ss garden.

A STAGE JEWEL

"It doesn't seem to be precisely what is meant by _old paste_," she
answered, repeating the expression I had just made use of, while she
handed me the diamond hoop across the table. "It's too like real stones,
you know. I think it must be a stage jewel."

As I fastened the brooch again in my dress, I was aware of a sudden
little change in my feelings. I was no longer pleased. Not that I had
hoped my diamonds might prove real; you cannot buy real diamonds, even
in imagination, for four francs, which was the precise sum I had
expended on these, and there were seven of them, all uncommonly large.
Nor can I say that the words "old paste" had possessed, on my lips, any
plain or positive meaning. But _stage jewel_, somehow ... My moral
temperature had altered: I was dreadfully conscious that I was no longer
pleased. Now, I had been, and to an absurd degree.

Perhaps because it was Christmas Eve, when I suddenly found myself
inside that curiosity shop, pricing the diamonds, and not without an
emotion of guilty extravagance, and of the difficulty of not buying if
the price proved too high.... As is always the case with me at that
season, my soul was irradiated with a vague sense of festivity, perhaps
with the lights of rows of long-extinguished Christmas trees in the fog
of many years, like the lights of the shops caught up and diffused in
the moist twilight. I had felt an inner call for a Christmas present;
and, so far, nobody had given me one. So I had paid the money and driven
back into the dark, soughing country with the diamond hoop loose in my
pocket. I had felt so very pleased.... And now those two cursed words
"stage jewel" had come and spoilt it all.

For the first time I felt it was very, very hard that my box should have
been broken open last autumn and all my valuables, my Real (the word
became colossal), not _stage_, jewels stolen. It was brought home to me
for the first time that the man who did it must have been very, very
wicked; and that codes of law, police and even prisons could afford
satisfaction to my feelings. Since, oddly enough, I had really not
minded much at the time, nor let my pleasure in that wonderful old
castle, where I had just arrived with the violated trunk, be in the
least diminished by the circumstance. Indeed, such is the subtle,
sophistic power of self-conceit, that the pleasure of finding, or
thinking I found, that I did not mind the loss of those t