Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/136

THE GOLDEN BOWL remarked beggars, she remembered servants, she recognised cabmen; she had often distinguished beauty, when out with him, in dirty children; she had admired "type" in faces at hucksters' stalls. There fore she had on this occasion found their antiquario interesting; partly because he cared so for his things, and partly because he cared—well, so for them. "He likes his things—he loves them," she was to say; "and it isn't only—it isn't perhaps even at all—that he loves to sell them. I think he would love to keep them if he could; and he prefers at any rate to sell them to right people. We, clearly, were right people—he knows them when he sees them; and that's why, as I say, you could make out, or at least I could, that he cared for us. Didn't you see"—she was to ask it with an insistence—"the way he looked at us and took us in? I doubt if either of us have ever been so well looked at before. Yes, he'll remember us"—she was to profess herself convinced of that almost to uneasiness. "But it was after all"—this was perhaps reassuring—"because, given his taste, since he has taste, he was pleased with us, he was struck—he had ideas about us. Well, I should think people might; we're beautiful—aren't we?—and he knows. Then also he has his way; for that way of saying nothing with his lips when he's all the while pressing you so with his face, which shows how he knows you feel it—that is a regular way."

Of decent old gold, old silver, old bronze, of old chased and jewelled artistry, were the objects that, successively produced, had ended by numerously dotting the counter where the shopman's slim light 106