Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/69

Rh answer: 'Come again, when you've done with the children, to my room.'

Our young woman found she had done with the children, that morning, with a promptitude that was a new joy to them, and when she reappeared before Mrs. Guy this lady had already encircled a plump white throat with the only ornament, surely, in all the late Mrs. Prime's—the effaced Miss Bradshaw's—collection, in the least qualified to raise a question. If Charlotte had never yet once, before the glass, tied the string of pearls about her own neck, this was because she had been capable of no such condescension to approved 'imitation'; but she had now only to look at Mrs. Guy to see that, so disposed, the ambiguous objects might have passed for frank originals. 'What in the world have you done to them?'

'Only handled them, understood them, admired them, and put them on. That's what pearls want; they want to be worn—it wakes them up. They're alive, don't you see? How have these been treated? They must have been buried, ignored, despised. They were half dead. Don't you know about pearls?' Mrs. Guy threw off as she fondly fingered the necklace.

'How should I? Do you?'

'Everything. These were simply asleep, and from the moment I really touched them—well,' said their wearer lovingly, 'it only took one's eye!'

'It took more than mine—though I did just wonder; and than Arthur's,' Charlotte brooded. She found herself almost panting. 'Then their value?'

'Oh, their value's excellent.'

The girl, for a deep moment, took another plunge into the wonder, the beauty and mystery, of them. 'Are you sure?'

Her companion wheeled round for impatience. 'Sure? For what kind of an idiot, my dear, do you take me?'

It was beyond Charlotte Prime to say. 'For the same kind as Arthur—and as myself,' she could only suggest. 'But my cousin didn't know. He thinks they're worthless.'