“Look here, Neave, what are you up to?”
He wouldn’t tell me at first: stared and laughed and denied. But I took him off to dine, and after dinner, while we smoked, I happened to mention casually that I had a pull over the man who had the Penicaud—and at that he broke down and confessed.
“Yes, I’m buying them back, Finney—it’s true.” He laughed nervously, twitching his moustache. And then he let me have the story.
“You know how I’d hungered and thirsted for the real thing—you quoted my own phrase to me once, about the ‘ripe sphere of beauty.’ So when I got my money, and Daunt lost his, almost at the same moment, I saw the hand of Providence in it. I knew that, even if I’d been younger, and had more time, I could never hope, nowadays, to form such a collection as that. There was the ripe sphere, within reach; and I took it. But when I got it, and began to live with it, I found out my mistake. It was a mariage de convenance—there’d been no wooing, no winning. Each of my little old bits—the rubbish I chucked out to make room for Daunt’s glories—had its own personal history, the drama of my relation to it, of the discovery, the struggle, the capture, the first divine moment of possession. There was a romantic secret between us. And then I had absorbed its beauties one by one, they had become a part of my imagination, they held me by a hundred threads of far-reaching association. And suddenly I had expected to create this kind of intense personal tie between myself and a roomful of new cold alien presences—things staring at me vacantly from the depths of unknown pasts! Can you fancy a more preposterous hope? Why, my other things, my own things, had wooed me as passionately as I wooed them: there was a certain little bronze, a little Venus Callipyge, who had drawn me, drawn me, drawn me, imploring me to rescue her from her unspeakable surroundings in a vulgar bric-a-brac shop at Biarritz, where she shrank out of sight among sham Sevres and Dutch silver, as one has seen certain women—rare, shy, exquisite—made almost invisible by the vulgar splendours surrounding them. Well! that little Venus, who was just a specious seventeenth century attempt at the ‘antique,’ but who had penetrated me with her pleading grace, touched me by the easily guessed story of her obscure, anonymous origin, was more to me imaginatively—yes! more than the cold bought beauty of the Daunt Diana...”
“The Daunt Diana!” I broke in. “Hold up, Neave—the Daunt Diana?”
He smiled contemptuously. “A professional beauty, my dear fellow—expected every head to be turned when she came into a room.”
“Oh, Neave,” I groaned.
“Yes, I know. You’re thinking of what we felt that day we first saw her in London. Many a poor devil has sold his soul as the result of such a first sight! Well, I sold her instead. Do you want the truth about her? Elle etait bete a pleurer.”
He laughed, and stood up with a little shrug of disenchantment.
“And so you’re impenitent?” I paused. “And yet you’re buying some of the things back?”