"Do I? Well, that twists the sentence backward. Shall we say that the attainable is the undesirable?"
"Surely not. Can you have ceased already to desire these lovely things? Could that piece of tapestry lose its charm for you, or that Spanish desk, or those English prints, or the old morocco of that binding? Do you feel that the colours in that brocade at your back could ever become meaningless?"
"I am not sure. Wouldn't it be possible to look at it while you were seeing something else, something so drab that it would take the colour out of all beauty?" She was looking at him over the tea-table, and while she asked the question she raised a lump of sugar in the quaint old sugar tongs she had brought home from Florence.
He shook his head. "I am denied sugar. Has it ever occurred to you that middle age ought to be called the age of denial?" Then his tone changed. "But I wonder if you begin to realize how fortunate you are? You have the collector's instinct and the means to gratify it. To discover with you is to possess—don't you understand the blessing of that? You love beauty as a favoured daughter, not as one of the disinherited who can only peer through the windows of her palace."
"But you also—you love beauty as I do."
"But I can't own it—not as you do." He was speaking frankly. "I haven't the means. At least what I have I have made myself, and therefore I guard it more carefully. It is only those who have once been poor who are really under the curse of money, for that curse is the inability to understand that money is less valuable than anything else on earth that you happen to need or desire. Now to me the most terrible thing on earth is not to be without beauty, but to be without money—"
She smiled. "You are talking like Gideon Vetch."
He caught at the name quickly. "Like Gideon Vetch? You mean that I sound ignoble?"
The laughter in his eyes made him look almost boyish, and she felt that she had come suddenly close to him. After all he was very attractive.
"Is he ignoble?" she asked. "I have seen him only once, and that was at the dinner a week ago."