This gave her a longer pause, and when she spoke again she might have seemed, oddly, to be addressing the dealer. "Would you allow me—?"
"No," said the Prince into his little box.
"You wouldn't accept it from me?"
"No," he repeated in the same way.
She exhaled a long breath that was like a guarded sigh. "But you've touched an idea that HAS been mine. It's what I've wanted." Then she added: "It was what I hoped."
He put down his box—this had drawn his eyes. He made nothing, clearly, of the little man's attention. "It's what you brought me out for?"
"Well, that's, at any rate," she returned, "my own affair. But it won't do?"
"It won't do, cara mia."
"It's impossible?"
"It's impossible." And he took up one of the brooches.