Eagerly taking advantage of the excuse thus offered, I put on my bonnet and went down to the office and took from my box in the safe an old-fashioned set of emeralds and, asking the proprietor to direct me to the most reliable jeweler and to send some one to sit with my husband until my return, went out.
I had had very little experience in buying of merchants, and none whatever in selling to them, but I feigned great wisdom and dignity as I told the young man who stepped forward to wait upon me that my business was with the head of the firm. He took me back to an inner office, where an old man with grizzly-gray hair and a very moist countenance was looking intently, through something which very much resembled a napkin-ring screwed into his right eye, at some jewels lying on a tray before him. He wore his teeth on the outside of his mouth, and his upper lip was so drawn, in the intensity of his look, as to be almost hidden under his over-reaching nose. His face, too, was wrinkled up into a thousand gullies in his concentration upon his work.
"We don't hemploy young women 'ere," he said, looking up and frowning as he suddenly became aware of my presence.
"I came," I explained, taking out my emeralds and handing them to him, "to ask you if you would not, please, sir, kindly buy some of these stones from me, or, at least, advance me some money on them."
"This is not a pawnbroker's shop, heither, mum," he replied, as he carefully examined the jewels, and then, suddenly popping the napkin-ring out of his eye, turned both of the piercing little gray twinklers upon me and said:
"Where did you get these hemeralds from, miss?"
"I was born with them, sir," I said indignantly.
Either from my appearance, or for some other cause, he became suddenly suspicious, and not only would not purchase them of me, but refused to let me have them till I could prove my right to them. I was too young and inexperienced to be anything but furious, and the bitter, scalding tears that anger sometimes unlocks to relieve poor woman's outraged feelings, were still falling fast when I reached the hotel with the clerk whom the jeweler had sent back with me that I might prove by the proprietor my ownership of the jewels with which I was born.
He, in his sympathy, shared my anger and, after expressing his sincere regret that I should have been subjected to such an indignity, advised, as he snatched the case from the clerk with a withering look of scorn translated into more emphatic language, that I should look carefully over them to be sure that neither this hireling nor his master had abstracted any of the stones, for his experience had been that suspicion was born of guilt.