"Yes," she exclaimed, speaking very rapidly, "I have been thinking about you as you sat there, and I am sure that I know you now. You are a man so well accustomed to steer in the shallows of your business that you never look beyond them. You make a gospel of distrust, and you consider confidence the sign of a weak intellect. You have been often deceived, for your breadth of view is not large; and you will be often deceived again. It is impossible for you to conceive beauty which is not saleable; and for romance you have no place in your heart. You have come here, saying all the way, 'I am going to interview an impostor; she will not amuse me—most possibly she will bore me. It is ten thousand to one that her experiments are all rubbish, but I will take the ten thousandth chance, in the hope that she might have found out something which I can sell—sell—sell.' Yet you are honest in a measure, since you ask me for a trick, knowing well that a trick is all you can reasonably expect from me. You are, in short, not very far removed from that dreadful person 'the pure man of business'; and you feel wofully strange already in the presence of one whose occupation is romance, and whose profession is undisguisedly practised in the offices of mystery. Do I speak the truth?"
She bent forward so that I could look straight into her eyes as she finished the excited sketch of character; and while with any other speaker my vanity had been sore wounded, I listened to her with no other feeling than those of growing admiration. The potency of her personality was beyond description; I have never met a woman who could communicate her own magnetism so quickly when she chose to talk seriously. And beyond this, I had already corrected my assumption that she was not clever. She had, indeed, one of the quickest brains I have ever dealt with.
"You are very hard on me," said I, as she waited for me to speak, "but I cannot say that you do not get to the bottom of the affair. You do me an injustice, however, when you say that my visit is purely commercial. No one in London would be more unselfishly interested than myself if any progress were made with the thousand attempts to manufacture jewels. If you have succeeded, even in a small degree, your fortune is made."
"Do you think that?" she cried. "Well, a word from Mr. Bernard Sutton is a word indeed; but we shall see. Meanwhile, we are going to have some fruit and wine. Don't you find it fearfully close in here?—that's the heat from my furnace in the conservatory there. I've had a little one put up especially for my experiments. As you were coming, we had to get the metal melted; and we've had a fire there since last night."
"You will experiment for me, then?" said I, with considerable interest.
"If you are very good," she replied, "I may show you something; but first you must taste my sherbet, and tell me all about the diamonds which I have bought and not made. You've heard, perhaps, that I waste all my money on jewelry."
I told her that I had not, but the flunky appearing at that moment, she did not pursue the subject, occupying herself in mixing me an effervescing draught in a great crystal goblet. The drink was gratifying on the hot day; and when I had taken it there was a warm coursing of blood through my veins as though I had drunk of rich Burgundy.
"Now," said she, when the man had gone, but had left the little table piled up with fruit—"now we can talk seriously. Let us carry the liquid with us—that's what Jack Lucas always calls it; he gets me that sherbet from some place in the East with an unpronounceable name. I am going to put you into an arm-chair, and you are not to ask a single question until I have finished. Have you got any cigarettes with you?—you may smoke if you are very good."
We went into the conservatory, which was ridiculously small, and close almost to suffocation, and there I saw many evidences of her attempt to fathom the unfathomable mysteries. There were racks with bottles round three sides of the apartment, and in the corner of the other side there stood a common little furnace such as smiths use. These, with a number of brass plates covered with hieroglyphics, some presses in steel, a basket containing strips of metal and a quantity of crystals, were her whole equipment for the business before her; but there was a low arm-chair in the shape of those used for dental horrors; and there she asked me to sit while she herself prepared for the undertaking.
"The first thing for you to do," said she, "is to make yourself comfortable. A man who is ill at ease is in the worst possible mental state, for he cannot concentrate himself. Just at present I want you to concentrate yourself on that cigarette and the fizzing stuff. When everything is ready I shall call out."