“I suppose it is insufficient pressure. If they could get the angular cavities that are in corundum, they would be on the way; of course they would never get the steady glow of the genuine ruby. But they would fool the old ladies in a drawing-room.”
Then his voice went into a piping note.
“You would pass for the owner of rubies if you were rich enough to back up the hypothesis.”
He twisted my stone around in his fingers; then he pointed to the case under his hand, and set out a tray of diamonds.
He selected a table diamond as large as my false one and set above a platinum band. I could not have told the difference.
My diamond was worth four hundred dollars. Bartoldi said there was not a stone in the tray under five thousand dollars.
I stepped back to look at them from a little distance, about the distance one would observe a diamond on a woman’s hand at dinner across the table. I could not see any difference between the two stones. They could have been interchanged, and they would have fooled me at the distance. But they didn’t fool Bartoldi.
“Not much alike,” he said; “your stone has a sleek look.”
I did not see that. I told him I didn’t see it.
I knew that aspect of artificial stones, that appearance as if they were pressed instead of cut. But it was the aspect of artificial stones of a lower order than the one I had shown to Bartoldi. This one was cut, and it looked crisp to me, very nearly as crisp as the best one. But there is where the trained eye comes in. Walker knew it was false, and Bartoldi knew it instantly. He could see the stratifications with his eye.