"Well, we'll wait and see," I drawled back at him in his own throaty bass.
Oh, I was drunk, Mag, drunk with thinking about that diamond! I didn't care even to please Obermuller. I just wanted the feel of that diamond in my hand. I wanted it lying on my own neck—the lovely, cool, shining, rosy thing. It's like the sunrise, Mag, that beauty stone. It's just a tiny pool of water blushing. It's—
How to get it! How to get away with it! On what we'd get for that diamond, Tom and I—when his time is up—could live for all our lives and whoop it up besides. We could live in Paris, where great grafters live and grafting pays—where, if you've got wit and fifty thousand dollars, and happen to be a "darn sight prettier," you can just spin the world around your little finger!
But, do you know, even then I couldn't bear to think of selling the pretty thing? It hurt me to think of anybody having it but just Nance Olden.
But I hadn't got it yet.
Gray has a dressing-room to herself. And on her table—which is a big box, open end down—just where the three-sided big mirror can multiply the jewels and make you want 'em three times as bad, her big russia-leather, silver-mounted box lies open, while she's dressing and undressing. Other times it's locked tight, and his Lordship himself has it tight in his own right hand, or his Lordship's man, Topham, has it just as tight.
How to get that diamond! There was a hard nut for Nance Olden's sharp teeth to crack. I only wanted that—never say I'm greedy, Mag—Gray could keep all the rest of the things—the pigeon in rubies and pearls, the tiara all in diamonds, the chain of pearls, and the blazing rings, and the waist-trimming all of emeralds and diamond stars. But that diamond, that huge rose diamond, I couldn't, I just couldn't let her have it.
And yet I didn't know the first step to take toward getting it, till Beryl Blackburn helped me out. She's one of the Charities, like me—a tall bleached blonde with a pretty, pale face and gold-gray eyes. And, if you'd believe her, there's not a man in the audience, afternoon or evening, that isn't dead-gone on her.
"Guess who's my latest," she said to me this afternoon, while we four Charities stood in the wings waiting. "Topham—old Topham!"
It all got clear to me then in a minute.