"It reconciles me to my years," Rose went on, quickly. "I'm willing to be forty, if I can have a ring like this."
"Why, Cousin Rose!" cried Isabel, in astonishment. "Are you forty?"
"Yes, dear. Don't be conventional and tell me I don't look it, for I feel it—every year."
"I should never have thought it," Isabel murmured.
Rose turned the ring slowly upon her finger and the ruby yielded the deep crimson glow of its heart to the candlelight that softly filled the room. "I've never had a ruby," she said, "and yet I feel, someway, as though I'd always had this. It seems as if it belonged to me."
"That's because it suits you," nodded Madame Bernard. "I hope that sometime our civilisation may reach such a point of advancement that every woman will wear the clothes and jewels that suit her personality, and make her home a proper setting for herself. See how women break their hearts for diamonds—and not one woman in a hundred can wear them."
"Could I wear diamonds?" asked Isabel. She was interested now and her eyes sparkled.
Madame Bernard studied her for a moment before replying. "Yes," she admitted, "you could wear them beautifully, but they do not belong to Rose, or to me."
"What else could I wear?"
"Turquoises, if they were set in silver."