“Are you quite sure there is nothing wrong?” I asked.
“Perfectly.... I expect I have been looking too long at my opals.”
After a moment she added:
“I so often think of what you said about sorrows being the opals of the soul.”
“Fancy your remembering that!” said I, with mock modesty.
“It is strange,” the Sphinx went on, “how sorrow continues to be associated with the opal.”
“I have often marvelled at your courage in wearing so many. They gleam on your fingers like a whole armory of sorrow.”
“Is there any danger a woman wouldn’t dare for beauty’s sake? And in spite of the superstition, they are more fashionable than ever. Yet I don’t think there is a woman who wears them who does not feel in her heart that she is living under the rainbow of some beautiful doom, some romantic menace. Some day the genius of the stone will touch her heart, with its wand of sorrow, and her face will suddenly become like one of her rings, mysteriously lit with pathos.”
“I believe,” said I, “that it is on that very account that women wear them. It is the legend of the stone that attracts them almost more than its beauty. It has for them something of the attraction of sorcery, and suggests a commerce with those occult influences which in spite of ourselves we involuntarily think of as ruling the romantic side of our lives. There is just a spice of magic about all precious stones, and, as in the old fairy tales, a certain ring was supposed to give control over unseen powers, so even yet we unconsciously, or consciously, continue to attach superstitious significance to the wearing of a ring.”
“That is true,” said the Sphinx, “and any woman who wears rings with art, and not merely for indiscriminate display, sets a new ring on her finger with a certain thoughtfulness, if not hesitation. If it does not already mean something to her, it is going to mean something—and what will that meaning be! A ring that means nothing to one, however beautiful, hardly seems to belong to us. A ring is a personal possession or nothing ... except diamonds,” the Sphinx added, laughing, some particularly fine diamonds glittering at her throat; “diamonds are like one’s carriage—a part of one’s entourage.”