by Henry James

“ Guy. This lady’s white shoulders heaved, under the pearls, with an emotion that the very red lips which formed, as if for the full effect, the happiest opposition of colour, were not slow to translate. “My dear, you should have seen the sensation—they’ve had a success!”
Charlotte, dumb a moment, took it all in. “It IS as if they knew it—they’re more and more alive. But so much the worse for both of us! I can’t,” she brought out with an effort, “be silent.” ”

“ Charlotte fed, in fancy, on the pearls, which decidedly were exquisite, but which at the present moment somehow presented themselves much more as Mrs. Guy’s than either as Arthur’s or as her own. “Yes—he did take it; even after I had distinctly hinted to him that they looked to me different from the other pieces.”
“Well then!” said Mrs. Guy with something more than triumph—with a positive odd relief. ”

“ Guy, who, could she by a miracle be secured—she was always engaged ten parties deep—might be trusted to supply, it was believed, an element of exuberance scarcely less potent. Mrs. Guy was already known to several of the visitors already on the scene, but she wasn’t yet known to our young lady, who found her, after many wires and counter-wires had at last determined the triumph of her arrival, a strange charming little red-haired black-dressed woman, a person with the face of a baby and the authority of a commodore. ”

“ Over this strange fact poor Charlotte interminably mused: it became more touching, more attaching for her than she could now confide to any ear. How bad or how happy—in the sophisticated sense of Mrs. Guy and the young man at the Temple—the effaced Miss Bradshaw must have been to have had to be so mute! The little governess at Bleet put on the necklace now in secret sessions; she wore it sometimes under her dress ”

“ That’s what pearls want; they want to be worn—it wakes them up. They’re alive, don’t you see? How HAVE these been treated? They must have been buried, ignored, despised. They were half-dead. Don’t you KNOW about pearls?” Mrs. Guy threw off as she fondly fingered the necklace.
“How SHOULD I? Do YOU?”
“Everything. These were simply asleep, and from the moment I really touched them—well,” said their wearer lovingly, “it only took one’s eye!”
“It took more than mine—though I did just wonder; and than Arthur’s,” Charlotte brooded. She found herself almost panting. “Then their value—?” ”

“ Guy this lady had already encircled a plump white throat with the only ornament, surely, in all the late Mrs. Prime’s—the effaced Miss Bradshaw’s—collection, in the least qualified to raise a question. If Charlotte had never yet once, before the glass, tied the string of pearls about her own neck, this was because she had been capable of no such stoop to approved “imitation”; but she had now only to look at Mrs. Guy to see that, so disposed, the ambiguous objects might have passed for frank originals. “What in the world have you done to them?” ”

“ It at any rate only added to his own gravity. “That sort of thing, exactly.”
“I didn’t think when I spoke this morning—but I see what you mean.”
“I mean that she was beyond reproach,” said Arthur Prime.
“A hundred times yes.”
“Therefore if she couldn’t, out of her slender gains, ever have paid for a row of pearls—”
“She couldn’t, in that atmosphere, ever properly have had one? Of course she couldn’t. I’ve seen perfectly since our talk,” Charlotte went on, “that that string of beads isn’t even as an imitation very good. The little clasp itself doesn’t seem even gold. ”

“ Guy. Charlotte was not at dinner, but she came down afterwards, and this guest, on seeing her, abandoned a very beautiful young man on purpose to cross and speak to her. The guest displayed a lovely necklace and had apparently not lost her habit of overflowing with the pride of such ornaments.
“Do you see?” She was in high joy.
They were indeed splendid pearls—so far as poor Charlotte could feel that she knew, after what had come and gone, about such mysteries. The poor girl had a sickly smile. “They’re almost as fine as Arthur’s.”
“Almost? Where, my dear, are your eyes? ”

“ With which she bent her eyes on the article wrapped, and now only exposed, in her superannuated satchel—a string of large pearls, such a shining circle as might once have graced the neck of a provincial Ophelia and borne company to a flaxen wig. “This perhaps IS worth something. Feel it.” ”

“ I don’t understand.”
“Why how would she have got them?”—so Charlotte candidly put it.
“She? Who?” There was a capacity in Mrs. Guy’s tone for a sinking of persons—!
“Why the person I told you of: his stepmother, my uncle’s wife—among whose poor old things, extraordinarily thrust away and out of sight, he happened to find them.”
Mrs. Guy came a step nearer to the effaced Miss Bradshaw. “Do you mean she may have stolen them?”
“No. But she had been an actress.”
“Oh well then,” cried Mrs. Guy, “wouldn’t that be just how?” ”

“ They ARE ‘Arthur’s’!” After which, to meet the flood of crimson that accompanied her young friend’s start: “I tracked them—after your folly, and, by miraculous luck, recognised them in the Bond Street window to which he had disposed of them.”
“DISPOSED of them?” Charlotte gasped. “He wrote me that I had insulted his mother and that the people had shown him he was right—had pronounced them utter paste.” ”

“ The box was on the top shelf of the old school-room closet, which, until one put one’s head into it from a step-ladder, looked, from below, quite cleared out. The door’s narrow and the part of the closet to the left goes well into the wall. ”