heir prison in the
safe-deposit box in the Trust Company cellar. They seemed to be glad
to be at home in the light again. They reveled in it, winking,
laughing, playing a kind of game in which light chased light through
the deeps of color.

The oddity of the feminine passion for precious stones struck Davidge
sharply. The man who built iron ships to carry freight wondered at the
curious industry of those who sought out pebbles of price, and
polished them, shaped them, faceted them, and fastened them in metals
of studied design, petrified jellies that seemed to quiver yet defied
steel.

He contrasted the cranes that would lift a locomotive and lower it
into the hold of one of his ships with the tiny pincers with which a
lapidary picked up a diamond fleck and sealed it in platinum. He
contrasted the pneumatic riveter with the tiny hammers of the
goldsmith. There seemed to be no less vanity about one than the other.
The work of the jeweler would outlast the iron hull. A diamond as
large as a rivet-head would cost far more than a ship. Jewels, like
sonnets and symphonies and flower-gardens, were good for nothing, yet
somehow worth more than anything useful.

He wondered what the future would do to these arts and their
patronesses. The one business of the world now was the manufacture,
transportation, and efficient delivery of explosives.

He could understand how offensive bejeweled and banqueted people were
to the humble, who went grimy and weary in dirty overalls over their
plain clothes to their ugly factories and back to their uglier homes.

It was a consummation devoutly to be wished that nobody should spend
his life or hers soiled and tired and fagged with a monotonous task.
It seemed hard that the toiling woman and the wife and daughter of the
toiler might not alleviate their bleak persons with pearl necklaces
about their throats, with rubies pendant from their ears, and their
fingers studded with sapphire and topaz.

Yet it did not look possible, somehow. And it seemed better that a few
should have them rather than none at all, better that beauty should be
allowed to reign somewhere than nowhere during its brief perfection.

And after all, what proof was there that the spoliation of the rich
and the ending of riches would mean the enrichment of the poor?
When panics came and the rich fasted the poor starved. Would the
reduction of the opulent and the elevation of the paupers all to the
same plain average mak