r underclothing and
stumbled upon a pair of rubber-soled shoes for deck wear. They brought
the great boat before me in a flash and then the wharves and then the
little group that had gathered at the long pier on that Saturday
morning so long ago--Wolcott Sears and his wife, Sue, white as a
ghost, Tip Elder and I, with Roger and Margarita leaning over the
rail. She had on a long, tight-fitting travelling coat of slate grey
and a quaint, soft little felt hat with a greyish-white gull that
sprawled over the top of it. She looked taller than I had ever seen
her, and her hair, drawn up high on her head, made her face more like
a cameo than ever, for she was pale from the excitement and fatigue of
shopping. On her hand, as she waved it with that lovely, free curve of
all her gestures, shone the great star sapphire Roger had bought her,
set heavily about with brilliants, a wonderful thing: all cloudy and
grey, like her eyes, and then all densely blue, like her eyes, and now
stormy and dark, like her eyes, and always, and most of all, like her
eyes, with that fiery blue point lurking in the heart of it.

It was her birth stone--an odd bit of sentimental superstition for
Roger to have cherished--and his own as well, for they were both born
in September. Her father had told her of this on one of the few
occasions when he seemed to have talked with her at any length, and
like all his remarks it had made a great impression upon her. Anything
more violently at odds with the theory of planetary influence it
would be hard to find, for two people more fundamentally unlike each
other than Roger and his wife, I never met.

And yet ... and yet (for I am not so sure as to what is "absurd" now
that my half-century milestone is well behind, and those months in
Egypt taught me that much of the inexplicable is terribly true) shall
I leave out of this rambling tale the moment of attention due the old
horoscopist of Paris? I think not.

He was withered and heavily spectacled and absent-minded to a degree I
have never seen equalled. Shall I ever forget the day he made a soapy
mixture in a great tin pan in his little garret in the Rue Serpente,
produced a long, clean clay pipe, delivered to me a neat if
extraordinary little lecture on the experiment he was about to make
and the inferences I must draw from it if it succeeded--and then, with
his prismatic bubbles all unblown, gravely sat down in the pan! He
gazed stupefied at me when I pointed ou