e
was the purchase of the St. Michael. She had found it, on a visit in
Romagna, in the hands of a noble family who knew its value and needed to
sell it, but dreaded the vulgarity of a transaction through the
antiquaries. To Emma, accordingly, whom they assumed to be rich, they
offered it at a price staggering for her, though still cheap for it. From
the first she had adored it. There had been a swift exchange of
despatches with New York, and the St. Michael went home with her to
Florence. After that adventure the small victoria, the stocky pony, and
the solemn coachman had never reappeared. Emma walked to teas or, when
she must, suffered the promiscuity of the trams. To those of us who knew
the store she set by her equipage its exchange for the St. Michael
indicated a fairly fanatical devotion. To her aunts it meant that she had
spent her principal, which, in their eyes, was an approximation to the
mysterious "sin against the Holy Ghost."

It was Dennis who speculated most audaciously, and perhaps truly, about
the St. Michael. When he learned that Emma secreted it in her den, where
she rarely admitted anyone, he maintained that it had become her
incorporeal spouse. The daintiness with which it fingered a golden
sword-hilt, as if fearing contamination, symbolised the aloofness of her
spirit. The solitary enjoyment of a great impression of art made her den
a sanctuary, absolving her from commoner or shared pleasures. And in a
manner the Saint was the type of the ultra-virginal quality she had
retained through much contact with books and life. For her to sell the
St. Michael, Dennis felt, would be a sort of vending of her soul, to give
it away in the present instance would imply, he insisted, an instinctive
self-surrender of which he judged her incapable.

To Crocker's side of the affair we gave very little thought, considering
that he, after all, had created the thrilling importance of the St.
Michael. But our general attitude toward the unwonted was one of
indifference, and Crocker was too unlike us to permit his orbit to be
calculated. The element of foible in him was almost null. None of our
guesses ever stuck to him, and we had grown weary of rediscovering that
anything so simple could also be so impermeable to our ingenuity. In a
word, Crocker's case was as much plainer than Emma's as noonday is than
twilight. When one says that he was born in Boston and from birth
dedicated to the Harvard nine, eleven, or crew--as