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22
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Gem Trader
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setting
by some clumsy person, so that its edge had been badly roughened.
Damaged beyond recall, unfitted now for even the humblest piece of
jewellery, it was now generously offered to me for spinach.
I
had already witnessed the manner in which working jewellers display
gems for a given design and from one of these craftsmen who frequently
came to the house I begged a strip of white beeswax into which I
proudly set my first stone.
So
far as amethysts are concerned, it was twelve years before I had
another, and then it was two! They were stones of quite a different
class, and they cost more than spinach.
It
was shortly after I had made Paris my home. At twenty-one I was still
youthful and enthusiastic and thought I knew a lot. A Russian gem
merchant who did business regularly with my principal, showed me in his
absence a parcel of Siberian amethysts, in which every stone truly
deserved to be called a "gem". I believe they came from the Ural
Mountains, which is the cradle of many excellent amethysts. They had
been admirably faceted and polished in the French Jura, where they are
expert at that kind of work, and being in general colour of a deep,
velvet-rich purple, they had in them a glint of red by day and flashed
crimson with a dash of purple in artificial light.
In
short, I was dazzled by them, and deciding on the spur of the moment
that a young gentleman of twenty-one must have a pair of cuff-links or
remain for ever unworthy of the name, I decided to purchase two of these
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