Turquoises: Taris—London—Romance 61
are
your fine Vienna manners that you have to point and stare like a booby?
Look away and go on talking. About turquoises if you like, since you
want to display your ignorance. So fine turquoises are plentiful, are
they? Well, you can dig out turquoises of a kind in many parts of the
world if you know where to look. There's the Sinai Desert, Egypt,
Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Tibet, and of course Persia. You get some
pretty poor stuff from North America, too, hardly worth the cutting.
They ought to keep that grey-blue junk for ballasting those railroads
of theirs."
He
picked his teeth ruminatively: "But the Egyptian turquoise isn't bad
for density and colour, and the stuff from Sinai is better still. I've
had some good pieces from there. They polish well and you really can
call them semiprecious. But the nearer you get to Persia the better
the turquoise. And sometimes in Persia the diggers come across the
shah-blue stone, which shames the deepest azure of the night."
I
smiled with the effrontery of youth, but his poetical outburst had made
him solemn. "It is a privilege to gaze upon the turquoises of Madame
'X'," he said seriously, his trim beard quivering.
But
to return to Madame "X". Everyone but the husband, of course, knew
that when she applauded the conclusion of a musical item with more
than discreet abandon she was really expressing her passion for the
musician. A hot-blooded tzigane does not need much prompting at any
time, and the patrons of the Grand Café shook their heads with gloomy
zest when Monsieur "X", prompted by his
