long
thought of selling it so that she might apply the proceeds to some
charitable cause. And now here was I, a messenger, if an odd one, who
might further her charitable aims.
I
offered at once to send the gem to Vienna for valuation and for an
offer to be made. On the following day she gave it into my hands
without apparent hesitation— although she can have known nothing of
me—and I despatched it to my mother. An offer came back. She accepted
it. And generous to a fault, she paid me a commission altogether
disproportionate to my services. Such was my first vacation—a busman's
holiday; my first effort also as a gem broker.
When
I returned to Vienna my head was filled with the idea of the money to
be earned by gem-broking and as a merchant. "If I can pick up a ruby
from a nun," I said to my mother, "and make more money on it than I
earn in two months at my job, I ought to be in your line of business."
But
she would hear nothing of it, not because she did not think that her
profession was not as good as any other, but because she was afraid I
might make money too easily; she thought that making money too easily
was the worst thing that could happen to a young man. But what with her
parental care and, later on, many other reasons, I never, whether as
young man or adult, underwent the supreme misfortune of gaining easy
money—the nun's ruby alone being excepted, naturally.
Looking back, the ruby of the Abbess Anastasia seems now to have been a vertible pcrint de départ in the story of
