But
he was following another line of thought. "At any rate, we dealers in
rubies and sapphires and emeralds have to be thankful that the precious
stones don't have quite the ups and downs of the others. My rubies, for
instance, have been precious since the beginning of time and women have
always wanted them."
"Do
you remember when the scientific ruby, and before it the reconstructed
ruby, seemed likely to knock the bottom out of the ruby market?"
"I
heard something about it once," said Jacob indifferently. But the gem
dealer is not interested in ancient history—anything that happened
more than five or six years before—and I saw that I should have to
speak quickly to hold his interest at all.
"Well,
it began when the Frenchman, Professor Ver-neuil, succeeded in
producing small rubies in his laboratory," I said. "He used inferior,
almost worthless Burma stones, which he crushed to powder. Then he
introduced a suitable colouring matter and fused the powder
electrically. The resulting mass, when it had been cut and polished,
could hardly be told from the natural stone. The professor called his
products 'reconstructed rubies' and took no more interest in them.
"If
it had stopped there, all would have been well. But there was the usual
bunch of smart fools with short sight about. One fellow in
particular—and I shan't say who, because I never had any use for
him—got to know the professor's method. He was a goldsmith of sorts,
not very good at his job, and he of all men took to making rubies.
Naturally he didn't know any better than to unload his
