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You know how, in and for themselves, I love gems ; and how,
less and less as the years go on, I have found myself able to wear the
few I own. Like fabrics, they seem to me so much more beautiful
in themselves than after they are ready to wear but with this difference:
that fabrics worn are legitimately useful, while jewels worn
are only ornamental extrinsic, unreasonable ! I can wear a brooch,
which does something and is beautiful meanwhile but when I ;
put on
a necklace, before I leave the mirror I take it off again.
Well: how to reconcile my love of jewels, which is real, with
my inability to be happy (with any on me ! I couldn't have some in
a box to look at on occasion that would be like drinking alone. I
Landor's "Pericles and
thought of it a good deal, and then, reading
Aspasia," I came on this, in a letter to Aspasia from Cleone :
"Your opinion was formerly that we should be careful not to
subdivide the person. The arm is composed of three parts ; no one
of them is too long. Now the armlet intersects that portion of it
which must be considered as the most beautiful. In my
idea of the
matter, the sandal alone is susceptible of gems, after the zone has
received the richest. The zone is necessary to our vesture in every
quarter of the humanized world in one invariable manner."
There it is. Then I knew. I can have my jewels in a girdle.
Ah, well, at least I have a direction for my imaginings in gems, and
I need no longer feel a little sad, a little alien, when I think of them.
Something beautiful to use, not merely to hang on, have I discovered
in the region of the gemness I so glorify.
116
ZONA GALE.