“Didn’t you know he was buying back his things?” “Nonsense!” “He is, though. Not in his own name--but he’s doing it.” And he _was_, do you know--and at prices that would have made a sane man shudder! A few weeks later I ran across his tracks in London, where he was trying to get hold of a Penicaud enamel--another of his scattered treasures. Then I hunted him down at his hotel, and had it out with him. “Look here, Neave, what are you up to?” He wouldn’t tell me at first: stared and laughed and denied. But I took him off to dine, and after dinner, while we smoked, I happened to mention casually that I had a pull over the man who had the Penicaud--and at that he broke down and confessed. “Yes, I’m buying them back, Finney--it’s true.” He laughed nervously, twitching his moustache. And then he let me have the story. “You know how I’d hungered and thirsted for the _real thing_--you quoted my own phrase to me once, about the ‘ripe sphere of beauty.’ So when I got my money, and Daunt lost his, almost at the same moment, I saw the hand of Providence in it. I knew that, even if I’d been younger, and had more time, I could never hope, nowadays, to form such a collection as _that_. There was the ripe sphere, within reach; and I took it. But when I got it, and began to live with it, I found out my mistake. It was a _mariage de convenance_--there’d been no wooing, no winning. Each of my little old bits--the rubbish I chucked out to make room for Daunt’s glories--had its own personal history, the drama of my relation to it, of the discovery, the struggle, the capture, the first divine moment of possession. There was a romantic secret between us. And then I had absorbed its beauties one by one, they had become a part of my imagination, they held me by a hundred threads of far-reaching association. And suddenly I had expected to create this kind of intense personal tie between myself and a roomful of new cold alien presences--things staring at me vacantly from the depths of unknown pasts! Can you fancy a more preposterous hope? Why, my other things, my _own_ things, had wooed me as passionately as I wooed them: there was a certain little bronze, a little Venus Callipyge, who had drawn me, drawn me, drawn me, imploring me to rescue her from her unspeakable surroundings in a vulgar bric-a-brac shop at Biarritz, where she shrank out of sight among sham Sevres and Dutch silver, as one has seen certain women--rare, shy, exquisite--made almost invisible by the vulgar splendours surrounding them. Well! that little Venus, who was just a specious seventeenth century attempt at the ‘antique,’ but who had penetrated me with her pleading grace, touched me by the easily guessed story of her obscure, anonymous origin, was more to me imaginatively--yes! more than the cold bought beauty of the Daunt Diana...” “The Daunt Diana!” I broke in. “Hold up, Neave--_the Daunt Diana?_”