He smiled contemptuously. “A professional beauty, my dear fellow--expected every head to be turned when she came into a room.” “Oh, Neave,” I groaned. “Yes, I know. You’re thinking of what we felt that day we first saw her in London. Many a poor devil has sold his soul as the result of such a first sight! Well, I sold _her_ instead. Do you want the truth about her? _Elle etait bete a pleurer._” He laughed, and stood up with a little shrug of disenchantment. “And so you’re impenitent?” I paused. “And yet you’re buying some of the things back?” Neave laughed again, ironically. “I knew you’d find me out and call me to account. Well, yes: I’m buying back.” He stood before me half sheepish, half defiant. “I’m buying back because there’s nothing else as good in the market. And because I’ve a queer feeling that, this time, they’ll be _mine_. But I’m ruining myself at the game!” he confessed. It was true: Neave was ruining himself. And he’s gone on ruining himself ever since, till now the job’s nearly done. Bit by bit, year by year, he has gathered in his scattered treasures, at higher prices than the dealers ever dreamed of getting. There are fabulous details in the story of his quest. Now and then I ran across him, and was able to help him recover a fragment; and it was wonderful to see his delight in the moment of reunion. Finally, about two years ago, we met in Paris, and he told me he had got back all the important pieces except the Diana. “The Diana? But you told me you didn’t care for her.” “Didn’t care?” He leaned across the restaurant table that divided us. “Well, no, in a sense I didn’t. I wanted her to want me, you see; and she didn’t then! Whereas now she’s crying to me to come to her. You know where she is?” he broke off. Yes, I knew: in the centre of Mrs. Willy P. Goldmark’s yellow and gold drawing-room, under a thousand-candle-power chandelier, with reflectors aimed at her from every point of the compass. I had seen her wincing and shivering there in her outraged nudity at one of the Goldmark “crushes.” “But you can’t get her, Neave,” I objected. “No, I can’t get her,” he said. Well, last month I was in Rome, for the first time in six or seven years, and of course I looked about for Neave. The Palazzo Neave was let to some rich Russians, and the splendid new porter didn’t know where the proprietor lived. But I got on his trail easily enough, and it led me to a strange old place in the Trastevere, an ancient crevassed black palace turned tenement house, and fluttering with pauper clothes-lines. I found Neave under the leads, in two or three cold rooms that smelt of the _cuisine_ of all his neighbours: a poor shrunken little figure, seedier and shabbier than ever, yet more alive than when we had made the tour of his collection in the Palazzo Neave.