Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ni ON THE WEARING OF OPALS HOW sad your eyes are to-night!" I said to the Sphinx a few evenings ago. "Are they?" she smiled. "But then you know we are never so sad as our eyes." "Are you quite sure there is nothing wrong?" I asked. "Perfectly I expect I have been looking too long at my opals." After a moment she added: " I so often think of what you said about sorrows being the opals of the soul." "Fancy your remembering that!" said I, with mock modesty. " It is strange," the Sphinx went on, " how sorrow continues to be associated with the opal." "I have often marvelled at your couragein wearing so many. They gleam on your fingers like a whole armory of sorrow." " Is there any danger a woman would n't dare for beauty's sake? And in spite of the superstition, they are more fashionable than ever. Yet I don't think there is a woman who wears them who does not feel in her heart that she is living under the rainbow of some beautiful doom, some romantic menace. Some day the genius of the stone will touch her heart, with its wand of sorrow, and her face will suddenly become like one of her rings, mysteriously lit with pathos." " I believe," said I, " that it is on that very account that women wear them. It is the legend of the stone that attracts them almost more than its beauty. It has for them something of the attraction of sorcery, and suggests a commerce with those occult influences which in spite of ourselves we involuntarily think of as ruling the romantic side of our lives. There is just a spice of magic about all precious stones, and, as in the old fairy tales, a certain ring was supposed to givecontrol over unseen powers, so even yet we unconsciously, or consciously, continue to attach superstitious significance to the wearing of a ring." ...