That evening, in the tiny attic room, Peter took the adorable thing out of the box where it lay hid, and set it on the chest of drawers, in front of the candle, so that the flame shone through the blue transparency like the setting sun through a stained-glass window.

It was very, very beautiful.  Peter sat on the bed and looked at it, as a devotee before a shrine.  In itself it was very beautiful, a magic thing of blue colour and deep light and pure shadow and clear, lovely form.  Peter loved it for itself, and for its symbolic character.  For it was a symbol of the world of great loveliness that did, he knew, exist.  When he had been turned out of that world into a grey and dusty place, he had kept that one thing, to link him with loveliness and light.  Peter was a materialist:  he loved things, their shapes and colours, with a passion that blinded him to the beauty of the colourless, the formless, the super-sensuous.

He slipped his fingers up the chalice’s slim stem and round its cool bowl, and smiled for pleasure that such a thing existed—­had existed for four hundred years—­to gladden the world.

“Well, anyone would have thought I should have smashed you before now,” he remarked, apostrophising it proudly.  “But I haven’t.  I shall take you to Christie’s myself to-morrow, as whole as you were the day Leslie gave you me.”

It was fortunate that Leslie was out of reach, and would not hear of the transaction.  If he had been in England, Peter would have felt bound to offer him the goblet, and he would have paid for it too enormous a price to be endured.  Leslie’s generosity was sometimes rather overwhelming.

When Peter took Hilary and Peggy the cheque he had received, and told them what he had received it for, Hilary said, “I suppose these things must be.  It was fortunate you did not ask my advice, Peter; I should have hesitated what to say.  It is uncommonly like bartering one’s soul for guineas.  To what we are reduced!”

He was an artist, and cared for beautiful goblets.  He would much rather have borrowed the money, or had it given him.

Peggy, who was not an artist, said, “Oh, Peter darling, how sweet of you!  Now I really can pay the butcher; I’ve had to hide from him the last few mornings, in the coal-hole.  You dear child, I hope you won’t miss that nice cup too much.  When our ship comes in you shall have another.”

“When,” sighed Hilary, who was feeling over-worked that evening. (He did advertisement pictures for a weekly paper; a sordid and degrading pursuit.)

“Well,” said Peggy hopefully, “the boarders we have now really do pay their rent the way they never did in Venice.  That’s such a comfort.  If only Larry’s cough gets off his chest without turning to bronchitis, I will be quite happy.  But these loathsome fogs!  And that odious man coming round wanting to know why aren’t the children attending school!  ‘I’m sure,’ I said to him, ’I wish they were;