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And with that, on the way home, he unpacked his grievance–pulled the bandage off the wound, and showed me the ugly mark it had made on his little white soul.

It wasn’t the struggling, stinting, self-denying that galled him–it was the inadequacy of the result. It was, in short, the old tragedy of the discrepancy between a man’s wants and his power to gratify them. Neave’s taste was too exquisite for his means–was like some strange, delicate, capricious animal, that he cherished and pampered and couldn’t satisfy.

“Don’t you know those little glittering lizards that die if they’re not fed on some wonderful tropical fly? Well, my taste’s like that, with one important difference–if it doesn’t get its fly, it simply turns and feeds on me. Oh, it doesn’t die, my taste–worse luck! It gets larger and stronger and more fastidious, and takes a bigger bite of me–that’s all.”

That was all. Year by year, day by day, he had made himself into this delicate register of perceptions and sensations–as far above the ordinary human faculty of appreciation as some scientific registering instrument is beyond the rough human senses–only to find that the beauty which alone could satisfy him was unattainable–that he was never to know the last deep identification which only possession can give. He had trained himself in short, to feel, in the rare great thing–such an utterance of beauty as the Daunt Diana, say–a hundred elements of perfection, a hundred reasons why, imperceptible, inexplicable even, to the average “artistic” sense; he had reached this point by a long austere process of discrimination and rejection, the renewed great refusals of the intelligence which perpetually asks more, which will make no pact with its self of yesterday, and is never to be beguiled from its purpose by the wiles of the next-best-thing. Oh, it’s a poignant case, but not a common one; for the next-best-thing usually wins…

You see, the worst of Neave’s state was the fact of his not being a mere collector, even the collector raised to his highest pitch of efficiency. The whole thing was blent in him with poetry–his imagination had romanticized the acquisitive instinct, as the religious feeling of the Middle Ages turned passion into love. And yet his could never be the abstract enjoyment of the philosopher who says: “This or that object is really mine because I’m capable of appreciating it.” Neave wanted what he appreciated–wanted it with his touch and his sight as well as with his imagination.

It was hardly a year afterward that, coming back from a long tour in India, I picked up a London paper and read the amazing headline: “Mr. Humphrey Neave buys the Daunt collection”… I rubbed my eyes and read again. Yes, it could only be our old friend Humphrey. “An American living in Rome … one of our most discerning collectors”; there was no mistaking the description. I clapped on my hat and bolted out to see the first dealer I could find; and there I had the incredible details. Neave had come into a fortune–two or three million dollars, amassed by an uncle who had a corset-factory, and who had attained wealth as the creator of the Mystic Super-straight. (Corset-factory sounds odd, by the way, doesn’t it? One had fancied that the corset was a personal, a highly specialized garment, more or less shaped on the form it was to modify; but, after all, the Tanagras were all made from two or three moulds–and so, I suppose, are the ladies who wear the Mystic Super-straight.)

The uncle had a son, and Neave had never dreamed of seeing a penny of the money; but the son died suddenly, and the father followed, leaving a codicil that gave everything to our friend. Humphrey had to go out to “realize” on the corset-factory; and his description of that… Well, he came back with his money in his pocket, and the day he landed old Daunt went to smash. It all fitted in like a Chinese puzzle. I believe Neave drove straight from Euston to Daunt House: at any rate, within two months the collection was his, and at a price that made the trade sit up. Trust old Daunt for that!