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When Maida put the rubbers back, she discovered that there were only four. She made up her mind that she had not counted right and thought no more of the incident. Two days later, Arthur Duncan came in again. Maida had just been selling some pencils—pretty striped ones with a blue stone in the end. Three of them were left lying out on the counter. Arthur asked her to show him some penholders.
Once they ran into a giant porcupine-about the size a setter would be, with shorter legs-which did not understand running away. They came upon it in a dense thicket, and the ensuing row was unholy. They managed to kill the porcupine among them, after which we plucked barbed quills from some very grieved dogs. The quills were large enough to make excellent penholders.
There are people to whom a ream of virgin paper is an inspiration, who find the first sharpening of a pencil the most lovable of all labours, who see something almost holy in the dedication of green and red penholders to their appropriate inks, in whose ears and before whose eyes the alphabet is like a poem or a prayer. Touch on stationery and you touched an insane spot in Sarah Brown's mind.
Shells of all sizes enormous pink ones like those I always remember standing on the mantelpiece in the nursery at home brought back by a sailor brother who used to tell us to put them to our ears and we would hear the noise of the sea and beautiful delicate little mother-of-pearl shells that are almost jewels wonderful frames, boxes, and pincushions, made of shells; big spoons, too, with a figure or a ship painted on them knives, penholders, paper-cutters and brooches, made out of the bones of big fish tassels of bright-coloured sea-weed, corals, vanilla beans curiously worked leather belts some roughly carved ivory crosses, umbrella handles, canes of every description, pipes, long gold earrings, parrots, little birds with bright-coloured feathers, monkeys an extraordinary collection.
She tried the little wicker chairs one after another. She sat at the tiny desk and touched the pearl penholders and the pencils with Rosanna's name printed on them in gold letters. All the letter paper said Rosanna in gold letters at the top too; it was beautiful. The little piano was real. It played delightfully little tinkly notes almost like hitting the rim of a glass with a lead pencil.
Another volley swept the intervening stretch of tablecloth, and the deadly missiles glanced against the glass bottles and rattled among the pencils and penholders. Two men fell without a cry, and lay motionless with their heads resting on the pen-wiper. "Look here, Barbara, you're cheating! You put in more than two peas that time, I know."
These images were false for another reason also; namely, that they were necessarily much simplified; doubtless the object to which my imagination aspired, which my senses took in but incompletely and without any immediate pleasure, I had committed to the safe custody of names; doubtless because I had accumulated there a store of dreams, those names now magnetised my desires; but names themselves are not very comprehensive; the most that I could do was to include in each of them two or three of the principal curiosities of the town, which would lie there side by side, without interval or partition; in the name of Balbec, as in the magnifying glasses set in those penholders which one buys at sea-side places, I could distinguish waves surging round a church built in the Persian manner.
He loved, indeed, to spend money over beautiful things, and there are few more attractive touches in the picture he draws of himself than the confession of his passion for costly penholders, gems, rare books, vessels of brass and silver, and painted spheres.
M. de Guersaint approved of her idea, and then busied himself with his own choice. "O dear! oh dear! how embarrassed I am!" said he. He was examining some ivory-handled penholders capped with pea-like balls, in which were microscopic photographs, and while bringing one of the little holes to his eye to look in it he raised an exclamation of mingled surprise and pleasure.
'The quills work into all parts of their bodies, and the barbed points make extraction very difficult. 'I believe the Indians use these in some sort of embroidery. Robert held in his hand a bunch of the quills such as had wounded Andy's fingers. 'I've seen penholders of them, when I little thought I should handle the unsophisticated originals out here.
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