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"Okay," I said.

I'll be fine in a day or two, I'll be able to tell him the truth and end this fictitious story, I hoped. Would he be angry or happy after that? Surely, he would understand. If he really cared for me, that is.

He left. and I returned to working on my face and hair. It wasn't twenty minutes before Bunny burst into my room with ropes of pearls dangling around her neck.

"It's the Fashion Firewoman!" she cried, "Here to put out the burning of beauty."

I couldn't help but laugh.

"It's not funny. I'm serious. Put on your dress," she ordered, "and we'll see what works the best."

"I'm really not into jewelry," I said as I slipped into my new black dress.

"Of course you are. Every woman is into jewelry, either in her fantasies because she can't afford it or in real life because she can. We've been created to wear the world's gems. What's a diamond without a setting to be worn on a woman's finger or in her earlobe or around her neck? Just some glittering raw stone greedy men will kill each other to possess. Precious stones are not meant to be in safety deposit boxes. They are meant to adorn our bodies, and that's that," she said as if she had the power to pronounce the final word on any subject and end any argument.

I sighed and shook my head. She stood back and studied me a moment. "If you're going to wear your hair up like that, you need matching earrings," she decided. "I have the perfect pair for this necklace.' She lifted it off the pile around her neck. "It's from the Etoile collection. Cultured pearls. Do you know anything about pearls, dear?"

"My mother had yards of them, but I never paid much attention to what she wore." I said honestly.

"What a pity. I made sure my daughter had a proper education when it came to precious stones. Who wants to be made the fool and ooh and aah over imitation jewelry? There are plenty of sorry young women in this town who thought the ring they were given was a flawless diamond only to find out from a jeweler that it was either a VS1 or a WS2. When it comes to diamonds especially, you have to pay attention to the four C's, my dear."

"The four C's?"

"Clarity, color, cut, and carat. Don't be impressed by the women you see here wearing big diamond rings. Why, some of them don't even know they're wearing cubic zirconia, imitation diamonds. My eyes are trained well enough to tell.

"Anyway, this necklace is sixteen inches long with a cultured Tahitian pearl clasp. The diamonds are set in platinum-- and look at their clarity."

"It sounds expensive." I said.

"Expensive?" She considered it. "I think it was fourteen thousand."

"Bunny, you're not serious. You want me to borrow a fourteen-thousand-dollar necklace?"

"And the earrings. I think they were six or seven"

"I would be too nervous," I said, backing away from her and her pearls.

"Oh, please." she said, her face pained. "It's all insured."

"But fourteen thousand."

She grimaced. "The only other one I would suggest," she said, lifting it off her neck. "is this, also cultured pearls...." She paused. "Do you know the difference between natural and cultured pearls?"

"No," I said, "but something tells me I will soon."

"You should know." she chastised with her eyes as well as her tongue. "Natural pearls are born quite by chance when the oyster can't get rid of some particle inside and coats it with layer upon layer of a smooth, hard substance called nacre. It takes years to make this tiny bead into a wonderful, lustrous pearl. To make a cultured pearl, the oyster's shell is opened with surgical precision, and the irritant, usually a mother-of-pearl bead, is placed inside, which causes the oyster to produce the nacre.

These happen to be Japanese Akova." "And how much was that?"

"This?" She stared at it a moment. "I think... yes. Asher got it at Tiffany's. He paid something like ten or eleven thousand."

"Don't you have any costume jewelry?" I asked.

"For what purpose? I don't understand these women who own beautiful things but get copies made to wear out in public. Why own the original? Stop worrying. You're not exactly going to walk on the streets of some city ghetto. You'll be quite safe, and the other women will envy you.

"I think I'd rather have a woman's envy than a man's love." she said with a laugh.

Two days ago, that remark might have shocked me, but at the moment, it seemed a perfectly natural thing for Bunny Eaton to tell me.