saying goes, loaded with rings. That saying means, in so far as any saying means anything at all – and every saying, every cliché, once meant something tightly related to some human experience – that the gems concerned were too weighty for the hands that bore them. Her hands were indeed loaded with rings. They had been thus loaded by Lord Slane – tokens of affection, certainly, but no less tokens of the embellishments proper to the hands of Lord Slane’s wife. The great half-hoop of diamonds twisted round easily upon her finger. (Lord Slane had been wont to observe that
