Read "The Priceless Pearl" by Alice Duer Miller online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Human nature being as it is, it is probable that the loss of the pearls was nothing to Edna Conway in comparison with the satisfaction of being able to telegraph her brother that his priceless Pearl was suspected of having stolen them. She was a kind-hearted woman and would not normally have wished to put even the most degraded criminal in prison; but there seemed an ironic justice in the fact that a woman sent to reform the manners of her children should turn out to be a thief. She valued her pearls too. They were not only beautiful and becoming but they had a sentimental association. Her husband had given them to her when they were first married, after a tremendous success at Monte Carlo. They had cost a great deal of money in the days when pearls were cheap, and yet, as he had got them from a ruined Polish nobleman, they had not cost their full value.
He had said to her as he gave them to her, "There, my dear, if I never give you anything else" As a matter of fact, he never had given her anything else; in fact, he had often tried to take them away from her when things had first begun to go wrong. But Edna had managed to cling to them, feeling that they would always keep away that wolf which idle well-to-do middle-aged women appear to dread more than any other group in the community.