lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other,
making almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater,
in both the colour and the texture of the glass. At the heart of it,
magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted
object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone.
'What is it?' said Winston, fascinated.
'That's coral, that is,' said the old man. 'It must have come from the
Indian Ocean. They used to kind of embed it in the glass. That wasn't made
less than a hundred years ago. More, by the look of it.'
'It's a beautiful thing,' said Winston.
'It is a beautiful thing,' said the other appreciatively. 'But there's
not many that'd say so nowadays.' He coughed. 'Now, if it so happened that
you wanted to buy it, that'd cost you four dollars. I can remember when a
thing like that would have fetched eight pounds, and eight pounds was --
well, I can't work it out, but it was a lot of money. But who cares about
genuine antiques nowadays even the few that's left?'
Winston immediately paid over the four dollars and slid the coveted
thing into his pocket. What appealed to him about it was not so much its
beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite
different from the present one. The soft, rainwatery glass was not like any
glass that he had ever seen. The thing was doubly attractive because of its
apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once have been
intended as a paperweight. It was very heavy in his pocket, but fortunately
it did not make much of a bulge. It was a queer thing, e