Yehudah smiled, feeling slightly resentful about not getting the joke. He took out ten different stones and laid them on the black velvet, picking up the last one and fastening it between a pair of jeweler’s tongs. “Nothing is more important than the diamond’s cut,” he said, pulling a large loupe out of his pocket. He felt a deep satisfaction as he laid the loupe down on the table for the client, a satisfaction that wiped away any annoyance he might have felt about jokes he didn’t get. The client could say whatever he wanted, but he, Yehudah, was the one in control. He detected within himself a surge of competence, mastery, power. Before he started working here, he hadn’t experienced that feeling since scoring his very last goal on the soccer field in college. He had missed it.

“What you mainly want to look for,” he continued, driving toward the goal box, “is the height of the stone’s crown compared to the depth of the pavilion—that’s the bottom part—and also the width of the table, which is the flat part at the top. That’s what determines the two most important things for the stone’s cut. The first thing is brilliance—how well the stone reflects white light. The second is fire, which is the way the stone divides light into rainbow colors. What you’re looking for is a balance of brilliance and fire.”

Jake had begun examining the diamonds through the loupe. It was amazing how much you could see when you really looked. Diamonds that appeared exactly alike on the table, once projected through the magnifying lens, resolved into fabulously different shapes, like a row of faces, each one unique. “Brilliance and fire,” he repeated. “Wouldn’t either one of those be good enough? How about just brilliance, or just fire?”

“No.” Yehudah took a pen flashlight out of his pocket and shone it on the stone Jake was holding in the tongs. “Look at this one you’ve got here. See? Lots of white-light reflection, but not a lot of rainbows in the diamond itself.” Jake peered through the loupe. The diamond glowed like a fading lightbulb. Yehudah switched off the penlight. “It ends up looking dull. Compare it to this one,” he said, unscrewing the tongs and fastening them onto another stone before shining the light again. “See the colors? Nice, but the light barely reflects. It ends up looking glassy. Most of them have too much brilliance and not enough fire, or too much fire and not enough brilliance. You end up with a lot of low-grade stones that way.”

“My own problem is not enough fire,” Jake ventured, wondering if the Mad Hatter would catch on.

Yehudah caught on. “And mine is not enough brilliance.”