good money for something he knows to be fake, he's shown he has the confidence and the guile to wheedle his way into high society. And once he's there, it's unlikely that he'll ever leave. He might very well end up marrying the delectable Diana, which is what he really wants most of all.

It's also likely that the Duchess will continue in her profligate ways, racking up ever greater gambling debts. In doing so, she will become ever more indebted to Bacon, who will exert greater control over her life as a result. The suggestion here is that the aristocratic soul is destroyed by money, whereas the likes of Oliver Bacon have already been corrupted to such an extent that their souls are almost completely formed by money. Thus they have nothing more to lose in the spiritual sense of the term. 

Virginia Woolf delves into the theme of the affect of greed on decision making in her story “The Duchess and the Jeweller.” In the story, both the Duchess and the jeweler have agendas, and both are corrupt in their judgement.

Coming from humble beginnings, Oliver Bacon, the jeweler, rises from his life as a destitute child to become the richest jeweler in England. His methods to increase his wealth and rise in society are not always use scrupulous

For her part, the Duchess accrues gambling debt, which she must address and hide. She uses the jeweler and her daughter to cover her indiscretions.   

They meet in the private office of his business establishment, where the corrupt pair make a deal. The Duchess presents Bacon with fake pearls, which he purchases when she promises a weekend with aristocrats and Diana, her daughter whom he covets. This is the price he pays to become upwardly mobile in society.

She unscrupulously deceives him by passing off the pearls as real, and all she has left. Bacon is so hungry to be included in her inner circle of friends that he pays her for the fake pearls and does not let on he knows they are bogus. The stakes are too high. The fake pearls are symbolic of his place in her level of society.  In essence, he is the fake among the aristocrats because he is of humble beginnings rather than aristocracy. It is not above either character to use greed for their own devices.

The most abiding theme in the story is the way that money corrupts people, making them do things they really should not do. The jeweler, Oliver Bacon, has money, plenty of it, but the one thing he lacks is social respectability. Despite his enormous wealth, high society still looks down on him as an upstart and a parvenu. The Duchess's financial embarrassment provides him with the opportunity he has been waiting for: a chance to gain admittance into the very highest echelons of English society.

The Duchess has social respectability in abundance, but she has little in the way of hard cash thanks to her reckless gambling habit. She turns to Bacon in the hope of easing her somewhat reduced circumstances. In their squalid little arrangement, both Bacon and the Duchess compromise their integrity to gain something they both desperately need.

Arguably, Bacon gets the better of the deal. Although he pays good money for something he knows to be fake, he has shown he has the confidence and the guile to wheedle his way into high society. Once he is there, it is unlikely that he will ever leave. He might very well end up marrying the delectable Diana, which is what he really wants most of all.

It is also likely that the Duchess will continue in her profligate ways, racking up ever greater gambling debts. In doing so, she will become even more indebted to Bacon, who will exert greater control over her life as a result. The suggestion here is that the aristocratic soul is destroyed by money, whereas the likes of Oliver Bacon have already been corrupted to such an extent that their souls are almost completely formed by money. Thus, they have nothing more to lose in the spiritual sense of the term.