The Book of Proverbs (31:10)

“The rubies that I gave up”

A community reader reads "the rubies that I gave up" against Proverbs 31:10 ("Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies"), so that the rubies the speaker gives up stand for her own virtue. The allusion was surfaced through Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which quotes the same verse, and it sits naturally among the song's staining and cheapening metaphors: what is given up is something precious and irrecoverable, the relationship recast in hindsight as more carnal than loving.