Mary hesitated, her eyes roaming over the omnibuses. One was conspicuous, drawn by four splendid horses, driven by a big man with a shining conical hat, and a wide expanse of scarlet waistcoat.
No other omnibus looked quite so important. On it, in gold letters, Mary read "Hôtel de Paris." The name sounded vaguely familiar. Where had she lately heard this hotel mentioned! Oh, yes! by Miss Wardropp.
"Hôtel de Paris, s'il vous plaît," she answered.
In another moment her bag was in the omnibus, and she was climbing in after it in the wake of other persons, enough to fill the roomy vehicle. As she settled into her corner she saw a man walk slowly by at a distance. He was not looking at her for the moment, and she had no more than a glimpse of a dark, clearly drawn profile; yet she received a curious impression that he had just turned away from looking at her; and she was almost sure it was the man she had noticed at Marseilles. Now her Romeo idea of him struck her as sentimental. She wondered why she had connected such a thought with a man in modern clothes, in a noisy railway station. The morning and its impressions seemed long ago. She felt older and more experienced, almost like a woman of the world, as the big horses trotted up a hill, leaving all the other omnibuses behind. From under the large hat of a large German lady, she peered eagerly, to lose no detail in approaching Monte Carlo.
High at the right rose a terrace like a hanging garden, attached to a huge white hotel. In front of the building, and also very high, ran a long covered gallery where there appeared to be restaurants and shops. At the left were gardens; and then in a moment more, coming out into an open square, all Monte Carlo seemed made of gardens with extraordinary, ornate white buildings in their midst, sugar-cake buildings made for pleasure and amusement, all glass windows and plaster figures and irrelevant towers, the whole ringed in by a semi-circle of high, gray mountains. It was a fantastic fairyland, this place of palms and bosky lawns, with grass far too green to seem real, and beds of incredibly brilliant flowers.
One section of the garden ran straight and long, like a gayly patterned carpet, toward a middle background of climbing houses with red roofs; and it began to spread almost from the steps of the cream white building with jewelled and gilded horns, which Mary had seen in Peter's Riviera snapshots: the Casino. As the omnibus swung round a generous half circle, slowly now to avoid loitering groups of people, Mary saw many men and women arriving in motors or on foot, to go up the shallow flight of carpeted marble steps which led into the horned building. She thought again of an immense animal face under these erect, glittering horns; a face with quantities of intelligent, bright glass eyes that watched, and a wide-open, smiling mouth into which the figures walked confidently. It looked a kind, friendly animal basking in the gardens, and the big clock above its forehead, round which pigeons wheeled, added to its air of comfortable good nature. Mary was suddenly smitten with a keen curiosity to see exactly what all these people would see who allowed themselves to be swallowed by the mouth which smiled in receiving them. Most of the women were smartly dressed and had gold or embroidered bags in their hands, like those she had seen at Nice station. They went in looking straight ahead, and men ran up the steps quickly. Surely this was more than a mere building. There was something alive and vital and mysteriously attractive about it, though it was not beautiful at all architecturally, only rich looking and extraordinary, with its bronze youths sitting on the cornice and plaster figures starting out of the walls, laughing and beckoning. It had a personality which subtly contrived to dominate and make everything else in the little fairyland of flowers subservient to it, almost as if the emotions and passions of thousands and tens of thousands of souls from all over the world had saturated the materials of its construction.
As this fancy came to Mary's mind, the sun in its last look over the gray Tête de Chien struck her full in the eyes as with a flung golden gauntlet, then dropped behind the mountain, setting the sky on fire. An unreal light illumined the buildings in the fairy gardens, and Mary became conscious of an invisible tide of burning life all around her which caught her in its rushing flood. She was impelled to float on a swift and shining stream which she knew was carrying many others besides herself in the same direction toward an unseen but definite end. She was like a leaf snatched from a quiet corner by the wind and forced to join the whirl of its fellow-dancers. It was a feeling that warmed her veins with excitement, and made her reckless.
The omnibus passed the Casino, and a little farther on stopped in front of the Hôtel de Paris. It too was fantastically ornate, surely the most extraordinary hotel on earth, with a high roof of a gray severity which ironically frowned down upon gilded balconies and nude plaster women who supported them, robustly voluptuous creatures who faded into foliage below the waist, like plump nymphs escaping the rude pursuit of gods. Their bareness and boldness startled the convent-bred girl, even horrified her. She was the last to leave the omnibus, and then, instead of pushing in with her fellow-passengers to secure a room before others could snap up everything, she lingered a moment on the steps.
Still that magical light illumined the Place, under the sky's rosy fire. The long glass façade of the restaurant sent out diamond flashes. The pigeons strutting in the open space in front of the Casino were jewels moving on sticks of coral. As they walked, tiny purple shadows followed them, as if their little red legs were tangled in pansies. Across the Place, on the other side of the garden and opposite the hotel, was an absurd yet gay collection of bubbly Moorish domes, and open or glassed-in galleries, evidently a café. Music was playing there, and in front of the balconies were many chairs and little tables where people drank tea and fed the strutting pigeons. Beyond the bubbly domes shimmered a panorama of beauty which by force of its magnificence redeemed the frivolous fairyland from vulgarity, rather than rebuked it. Under the rain of rose and gold, as if seen through opaline gauze, shone sea and hills and distant mountains. On a green height a ruined castle and its vassal rock-village seemed to have fallen from the top and been arrested by some miracle halfway down. Beneath, a peninsula of pines silvered with olives floated on a sea of burnished gold; and above soared mountains that went billowing away to the east and to Italy, deep purple-red in the wine of sunset.
Mary forgot that people do not come to hotels for the sole purpose of standing on the steps to admire a view. It was a liveried servant who politely reminded her of her duty by holding the glass door open and murmuring a suggestion that Mademoiselle should give herself the pain of entering. Then, slightly dazed by new impressions and the magnitude of her independence, Mary walked humbly into an immense hall, marble paved and marble columned. She had never seen anything half so gorgeous, and though she did not know yet whether she liked or disliked the bewildering decorations of mermaids and sea animals and flowers, she was struck by their magnificent audacity into a sense of her own insignificance. Before she could dare to walk here as by right, or seat herself in one of those great gilded and brocaded chairs, she must buy clothes which suited Monte Carlo as all this florid splendour of ornamentation suited it. She did not put this in words, but like all women possessed of "temperament," had in her something of the chameleon, and instinctively wished to match her tints with her environment.