The yacht arrived at ‘that very pleasant place on the Riviera’ two days after, and the newly-married pair spent a very interesting fortnight there. One thing alone troubled Sophia, and that was the discovery that her husband played on a finely elaborated and seemingly successful system, involving all sorts of abstruse sums in multiplication. Now, this to her was a shock, for she was of the type of gambler which, for want of a better word, we may call the romantic. Primarily she played for the sake of the play, and it was not the winning of money which she enjoyed so much as the winning in the abstract. The whole charm of the thing to her lay in that rolling marble the momentum of which no one knew, not even the croupier who set it going. She backed her luck, another unknown agent, against the immutable and incalculable laws of gravity and friction, and though she had all the gambler’s fine superstitions, and would back a run of luck, and never lay a sou on No. 13, it was the utter uncertainty of the thing which fascinated her.
She almost felt that Petros ought to have made a clean breast of it before he married her, classing it among those confessions which many men may have to make before they take a girl to share their lives, and she was a little hurt he had not done so. Eventually she decided one day to talk the matter over with him.
‘Yes; I was surprised, and—shall I say it?—a little disappointed, dear,’ she said, ‘when I found out that you had a system. Why did you not tell me? Well, never mind. When a game depends on its uncertainty, any subtraction from that surely subtracts from its charm. Suppose anyone invented an infallible system——’
Petros frowned, for he was just multiplying one hundred and seventy-three by fourteen, and dividing it by seventeen, a calculation often incidental to the system in question.
‘Mine is infallible,’ he interrupted rather sharply.
‘Yet you lost heavily all the morning, did you not?’
‘I shall win heavily all the evening, you will see;’ and he made a note of some figures.
‘Oh, Petros, leave the calculation alone a minute,’ she said, ‘and listen to me. I don’t think of roulette as a means of livelihood.’
Petros laughed.
‘That is just as well, dear Sophia,’ he said, ‘for you would not exactly have paid your way since you have been here.’