"You'll hardly be at the tables to-night, Ethel?"
"Why not? Easy to unpack and settle in before dinner. And only staying three weeks, a pity to lose a night."
"True, I shall put in a couple of hours before dinner as well as after."
Again, in Teutonic accents, "So Hedwig leaves next week?"
"Yes, her husband says they are thoroughly tired of Monte Carlo."
"So? I thought Hedwig had lost rather heavily of late. And Hermann's luck has evidently turned too."
Or it was, "System this, system that," and, "So many francs to the good at the end of the week," and the wonderful run of So-and-so's luck, and M. Tel-et-tel winning five hundred francs in half an hour, and the positive madness of putting anything on a number that had just turned up, and why à travers meant so much, and how a cool head and an accurate memory of the winning numbers of the last six or seven turns were absolutely necessary to work any system.
"But why," Ermengarde tragically demanded, "come to the loveliest spot on earth to do this devilry? A disused coal-mine would do equally well to gamble in."
The thin man conjectured that very likely the devil likes to kill two birds with one stone. "Because," he sighed, "the moment a beautiful and pleasant spot is discovered in any corner of the earth, he incites people to build flaring hotels and villas upon it, and run railways to it; and, if there is sea, to block it from sight with ghastly buildings, and spoil its strand with sea-walls and piers and promenades; and, if there are trees, to cut them down or blast them with smoke and chemicals; and, if there are mountains, to scar and tunnel them with lines of smut and iron; and, if meadows and grassy slopes commanding lovely prospects, to destroy their beauty and make rasping noises and knock balls over them all day. He gets people to rush in herds to places made for beauty and calm, to chatter and snigger and look at fashionable clothes-shops emptied on thoughtless females from every capital in Europe, and gorge themselves upon all the luxuries and vices of towns. And the lovelier the spot the greater satisfaction the devil seems to take in getting men to practise ugly and squalid sins in it, and to corrupt and degrade simple and sane folk for miles round it."
By this time they were crammed like sardines with others in a close box, that; by some invisible and probably diabolic agency, was drawn up to a higher level, upon which they were contumeliously ejected by a morose official who had previously mulcted them of small coin. Then, passing under avenues of wondrous exotic trees, by beds blazing with cyclamens, carnations, salvias, and petunias, and passing rivulets dancing and rippling down rocks covered with maidenhair and broadening in pools half hidden by water lilies, they emerged upon a terrace fronting a vast blue splendour, firmly rimmed beneath a nearly white band of sky, and bounded by the purple of Bordighera on one side, and Monaco, running out on its rock beneath the headland of Cap d'Ail on the other. And in the foreground, dainty steam and sailing yachts, some moored, some flitting over the sunny sea, and crowds of fishing-boats dotted here and there.