She held out two white chips in her shabby, gloved hand. He noted the smallness of the hand, and the glimpse of milk-white wrist between the glove and the threadbare jacket. He drew nearer still.
“Ah! it’s hopeless,” he said, “when one gets down so low. Why not let me make you a loan? I shall never miss it. You can repay me out of your winnings. Let me lend you a trifle, say five hundred.”
She looked at him steadily for a moment. “But I have no security to give you,” she said at last.
He laughed easily. “Oh, that doesn’t matter. Of course, we are speaking as one Monte Carloite to another. We understand each other. If I am nice to you, you will be nice to me. My room at the pension is number fourteen. If you come down and see me this evening I have no doubt we can arrange matters.”
She rose. In the shadow he could not see the loathing in her eyes. These men ... they were all alike. Beasts! She left him without a word.
He waited in his room that night, wondering if she would come. She did not. He went off to the Casino laughing comfortably. Life was a great game.
“If it isn’t to-night,” he said to himself, “it will be to-morrow or the day after. A little more hunger, a little more despair. I have but to wait. She will come to me. If she doesn’t, what matter? There are lots of others.”
3.
Some days later she sat in her room staring at her face in the cheap mirror. There were dark circles around her weary eyes. Her cheeks were thinned to pathetic hollows, her mouth drooped with despair and defeat. The Casino had beaten her. She was sick, weak, nervously unstrung. Try as she would she could not get back her old healthy view of life; that was the worst of it. Gambling had poisoned the very blood in her veins.
She had no money to take her back to Paris, even if she were willing to go, and she felt she would rather die than write and ask for help. Then to take up the burden of labour again, the life of struggle without hope and with misery to crown it all, ... Ah! she knew it so well. She had seen too many of her comrades fight and fall. Must she too work as they worked, until her strength was exhausted and she perished in poverty?