My poor little three louis seemed suddenly insignificant. A lady sitting next to him, a woman of perhaps fifty, with a cool, calculating face had perhaps as much as two thousand dollars in gold and notes piled up before her. All around the table were these piles of gold, silver and notes. It was a fascinating scene.
“There, that ends me,” observed Scorp, all at once, his stock of gold on certain numbers disappearing with the rake of the croupier. “Now I’m done. We might walk out in the lobby and watch the crowd.” All his good gold so quietly raked in by the croupier was lingering painfully in my memory. I was beginning to see plainly that I would not make a good gambler. Such a loss distressed me.
“How much did you lose?” I inquired.
“Oh, a thousand francs,” he replied.
We strolled up and down, Scorp commenting sarcastically on one type and another and yet with a genial tolerance which was amusing.
I remember a charming-looking cocotte, a radiant type of brunette, with finely chiseled features, slim, delicate fingers, a dainty little foot, who, clad in a fetching costume of black and white silk which fitted her with all the airy grace of a bon-bon ribbon about its box, stood looking uncertainly about as if she expected to meet some one.
“Look at her,” Scorp commented with that biting little ha! ha! of his, which involved the greatest depths of critical sarcasm imaginable. “There she is. She’s lost her last louis and she’s looking for some one to pay for her dinner!”
I had to smile to myself at the man’s croaking indifference to the lady’s beauty. Her obvious charms had not the slightest interest for him.
Of another lovely creature who went by with her head held high and her lips parted in a fetching, coaxing way he observed, “She practises that in front of her mirror!” and finding nothing else to attack, finally turned to me. “I say, it’s a wonder you don’t take a cocktail. There’s your American bar.”
“It’s the wrong time, Scorp,” I replied. “You don’t understand the art of cocktail drinking.”