"All right; we know that very well already. But who was this Duchess you met?"
"The Duchess de Delille. She often asks about your Highness, and upon hearing that you had just arrived, she gave me to understand that she intended paying you a call."
The Prince replied with a simple exclamation, and then remained silent.
"We are starting well," said Castro, laughing. "'No women!' And immediately the Colonel announces a visit from one of them, one of the most dangerous.... For you will admit that a Duchess like that is one of the 'women' you described to us."
"I won't receive her," said the Prince resolutely.
"I have an idea that this Duchess is a cousin of yours."
"There is no such relationship. Her father was the brother of my mother's second husband. But we have known each other since childhood, and we each have a most unpleasant memory of one another. When I was living in Russia she married a French Duke. She had the same desire as the majority of wealthy American girls: a great title of nobility in order to make her friends among the fair sex jealous and to shine in European circles. A few months later she left the Duke, assigning him a certain income, which is just what her noble husband wanted perhaps. This woman Alicia never appealed to me particularly.... Besides, she has lived life just as she pleased.... She has seen almost as much of it as I have. She has as much of a reputation as I. They even accuse her, just as they do me, of love affairs with people she has never seen.... They tell me that in recent years she has been parading around with a young lad, almost a child ... dear me! We are getting old!"
"I saw her with him in Paris," said Castro. "It was before the war. Later in Monte Carlo I met her, all by herself, without being able to find a trace of her young chap anywhere. He must have been a passing fancy of hers.... She has been here three years now. When summer comes she moves to Aix-les-Bains, or to Biarritz, but as soon as the Casino is gay and fashionable again, she is one of the first to return."
"Does she play?"
"Desperately. She plays high stakes and plays them badly, although we who think we play well always lose just the same, in the end. I mean, she puts her money on the table without thinking, in several places at a time, and then even forgets where she placed it. The 'leveurs des morts' are always hanging around to pick up the pieces that no one claims and when she wins, they always manage to get something of it. She gambled for two years with nothing less than chips of five hundred and a thousand francs. At present her chips are never for more than a hundred. It won't be long before she is using the red ones, the twenties, the favorites of your humble servant."