“It is not quite so splendid and gay as I imagined,” my sister observed. “In fact, it’s all rather dim and dingy. Do you know it reminds me of the Pavilion at Brighton more than anything else. And how common some of the people are! Isn’t that your friend, Mr. Hines?”
Bob Hines was sitting in rather a melancholy heap, with a pile of five-franc pieces in front of him, and a card on which he was morosely writing the numbers as they came up.
“Let’s ask him how he’s doing?”
“Never speak to a gambler,” I whispered; “it’s considered unlucky.”
“Judging from his expression, he will be glad to get something back in your raid! And why seat himself between those two terrible old women?”
“They look,” Brentin murmured, “like representations of friend Zola’s the fat and the lean. Sakes alive! they’d make the fortune of a dime museum. Those women are freaks, ma’am, freaks.”
Hines was sitting between two ladies; one, with a petulant face of old childishness, was enormously stout. Her eyebrows were densely blackened, her pendulous cheeks as dusty with powder as the Mentone road. She was gorgeously overdressed; her broad bosom, fluid as of arrested molten tallow, was hung with colored jewels, like a bambino. With huge gloved hands and arms she was wielding a rake, whereof poor Bob had occasionally the end in his face. Beside her, on the green cloth, lay a withered bunch of roses, dead of her large, cruel grasp. At her back stood her husband, a German Jew financier, who couldn’t keep his pince-nez on. Continually he smoothed his thin hair and tried to get her away, grumbling and moving from leg to leg; for hours he would stand behind her chair, supplying her with money, for she nearly always lost. Occasionally she grabbed other people’s stakes, or they grabbed hers. Then she was sublime in her horrible ill-humor; half rising, with her great arms resting on the table, she shouted at the croupiers to be paid, in harsh, rattling, fish-fag tones. The sunken corners of her small mouth were drawn upward; the deep-set eyes worked in dull fury; you saw short, white teeth that once had smiled in a pretty Watteau face. Now the body was old and torpid and swollen; but the rabbit intelligence was still undeveloped, except in the direction of its rapacity.
Poor Bob Hines! He was indeed badly placed! On his other side sat a lath-and-plaster widow in the extensive mourning of a Jay’s advertisement. Her face was yellow and damaged as a broken old fresco at Florence; thin, oblong, brittle, only the semi-circular, blackened eyebrows seemed alive. The dyed, pallid hair looked dead as a Lowther Arcade doll’s; dead were her teeth, her long, thin, griffin hands with curved nails. Decomposition, even by an emotion, was somehow palpably arrested; perhaps she was frozen by the bitter chill of fatal zero. Horrible, old, crape-swathed mummy, one would have said she had lost even her husband at play. Who could ever have been found to love her? At whom had she ever smiled? at what had she ever laughed or wept? Bride of Frankenstein’s monster, she worked her muck-rake with the small, dry, galvanized gestures of an Edison invention. Poor Bob Hines! It sickened me to think these women, and others perhaps worse, were of the same sisterhood with Lucy. What a day when we should sweep them all out before us, as the fresh autumn wind sweeps the withered leaves across the walks of Kensington Gardens!
“So this is Monte Carlo!” murmured my sister again. “It stifles me! Take me out to the Café de Paris and give me some tea.”
As she took my arm and we went down the steps, “Easier place, however, to raid,” she remarked, “I never saw. As for the morality of it, I was a little doubtful at first, but now—”