"Never!"
"My dear Miss Rosselli, that's what everyone says here," he laughed. "But before you've been on the Riviera long you'll soon discover that this is no place for good resolutions. Gambling is one of the sweetest and most insidious of vices, and has the additional attraction of being thought chic. Look at the crowd of women here! Why, every one of them plays. If she didn't, others would believe her to be hard-up—and poverty, you know, is distinctly bad form here. Even if a woman hasn't sufficient to pay her hotel bill, she must wear the regulation gold chatelaine and the gold chain-purse, if it only contains a couple of pieces of a hundred sous. And she must play. Fortunes have been won with only five francs."
"Such stories, I fear, are only fairy tales," I said incredulously.
"No. At least, one of them is not," he answered, blowing a cloud of smoke from his lips and looking at me amusedly. "I was playing here one night last March when a young French girl won three hundred thousand francs after having first lost all she had. She borrowed a five-franc piece from a friend, and with it broke the bank. I was present at the table where it occurred. Fortune is very fickle here."
"So it seems," I said. "That is why I intend to keep what I've won."
"You might have a necklace made of the louis," he said. "Many women wear coins won at Monte attached to their bangles, along with golden pigs and enamelled discs bearing the fatal number thirteen."
"A happy thought!" I exclaimed. "I'll have one put on my bangle to-morrow as a souvenir."
"Are you staying on the Riviera long?" he inquired presently.
"I really don't know. When Ulrica is tired of it we shall move down to Rome, I suppose."
"When she's lost sufficient, you mean," he smiled. "She's quite reckless when she commences. I remember her here several seasons ago. She lost very heavily. Luck was entirely against her."