Perhaps, like
the writer of this story, you have stood by the long tables, and watched
the people seated there; the white-haired, watery-eyed old men, whose
trembling hands can scarcely hold the gold they put down with such
feverish eagerness; the men of middle age, whom experience has taught to
play cautiously, and stop just before the tide of success turns against
them; the young men, who, with the perspiration standing thickly about
their pale lips, and a strange glitter in their feverish eyes as they
see hundreds swept away, still play recklessly, desperately, until all
is lost, and they leave the accursed spot, hopelessly ruined, sometimes
seeking forgetfulness in death, with only the silent stars looking down
upon them and the restless sea moaning in their ears, lost, lost! There
are women too, at Monte Carlo, more, I verily believe than men; old
women, who sit from the hour of noon to the hour of midnight; women,
with their life's history written on their wrinkled, wicked faces;
women, who laugh hysterically when all they have is lost, and then
borrow of their friends to try their luck again; women, who go from
table to table with their long bags upon their arms, and who only risk
five or ten francs at a time, and stop when their unlucky star is in the
ascendant, or they feel that curious eyes are watching them.
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