And how comes
it that the eyesore has not yet been detected and uprooted by those
keen-sighted authorities that perform such wonders in making the visitor
feel at home, and hush up with miraculous dexterity everything in the
nature of a public scandal?
In exemplification whereof, let me tell a trivial Riviera tale. There
was an Englishwoman here, one of those indestructible modern ladies who
breakfast off an ether cocktail and half a dozen aspirins and feel all
the better for it, and who, one day, found herself losing rather heavily
at the tables. "Another aspirin is going to turn my luck," she thought,
and therewith swallowed surreptitiously her last tabloid of the panacea.
Not unobserved, however; for straightway two elegant gentlemen - they
might have been Russian princes - pounced upon her and led her to that
underground operating-room where a kindly physician is in perennial
attendance. He brushed aside her explanations.
"It would be a thousand pities for so charming a lady to poison herself.
But since you wish to take that step, why choose the Casino which has a
reputation to keep up? Are there not hotels - - "
"I tell you it was only aspirin."
"Alas, we are sufficiently familiar with that tale! Now, Madam, let us
not lose a moment!
