If You Liked, He Would Speak
French Or Italian, Though He Spoke English As Well As Any One, And He
Was Of That Excellent Piedmontese Race Which Has Been The Saving Salt Of
The Whole Peninsula.
As for the food, it was far beyond that of our
cold-storage, and it must have been cheap, since it was provided for us
at the rate we paid.
The cost of dress varies, according to the taste of and the purse,
everywhere. White serge seemed the favorite wear of most of the ladies
one saw in the street at Monte Carlo, especially in the region of the
Casino. This may have expressed an inner condition, or it may have been
a sympathetic response to the advances of the flowers in the pretty beds
and parterres so fancifully designed by the gardeners of the
administration, or it may have been a token of the helpless submission
to which the windows of the milliners and modistes reduced all comers of
the dressful sex. Many of the men with the women, or without them, were
also in white serge, but they seemed more variably attired; there was a
prevailing suggestion of yachting or automobiling in their dress,
though doubtless most of them had not sailed or motored to the spot.
Some few, say four or five, may have motored away from it, for in the
centre of the charming square before the Casino there was an automobile
of some newest type being raffled for in the interest of that chiefest
of the Christian virtues which makes its most successful appeals in the
vicinity of games of chance. Some one must have won the machine and
carried a party of his friends away, and triumphantly turned turtle with
it over the first of the precipices which abound at Monte Carlo. More
than the tables within this opportunity of fortune tempted me, and it
was only by the repeated recurrence to my principles that I was able to
get away alive. In spite of myself, I did not get away without, however
guiltlessly, having yielded to the spirit of the place. It was at the
Administrational Art Exhibition, where there were really some good
pictures, and where, on my entering, I was given a small brass disk. On
going out I attempted to restore this to the door-keeper, but he went
back with me to a certain piece of mechanism, where he instructed me to
put the disk into a slot. Then the disk ran its course, and a small
brass ball came out at the bottom. The door-keeper opened this, and
showed me that it was empty; but he gave me to understand that it might
have been full of diamonds, or rubies, or seed-pearls, which might have
implanted in me a lust of gambling I should never have overcome. Monte
Carlo was in every way tempting. A vast oblong, brilliant with flowers
in artistic patterns, stretched upward from the Casino, and there was an
agreeable park where one might sit.
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