ot as a longing in which
the whole being consents?

She who raised these questions in Daniel Deronda's mind was occupied in
gambling: not in the open air under a southern sky, tossing coppers on
a ruined wall, with rags about her limbs; but in one of those splendid
resorts which the enlightenment of ages has prepared for the same
species of pleasure at a heavy cost of guilt mouldings, dark-toned
color and chubby nudities, all correspondingly heavy--forming a
suitable condenser for human breath belonging, in great part, to the
highest fashion, and not easily procurable to be breathed in elsewhere
in the like proportion, at least by persons of little fashion.

It was near four o'clock on a September day, so that the atmosphere was
well-brewed to a visible haze. There was deep stillness, broken only by
a light rattle, a light chink, a small sweeping sound, and an
occasional monotone in French, such as might be expected to issue from
an ingeniously constructed automaton. Round two long tables were
gathered two serried crowds of human beings, all save one having their
faces and attention bent on the tables. The one exception was a
melancholy little boy, with his knees and calves simply in their
natural clothing of epidermis, but for the rest of his person in a
fancy dress. He alone had his face turned toward the doorway, and
fixing on it the blank gaze of a bedizened child stationed as a
masquerading advertisement on the platform of an itinerant show, stood
close behind a lady deeply engaged at the roulette-table.

About this table fifty or sixty persons were assembled, many in the
outer rows, where there was occasionally a deposit of new-comers, being
mere spectators, only that one of them, usually a woman, might now and
then be observed putting down a five-franc with a simpering air, just
to see what the passion of gambling really was. Those who were taking
their pleasure at a higher strength, and were absorbed in play, showed
very distant varieties of European type: Livonian and Spanish,
Graeco-Italian and miscellaneous German, English aristocratic and
English plebeian. Here certainly was a striking admission of human
equality. The white bejewelled fingers of an English countess were very
near touching a bony, yellow, crab-like hand stretching a bared wrist
to clutch a heap of coin--a hand easy to sort with the square, gaunt
face, deep-set eyes, grizzled eyebrows, and ill-combed scanty hair
which seemed a slight metamo