as
always filled me with a depression bordering on disgust. Most of the
men, by some subtle stress of their ruling passion, have grown so
monstrously fat, and most of the women so harrowingly thin. The rest
of the women seem to be marked out for apoplexy, and the rest of the
men to be wasting away. One feels that anything thrown at them would
be either embedded or shattered, and looks vainly among them for one
person furnished with a normal amount of flesh. Monsters they are, all
of them, to the eye, though I believe that many of them have excellent
moral qualities in private life; but just as in an American town one
goes sooner or later--goes against one's finer judgment, but somehow
goes--into the dime-museum, so year by year, in Dieppe's race-week,
there would be always one evening when I drifted into the
baccarat-room. It was on such an evening that I first saw the man
whose memory I here celebrate. My gaze was held by him for the very
reason that he would have passed unnoticed elsewhere. He was
conspicuous not in virtue of the mere fact that he was taking the bank
at the principal table, but because there was nothing at all odd about
him.

He alone, among his fellow-players, looked as if he were not to die
before the year was out. Of him alone I said to myself that he was
destined to die normally at a ripe old age. Next day, certainly, I
would not have made this prediction, would not have "given" him the
seven years that were still in store for him, nor the comparatively
normal death that has been his. But now, as I stood opposite to him,
behind the croupier, I was refreshed by my sense of his wholesome
durability. Everything about him, except the amount of money he had
been winning, seemed moderate. Just as he was neither fat nor thin, so
had his face neither that extreme pallor nor that extreme redness which
belongs to the faces of seasoned gamblers: it was just a clear pink.
And his eyes had neither the unnatural brightness nor the unnatural
dullness of the eyes about him: they were ordinarily clear eyes, of an
ordinary gray. His very age was moderate: a putative thirty-six, not
more. ("Not less," I would have said in those days.) He assumed no air
of nonchalance. He did not deal out the cards as though they bored
him, but he had no look of grim concentration. I noticed that the
removal of his cigar from his mouth made never the least difference to
his face, for he kept his lips pursed out as st