e times a week. Still did an occasional
flutter, though. Cleared eighty-thousand in Mexicans last February.
Wife had been a barmaid at Cambridge; married her when he was nineteen.
Thing seemed to have turned out quite well. Altogether, a great
character.

Possibly, thought I. But my cursory friend, accustomed to quick
transactions and to things accepted "on the nod," had not proved his
case to my slower, more literary intelligence. It was to him, though,
that I owed, some minutes later, a chance of testing his opinion. At
the cry of "Messieurs, la banque est aux encheres," we looked round and
saw that the subject of our talk was preparing to rise from his place.
"Now one can punt," said Grierson (this was my friend's name), and
turned to the bureau at which counters are for sale. "If old Jimmy
Pethel punts," he added, "I shall just follow his luck." But this
lode-star was not to be. While my friend was buying his counters, and
I was wondering whether I, too, could buy some, Pethel himself came up
to the bureau. With his lips no longer pursed, he had lost his air of
gravity, and looked younger. Behind him was an attendant bearing a big
wooden bowl--that plain, but romantic, bowl supplied by the
establishment to a banker whose gains are too great to be pocketed. He
and Grierson greeted each other. He said he had arrived in Dieppe this
afternoon, was here for a day or two. We were introduced. He spoke to
me with empressement, saying he was a "very great admirer" of my work.
I no longer disliked him. Grierson, armed with counters, had now
darted away to secure a place that had just been vacated. Pethel, with
a wave of his hand toward the tables, said:

"I suppose you never condescend to this sort of thing."

"Well--" I smiled indulgently.

"Awful waste of time," he admitted.

I glanced down at the splendid mess of counters and gold and notes that
were now becoming, under the swift fingers of the little man at the
bureau, an orderly array. I did not say aloud that it pleased me to
be, and to be seen, talking on terms of equality to a man who had won
so much. I did not say how wonderful it seemed to me that he, whom I
had watched just now with awe and with aversion, had all the while been
a great admirer of my work. I did but say, again indulgently, that I
supposed baccarat to be as good a way of wasting time as another.

"Ah, but you despise us all the same." He added that he always envied
men who