ullest order.
The only player who seems to throw any kind of vivacity into his
gambling is a gaudy little Jew with heavy watch-chain, who vibrates
between one table and another, sees nothing of the game save the
dropping his stake at roulette and then rushing off to drop another
stake at rouge-et-noir, and finds time in his marches to spare a merry
little word to a friend or two. But he is the only person who seems to
know anybody. Men who sit by one another year after year never exchange
a word. There is not even the air of reckless adventure to excite one.
The player who dashes down his all on any part of the table and trusts
to fortune is a mere creature of fiction; the gambler of fact is a
calculator, a man of business, with a contempt for speculation and a
firm belief in long-studied combination. Each has his little card, and
ticks off the succession of numbers with the accuracy of a ledger. It is
in the careful study of these statistics that each believes he discovers
the secret of the game, the arrangement which, however it may be
defeated for a time by inscrutable interference of ill-luck, must in the
end, if there is any truth in statistics, be successful. One looks in
vain for the "reckless gambler" one has read about and talked about, for
"reckless" is the very last word by which one would describe the ring of
business-like people who come day after day with the hope of making
money by an ingenious dodge.

Their talk, if one listens to it over the dinner-table, turns altogether
on this business-like aspect of the question. Nobody takes the least
interest in its romantic or poetic side, in the wonderful runs of luck
or the terrible stories of ruin and despair which form the
stock-in-trade of the novelist. The talk might be that of a conference
of commercial travellers. Everybody has his infallible nostrum for
breaking the bank; but everybody looks upon the prospect of such a
fortune in a purely commercial light. The general opinion of the wiser
sort goes against heavy stakes, and "wild play" is only talked about
with contempt. The qualities held in honour, so far as we can gather
from the conversation, are "judgment," which means a careful study of
the little cards and a certain knowledge of mathematics, and
"constancy"--the playing not from caprice but on a definite plan and
principle. Nobody has the least belief in "luck." A winner is
congratulated on his "science." The loser explains the causes of his
loss