ocketbook from his breast pocket and selected two
cards and two pamphlets, which he laid on the table. Then he arose with an
air of suave yet offended dignity. Zora, seeing that the man, in some
strange way, was deeply hurt, looked up at him with a conciliatory smile.

"You mustn't bear me any malice, Mr. Sypher, because I'm so grateful to you
for saving us from these swindling people."

When Zora smiled into a man's eyes, she was irresistible. Sypher's pink
face relaxed.

"Never mind," he said. "I'll send you all the advertisements I can lay my
hands on in the morning. Au revoir."

He raised his hat and went away. Zora laughed across the table.

"What an extraordinary person!"

"I feel as if I had been talking to a typhoon," said Septimus.

* * * * *

They went to the theater that evening, and during the first entr'acte
strolled into the rooms. Except the theater the Casino administration
provides nothing that can allure the visitor from the only purpose of the
establishment. Even the bar at the end of the atrium could tempt nobody not
seriously parched with thirst. It is the most comfortless pleasure-house in
Europe. You are driven, deliberately, in desperation into the rooms.

Zora and Septimus were standing by the decorous hush of a _trente et
quarante_ table, when they were joined by Mr. Clem Sypher. He greeted them
like old acquaintances.

"I reckoned I should meet you sometime to-night. Winning?"

"We never play," said Zora.

Which was true. A woman either plunges feverishly into the vice of gambling
or she is kept away from it by her inborn economic sense of the uses of
money. She cannot regard it like a man, as a mere amusement. Light loves
are somewhat in the same category. Hence many misunderstandings between the
sexes. Zora found the amusement profitless, the vice degraded. So, after
her first evening, she played no more. Septimus did not count.

"We never play," said Zora.

"Neither do I," said Sypher.

"The real way to enjoy Monte Carlo is to regard these rooms as
non-existent. I wish they were."

"Oh, don't say that," Sypher exclaimed quickly. "They are most useful. They
have a wisely ordained purpose. They are the meeting-place of the world. I
come here every year and make more acquaintances in a day than I do
elsewhere in a month. Soon I shall know everybody and everybody will know
me, and they'll take away with them to Edinburgh and Stockholm and Uruguay