Septimus | Page 5

the veil, can only follow the obvious; and there are seasons
when the obvious fails to satisfy. When such a mood overcame her
mistress, Turner railed at the upsetting quality of foreign food, and
presented bicarbonate of soda. She arrived by a different path at the
unsatisfactory nature of the obvious. Sometimes, too, the pleasant
acquaintances of travel were lacking, and loneliness upset the nice
balance of Zora's nerves. Then, more than ever, did she pine for the
Beyond.
Yet youth, receptivity, imagination kept her buoyant. Hope lured her on
with renewed promises from city to city. At last, on her homeward
journey, he whispered the magic name of Monte Carlo, and her heart
was aflutter in anticipation of wonderland.
She stood bewildered, lonely, and dismayed in the first row behind the
chairs, fingering an empty purse. She had been in the rooms ten
minutes, and she had lost twenty louis. Her last coup had been
successful, but a bland old lady, with the white hair and waxen face of
sainted motherhood, had swept up her winnings so unconcernedly that
Zora's brain began to swim. As she felt too strange and shy to
expostulate she stood fingering her empty purse.
The scene was utterly different from what she had expected. She had
imagined a gay, crowded room, wild gamblers shouting in their
excitement, a band playing delirious waltz music, champagne corks
popping merrily, painted women laughing, jesting loudly, all kinds of
revelry and devilry and Bacchic things undreamed of. This was silly of
her, no doubt, but the silliness of inexperienced young women is a
matter for the pity, not the reprobation, of the judicious. If they take the
world for their oyster and think, when they open it, they are going to
find pearl necklaces ready-made, we must not blame them. Rather let
hoary-headed sinners envy them their imaginings.
The corners of Zora Middlemist's ripe lips drooped with a child's
pathos of disillusionment. Her nose delicately marked disgust at the
heavy air and the discord of scents around her. Having lost her money
she could afford to survey with scorn the decorous yet sordid greed of
the crowded table. There was not a gleam of gaiety about it. The people

behaved with the correct impassiveness of an Anglican congregation.
She had heard of more jocular funerals.
She forgot the intoxication of her first gold and turquoise day at Monte
Carlo. A sense of loneliness--such as a solitary dove might feel in a
wilderness of evil bats--oppressed her. Had she not been aware that she
was a remarkably attractive woman and the object of innumerable
glances, she would have cried. And twenty louis pitched into
unprofitable space! Yet she stood half fascinated by the rattle of the
marble on the revolving disc, the glitter of the gold, the soft pat of the
coins on the green cloth as they were thrown by the croupier. She
began to make imaginary stakes. For five coups in succession she
would have won. It was exasperating. There she stood, having pierced
the innermost mystery of chance, without even a five-franc piece in her
purse.
A man's black sleeve pushed past her shoulder, and she saw a hand in
front of her holding a louis. Instinctively she took it.
"Thanks," said a tired voice. "I can't reach the table. She threw it, _en
plein_, on Number Seventeen; and then with a start, realizing what she
had done, she turned with burning cheeks.
"I am so sorry."
Her glance met a pair of unspeculative blue eyes, belonging to the
owner of the tired voice. She noted that he had a sallow face, a little
brown mustache, and a shock of brown hair, curiously upstanding, like
Struwel Peter's.
"I am so sorry," she repeated. "Please ask for it back. What did you
want me to play?"
"I don't know. It doesn't matter, so long as you've put it somewhere."
"But I've put it en plein on Seventeen," she urged. "I ought to have
thought what I was doing."

"Why think?" he murmured.
Mrs. Middlemist turned square to the table and fixed her eyes on the
staked louis. In spite of the blue-eyed man's implied acquiescence she
felt qualms of responsibility. Why had she not played on an even
chance, or one of the dozens, or even a transversale? To add to her
discomfort no one else played the full seventeen. The whole table
seemed silently jeering at her inexperience.
The croupiers had completed the payments of the last coup. The marble
fell with its sharp click and whizzed and rattled around the disc. Zora
held her breath. The marble found its compartment at last, and the
croupier announced:
"Dix-sept, noir, impair et manque."
She had won. A sigh of relief shook her bosom. Not only had she not
lost