At the tables was another type of woman whom I had first casually noticed at Monte Carlo, a not too good looking, rather practical, and perhaps disillusioned type of woman--usually inclined to stoutness, as is so often the case with women of indolent habits and no temperament--although, now that I think of it, I have the feeling that neither illusion nor disillusion have ever played much part in the lives of such as these. They looked to me like women who, from their youth up, had taken life with a grain of salt and who had never been carried away by anything much--neither love, nor fashion, nor children, nor ambition. Perhaps their keenest interest had always been money--the having and holding of it. And here they sat--not good-looking, not apparently magnetic--interested in chance, and very likely winning and losing by turns, their principal purpose being, I fancy, to avoid the dullness and monotony of an existence which they are not anxious to endure. I heard one or two derogatory comments on women of this type while I was abroad; but I cannot say that they did more than appeal to my sympathies. Supposing, to look at it from another point of view, you were a woman of forty-five or fifty. You have no family--nothing to hold you, perhaps, but a collection of dreary relatives, or the _ennui_ of a conventional neighborhood with prejudices that are wearisome to your sense of liberty and freedom. If by any chance you have money, here on the Riviera is your resource. You can live in a wonderful climate of sun and blue water; you can see nature clad in her daintiest raiment the year round; you can see fashion and cosmopolitan types and exchange the gossip of all the world; you can go to really excellent restaurants--the best that Europe provides; and for leisure, from ten o’clock in the morning until four or five o’clock the next morning, you can gamble if you choose, gamble silently, indifferently, without hindrance as long as your means endure. If you are of a mathematical or calculating turn of mind you can amuse yourself infinitely by attempting to solve the strange puzzle of chance--how numbers fall and why. It leads off at last, I know, into the abstrusities of chemistry and physics. The esoteric realms of the mystical are not more subtle than the strange abnormalities of psychology that are here indulged in. Certain people are supposed to have a chemical and physical attraction for numbers or cards. Dreams are of great importance. It is bad to sit by a losing person, good to sit by a winning one. Every conceivable eccentricity of thought in relation to personality is here indulged in; and when all is said and done, in spite of the wonders of their cobwebby calculations, it comes to about the same old thing--they win and lose, win and lose, win and lose.