They dined with their cavaliers at one of the fashionable restaurants, then, after an hour in the Casino rooms, which were not at all to their taste, with their ornate walls and dingy crowd, went by means of lifts and underground corridors over to the International Sporting Club. Valdobia and Mowbray had put them up at this exclusive resort during the afternoon and they entered the roulette rooms at once. Here the walls were chastely hung with pale grey satin, and all the colour was in the company. The long tables were crowded with smart-looking men and women of both worlds, although only the ladies that had stepped down from ancestral halls dared to show a grey hair or a wrinkle. The cocottes were so young and fresh as well as beautiful that to Ora and Ida they looked much like girls of their own class. All, young and old, were splendidly dressed and bejewelled; and if there was excitement in their brains there was no evidence of it in their calm or animated faces. They might have been a great house-party amusing themselves with some new and innocuous game. Our party walked about for a time dividing their attention between the spinning balls, the faces of the players, and the gowns of the women; even those of the cocottes were not eccentric, although worn with a certain inimitable style. Their ropes of pearls were also the longest in the room. A number of the most notable men in Europe were present, princes of reigning houses, and statesmen high in the service of their country. In spite of the absence of that feverish excitement which is supposed to pervade these gambling rooms of Monte Carlo (and which is absent from the Casino even when a man shoots himself and is whisked out), Ora wandered about in a curious state of exaltation. The cool splendour of the rooms, the atmosphere of high breeding and restraint, the gratification of the æsthetic sense at every turn, the beauty of the women and the distinguished appearance of the men made it a romantic and memorable scene. Notwithstanding the constant clink of gold, the monotonous admonitions of the croupiers, it was a sort of worldly fairyland, this apotheosis of one of the most perilous of human indulgences. These people might be gambling for greed or mere excitement, being blasé of other mundane diversions, but they were at the same time so frank and so reserved, so pleased and so indifferent, that they produced the illusion of sojourning on a plane high above the common mortal with his commonplace loves and disasters and struggles to exist or shine. No wonder that men came here to forget the burdens of state, women Society’s conservatisms or the inconstancy of man. For the hour, and the hour generally lasted until four in the morning, they lived in a world apart, and a duchess sat next to a cocotte with a serene indifference that amounted almost to democracy.