The rest doesn't matter. He leaves it to chance. I am speaking, be it understood, not of deep passions--that is a different matter altogether--but of the more superficial sexual attractions which we, as a race, take so seriously and puritanically, often to our most disastrous undoing, and which the Latin light-heartedly regards as essential, but transient phenomena of human existence. Aristide made the most respectful love in the world to Betty Errington, because he could not help himself. "_Tonnerre de Dieu!_" he cried when from my Britannic point of view, I talked to him on the subject. "You English whom I try to understand and can never understand are so funny! It would have been insulting to Miss Betty Errington--_tiens!_--a purple hyacinth of spring--that was what she was--not to have made love to her. Love to a pretty woman is like a shower of rain to hyacinths. It passes, it goes. Another one comes. _Qu'importe?_ But the shower is necessary--Ah! _sacré gredin_, when will you comprehend?" All this to make as clear as an Englishman, in the confidence of a changeling child of Provence can hope to do, the attitude of Aristide Pujol towards the sweet and innocent Betty Errington with her mouth like crumpled rose-petals, her ivory and peach-blossom complexion, her soft contralto voice, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, as per foregoing bald description, and as per what can, by imaginative effort, be pictured from the Pujolic hyperbole, by which I, the unimportant narrator of these chronicles, was dazzled and overwhelmed. "I'm afraid I don't think of the croupier at all," said Betty. "Do you think of no one who brings you good fortune?" asked Aristide. He threw the _Matin_ on the grass, and, doubling himself up in his chair regarded her earnestly. "Last night you put five louis into my bank----" "And I won forty. I could have hugged you." "Why didn't you? Ah!" His arms spread wide and high. "What I have lost!" "Betty!" cried Mrs. Errington. "Alas, Madame," said Aristide, "that is the despair of our artificial civilization. It prohibits so much spontaneous expression of emotion." "You'll forgive me, Monsieur Pujol," said Mrs. Errington dryly, "but I think our artificial civilization has its advantages." "If you will forgive me, in your turn," said Aristide, "I see a doubtful one advancing." A man approached the group and with profuse gestures took off a straw hat which he thrust under his right arm, exposing an amazingly flat head on which the closely cropped hair stood brush-fashion upright. He had an insignificant pale face to which a specious individuality was given by a moustache with ends waxed up to the eyes and by a monocle with a tortoise shell rim. He was dressed (his valet had misjudged things--and valets like the rest of us are fallible) in what was yesterday a fairly white flannel suit.