This strange exotic luxuriance has something infernal in its beauty; the darkly massed foliage, in hard contrast with the white glare of flaunting hotels and restaurants and the marble and gilding and flamboyant style of the Casino, gives the whole a violence, a crude insistence of wealth and luxury, in harmony with the spirit of the place, and much at variance with its superb natural setting and associations. "And what people! Oh, what people!" Ermengarde murmured to the thin man, who was glad to sit down and pretend to listen to the band and watch the crowd strolling and sitting outside the Café de Paris. "What tawdriness, what dowdiness, what Parisian elegance run wild! Look at that woman; she has six purses at her belt. You can see the gold through the net. She's going into the Casino--let us go too!" "So young, so fair, and so very business-like! Yes, beneath that Parisian hat, in that expensive Parisian raiment, is the cool and calculating brain and steady nerve of a financier. She has a system and works it, Mrs. Allonby." How tawdry and tarnished was the vaunted splendour of the Casino, and how wearisome the formalities exacted before admittance to the gaming-hall! "Such meddlesome impertinence. The man actually asked my age," Ermengarde complained. "Ah! they don't ask mine," sighed the artist, whose head already showed the silver touch of time; "they are quite sure that I am of _âge majeur_." Most places have their characteristic odour. That of Mentone is garlic, with a suspicion of sewage; that of the _Salle de Jeu_ is a fine blend of garlic, old clothes, musk, and money--especially paper money. The garlic is mostly contributed by hollow-eyed croupiers, who are in some measure responsible for the old clothes, an odour otherwise due to grave elderly persons, chiefly female, in garments of indescribable frumpishness and respectability, who form the staple of the afternoon congregation, and seem to contemplate life and its agreeable weaknesses from a standpoint of ferocious piety. Surely they must have dropped into a prayer-meeting by mistake. Ermengarde looked round for the minister, after some seconds' contemplation of long green tables covered with coin and diagrams, and surrounded by treble and quadruple rows of staid and solemn faces, "all silent and all damned." This congregation was apparently listening with hushed reverence to spasmodic, low-muttered words of wisdom from a priestly person flavoured with garlic, who appeared to be consulting some oracle, or celebrating some religious rite, by turning a brass wheel in a basin sunk in the table, and surrounded by votive offerings in the shape of rolls and rolls of five-franc pieces and golden louis in glittering, provocative piles.