It was opened, not by the greasy Jack-in-the-box with the emerald pin, but by a deferential old man, who looked at me for a moment, holding the door with his foot.  Then gently closing it, he preceded me across a hall and up a long staircase.  At the top was a passageway and another door, and behind this a large room paneled in dark wood.  On one side of this apartment was a high desk.  Here sat the cashier counting money, and arranging little piles of chips of various colors.  In the centre stood a table covered with black cloth:  I had always supposed such tables to be green.  About it were seated ten people, the croupier in the middle.  The game had already begun.  I moved up a chair, saying that I would look on, but not play.

Had the occasion been a clinic, the game a corpse, and the croupier the operating surgeon, the group about the table could not have been more absorbed or more silent; a cold, death-like, ominous stillness that seemed to saturate the very air.  The only sounds were the occasional clickings of the ivory chips, like the chattering of teeth, and the monotones of the croupier announcing the results of the play:—­

“Faites vos jeux.  Le jeu est fait; rien ne va plus.”

I began to study the personnel of this clinic of chance.

Two Englishmen in evening dress sat side by side, never speaking, scarcely moving, their eyes riveted on the falling cards flipped from the croupier’s hands.  A coarse-featured, oily-skinned woman—­a Russian, I thought—­looked on calmly, resting her head on her palm.  A man in a gray suit, with waxy face and watery, yellow eyes, made paper pills, rolling them slowly between thumb and forefinger—­his features as immobile as a death-mask.  A blue-eyed, blond German officer, with a decoration on the lapel of his coat, nonchalantly twirled his mustache, his shoulders straining in tension.  A Parisienne, with bleached hair and penciled eyebrows, leaned over her companion’s arm.  There was also a flashily dressed negro, evidently a Haytian, who sat motionless at the far end, as stolid as a boiler, only the steam-gauge of his eyes denoting the pressure beneath.

No one spoke, no one laughed.

Two of the group interested me at once,—­the croupier and a woman who sat within three feet of me.

The croupier, who was in evening dress, might have been of any age from thirty to fifty.  His eyes were deep-set and glassy, like those of a consumptive.  His hair was jet-black, his face clean-shaven; the skin, not ivory, but a dirty white, and flabby, like the belly of a toad.  His thin and bloodless lips were flattened over a row of pure white teeth with glistening specks of gold that opened when he smiled; closing again slowly like an automaton’s.  His shrunken, colorless hands lay on the black cloth like huge white spiders; their long, thin legs of fingers turned up at the tips—­stealthy, creeping fingers.  Sometimes, too, in their nervous workings, they drooped together like a bunch of skeleton keys.  On one of these lock picks he wore a ring studded alternately with diamonds and rubies.