“You mustn’t bear me any malice, Mr. Sypher, because I’m so grateful to you for saving us from these swindling people.”

When Zora smiled into a man’s eyes, she was irresistible.  Sypher’s pink face relaxed.

“Never mind,” he said.  “I’ll send you all the advertisements I can lay my hands on in the morning.  Au revoir.”

He raised his hat and went away.  Zora laughed across the table.

“What an extraordinary person!”

“I feel as if I had been talking to a typhoon,” said Septimus.

* * * * *

They went to the theater that evening, and during the first entr’acte strolled into the rooms.  Except the theater the Casino administration provides nothing that can allure the visitor from the only purpose of the establishment.  Even the bar at the end of the atrium could tempt nobody not seriously parched with thirst.  It is the most comfortless pleasure-house in Europe.  You are driven, deliberately, in desperation into the rooms.

Zora and Septimus were standing by the decorous hush of a trente et quarante table, when they were joined by Mr. Clem Sypher.  He greeted them like old acquaintances.

“I reckoned I should meet you sometime to-night.  Winning?”

“We never play,” said Zora.

Which was true.  A woman either plunges feverishly into the vice of gambling or she is kept away from it by her inborn economic sense of the uses of money.  She cannot regard it like a man, as a mere amusement.  Light loves are somewhat in the same category.  Hence many misunderstandings between the sexes.  Zora found the amusement profitless, the vice degraded.  So, after her first evening, she played no more.  Septimus did not count.

“We never play,” said Zora.

“Neither do I,” said Sypher.

“The real way to enjoy Monte Carlo is to regard these rooms as non-existent.  I wish they were.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” Sypher exclaimed quickly.  “They are most useful.  They have a wisely ordained purpose.  They are the meeting-place of the world.  I come here every year and make more acquaintances in a day than I do elsewhere in a month.  Soon I shall know everybody and everybody will know me, and they’ll take away with them to Edinburgh and Stockholm and Uruguay and Tunbridge Wells—­to all corners of the earth—­a personal knowledge of the cure.”

“Oh—­I see.  From that point of view—­” said Zora.

“Of course.  What other could there be?  You see the advantage?  It makes the thing human.  It surrounds it with personality.  It shows that ’Friend of Humanity’ isn’t a cant phrase.  They recommend the cure to their friends.  ‘Are you sure it’s all right?’ they are asked.  ‘Of course it is,’ they can reply. ’I know the man, Clem Sypher himself.’ And the friends are convinced and go about saying they know a man who knows Clem Sypher, and so the thing spreads like a snowball.  Have you read the pamphlet?”