His comrade fell in with the pictured idea:  ’You hit it:—­not what you called the “sublimely milky,” and not squalid as you’ll see the faces of the gambling women at the tables below.  Oblige me—­may I beg?—­don’t clap names on the mountains we’ve seen.  It stamps guide-book on them, English tourist, horrors.  We’ll moralize over the crowds at the tables down there.  On the whole, it’s a fairish game:  you know the odds against you, as you don’t on the Turf or the Bourse.  Have your fling; but don’t get bitten.  There’s a virus.  I’m not open to it.  Others are.’

Hereupon Woodseer, wishing to have his individuality recognised in the universality it consented to, remarked on an exchequer that could not afford to lose, and a disposition free of the craving to win.

These were, no doubt, good reasons for abstaining, and they were grand morality.  They were, at the same time, customary phrases of the unfleshed in folly.  They struck Fleetwood with a curious reminder of the puking inexperienced, whom he had seen subsequently plunge suicidally.  He had a sharp vision of the attractive forces of the game; and his elemental nature exulted in siding with the stronger against a pretender to the superhuman.  For Woodseer had spoken a trifle loftily, as quite above temptation.  To see a forewarned philosopher lured to try the swim on those tides, pulled along the current, and caught by the undertug of the lasher, would be fun.

’We’ll drop down on them, find our hotel, and have a look at what they’re doing,’ he said, and stepped.

Woodseer would gladly have remained.  The starlit black ridges about him and the dragon’s mouth yawing underneath were an opposition of spiritual and mundane; innocent, noxious; exciting to the youthful philosopher.  He had to follow, and so rapidly in the darkness that he stumbled and fell on an arm; a small matter.

Bed-chambers awaited them at the hotel, none of the party:  and Fleetwood’s man-servant was absent.

‘Gambling, the rascal!’ he said.  Woodseer heard the first note of the place in that.

His leader was washed, neatly dressed, and knocking at his door very soon, impatient to be off, and he flung a promise of ‘supper presently’ to one whose modest purse had fallen into a debate with this lordly hostelry, counting that a supper and a night there would do for it.  They hurried on to the line of promenaders, a river of cross-currents by the side of seated groups; and the willowy swish of silken dresses, feminine perfumery, cigar-smoke, chatter, laughter, told of pleasure reigning.

Fleetwood scanned the groups.  He had seen enough in a moment and his face blackened.  A darting waiter was called to him.

He said to Woodseer, savagely, as it sounded:  ’You shall have something to joint your bones!’ What cause of wrath he had was past a guess:  a wolf at his vitals bit him, hardening his handsome features.