lettuce, a hollow-stemmed glass effervescent with liquid sunlight of a
most excellent bouquet, and then another: these served not in the
least to subdue his occult jubilation.

Finally "the house," through the medium of its servitor, insisted that
he top off with a cigar.

Ten years since his teeth had gripped a Fancy Tales of Smoke!...

Now it mustn't be understood that P. Sybarite entertained any
misapprehensions as to the nature of the institution into which he had
stumbled. He had not needed the sound, sometimes in quieter moments
audible from upstairs, of a prolonged whirr ending in several staccato
clicks, to make him shrewdly cognisant of its questionable character.

So at length, satiate and a little weary--drawn by curiosity
besides--he rose, endowed Pete lavishly with a handful of small change
(something over fifty cents; all he had in the world aside from his
cherished five dollars), and with an impressive air of the most
thorough-paced sophistication (nodding genially to the doorkeeper _en
passant_) slowly ascended to the second floor.

Here, in remodelling the house for its present purposes, partitions
had arbitrarily been dispensed with, aside from that enclosing the
well of the stairway; the floor was one large room, wholly devoted to
some half a dozen games of chance. With but few of these was P.
Sybarite familiar; but on information and belief he marked down a faro
layout, the device with which his reading had made him acquainted
under the designation of _les petits chevaux_, and at either end of
the saloon, immense roulette tables.