infernal tables. Vale! J.G.S."

I found myself smiling--I fear miserably--over this kind
letter, especially at the wonder of my friend that I had not
appealed to my relatives. The only ones who would have liked to
help me, if they had known I needed something, were my two
little nieces who were in my own care; because my father, being
but a poet, had no family, and my mother had lost hers, even her
eldest son, by marrying my father. After that they would have
nothing to do with her, nor were they asked. That rascally old
Antonio was now the head of all the Caravacioli, as was I of my
own outcast branch of our house--that is, of my two little
nieces and myself. It was partly of these poor infants I had
thought when I took what was left of my small inheritance to
Monte Carlo, hoping, since I seemed to be incapable of
increasing it in any other way, that number seventeen and black
would hand me over a fortune as a waiter does wine. Alas! Luck
is not always a fool's servant, and the kind of fortune she
handed me was of that species the waiter brings you in the other
bottle of champagne, the gold of a bubbling brain, lasting an
hour. After this there is always something evil to one's head,
and mine, alas! was shaved.

Half an hour after I had read the letter, the little paper-
flower makers in the attic window across from mine may have seen
me shaving it--without pleasure--again. What else was I to
do? I could not well expect to be given the guardianship of an
erring young man if I presented myself to his parent as a
gentleman who had been sitting at the Cafe' de la Paix with his
head painted. I could not wear my hat through the interview. I