the Oriental feeling on the subject. She thought it delightful to be
danced to, to lie still with a pleasant companion near her who would
not talk too much, and listen to the music, and enjoy the poetry of
motion coolly and at ease. "I love to see the 'dancers dancing in
tune,'" she said; "but to have to dance myself would be as great a
bother as to have to cook my dinner as well as eat it. I suppose it is
a healthy amusement--indeed, I know it is when you take it as I do; for
when all you people come down the morning after a dance with haggard
eyes and no power to do anything, I am as fresh as a lark, and have
decidedly the best of it."

She was not good at games because she was not ambitious. She did not
care to have her skill commended, and was content to lose or win with
equal indifference--so long as only the honour of the thing was
involved; but when the stakes were more material she showed a vice of
which she was quite conscious.

"I daren't play for money," she said to me. "I never have, and I have
always said that I never will. All the women of my family are born
gamblers. My mother has often told me that regularly, when she was a
girl, the day after she received her allowance she had either doubled
it or lost it all; and before she was twenty she hadn't a jewel worth
anything in her possession--and my aunts were as bad. One of them
staked herself one night to a gentleman she was playing with, and he
won, and married her. Gambling was more the custom then than it is now,
but for me it is as much in the air as if it were still the fashion.
When there is any talk of play I feel fascinated, and when I see a pack
of cards the temptation is so irresistible that I have often to go away
to save my resolution."