James Pethel

The place was then less overrun by trippers than it is now. Some pleasant English people shared it with some pleasant French people. We used rather to resent the race-week—the third week of the month—as an intrusion on our privacy. We sneered as we read in the Paris edition of "The New York Herald" the names of the intruders, though by some of these we were secretly impressed. We disliked the nightly crush in the baccarat-room of the casino, and the croupiers' obvious excitement at the high play. The rest of the women seem to be marked out for apoplexy, and the rest of the men to be wasting away. One feels that anything thrown at them would be either embedded or shattered, and looks vainly among them for one person furnished with a normal amount of flesh.