Simpson is popularly supposed to belong to a Fleet Street Toilet and Hairdressing Club, where for three guineas a year he gets shaved every day, and his hair cut whenever Myra insists. On the many occasions when he authorises a startling story of some well-known statesman with the words: "My dear old chap, I know it for a fact. I heard it at the club to-day from a friend of his," then we know that once again the barber's assistant has been gossiping over the lather.
"Do think, Samuel," I interrupted, "how much more splendid if you could be the only man who had seen Monte Carlo without going inside the rooms. And then when the hairdress--when your friends at the club ask if you've had any luck at the tables you just say coldly, 'What tables?'"
"Preferably in Latin," said Archie. "_Quae mensæ?_"
But it was obviously no good arguing with him. Besides, we were all keen enough to go.
"We needn't lose," said Myra. "We might win."
"Good idea," said Thomas. He lit his pipe and added, "Simpson was telling me about his system last night. At least, he was just beginning when I went to sleep." He applied another match to his pipe and went on, as if the idea had suddenly struck him, "Perhaps it was only his internal system he meant. I didn't wait."
"Samuel, you _are_ quite well inside, aren't you?"
"Quite, Myra. But I _have_ invented a sort of system for _roulette_, which we might----"
"There's only one system which is any good," pronounced Archie. "It's the system by which, when you've lost all your own money, you turn to the man next to you and say, 'Lend me a louis, dear old chap, till Christmas; I've forgotten my purse.'"
"No systems," said Dahlia. "Let's make a collection and put it all on one number and hope it will win."
Dahlia had obviously been reading novels about people who break the bank.
"It's as good a way of losing as any other," said Archie. "Let's do it for our first gamble, anyway. Simpson, as our host, shall put the money on. I, as his oldest friend, shall watch him to see that he does it. What's the number to be?"
"Samuel, what's your age?" asked Myra at last.
"You're not really more than thirty-six?" Myra whispered to him. "Tell me as a secret."
"Do you think you could nearly put our money on 'two'?" asked Archie.