But no! It was
for season-ticket holders. She must go to the left. The middle door was
for those coming out. A fat man, hurrying brusquely in before her, let
the swing-door slam in her face. "Le joueur n'a ni politesse, ni sexe,"
was a proverb of the "Rooms" which Mary Grant had never heard, but would
come to understand.
She was on the threshold of an enormous room, magnificently
proportioned, hung with lustrous chandeliers, and divided by an archway
into two sections. The farther part was much larger than that which she
had entered, and more sumptuous in decoration; but the whole was flooded
with a peculiar radiance which turned everything to gold. It was far
mellower than the light of the atrium, or the splendid rooms of the
hotel. It had actual colour like honey, or the pinky-golden skin of
apricots. It was bright, yet the impression it made on the mind was of
softness rather than brilliance; and the shining atmosphere of the room,
instead of being clear, seemed charged with infinitesimal particles of
floating gold, like motes in rays of sunshine. The tables, under darkly
shaded, low-hanging lamps, gave the effect of sending a yellow smoke,
like incense, up to the height of the great dazzling chandeliers. It was
almost as if the hands of players in fingering gold pieces day after
day, year after year for generations, had rubbed off minute flakes which
hung like a golden haze in the air.
It appeared to Mary's eyes, taking in the whole and not dwelling upon
details, that everything in the farther part of the vast domed room was
of gold: different shades of gold; dark, old gold, the richer for being
tarnished: bright, glittering, guinea gold: greenish gold, and gold of
copper red.
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