No other colour could have been as appropriate here.
The air was not offensively dead, but it was langorously asleep. Many
different perfumes haunted and weighed it down; but there was some
underlying, distinctive odour which excited the nerves mysteriously, and
sent the blood racing through the veins.
"It is the smell of money," Mary said to herself.
Just inside the entrance doors, on either side, was a large table round
which people sat or stood. Those standing behind the chairs of the
seated ones were at least two rows deep, crowded tightly together.
Beyond were many other tables, thronged even more densely; and ringed
thus with closely packed figures, they were like islands on a shining
golden sea, an archipelago of little islands, all of exactly the same
size, and placed at equal distances.
Mary, hardly knowing what to expect from Peter's rather vague and
disjointed descriptions, had dimly fancied clamour and confusion
bursting upon eyes and ears on the instant of entering the
gambling-rooms. But the silence of the place was as haunting and
mystery-suggesting as the indefinable odour, and more thrilling to the
imagination than the loudest noise.
She who had been Sister Rose was horrified to find herself thinking of a
cathedral lighted for a midnight mass. Almost, she expected organ music
to peal out.
Slowly she moved down the room, past the first tables, and, as she
walked, the muffled, characteristic sounds she began to hear seemed but
to punctuate and emphasize the silence, like echoes in a cave: a faint
rattle of rakes, like the rustle of leaves, and a delicate chink-chink
of gold, like the chirping of young birds just awakened by dawn.
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