Gallants and ladies came there to flirt and to
gossip, to gamble and to pay homage.
About a great table in her splendid salon, a company of rustling,
iridescent fops in satin and heavy periwigs, and of ladies with
curled head-dresses and bare shoulders, played at basset one
night in January. Conversation rippled, breaking here and there
into laughter, white, jewelled hands reached out for cards, or
for a share of the heaps of gold that swept this way and that
with the varying fortunes of the game.
My Lady Castlemaine, seated between Etheredge and Rochester,
played in silence, with lips tight-set and brooding eyes. She had
lost, it is true, some L1500 that night; yet, a prodigal
gamester, and one who came easily by money, she had been known to
lose ten times that sum and yet preserve her smile. The source of
her ill-humour was not the game. She played recklessly, her
attention wandering; those handsome, brooding eyes of hers were
intent upon watching what went on at the other end of the long
room. There, at a smaller table, sat Miss Stewart, half a dozen
gallants hovering near her, engaged upon a game of cards of a
vastly different sort. Miss Stewart did not gamble. The only
purpose she could find for cards was to build castles; and
here she was building one with the assistance of her gallants,
and under the superintendence of his Grace of Buckingham, who
was as skilled in this as in other equally unstable forms of
architecture.
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