"Roulette" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the evening when Glenister entered the Northern and passed idly down the row of games, pausing at the crap-table, where he rolled the dice when his turn came. Moving to the roulette-wheel, he lost a stack of whites, but at the faro "lay- out" his luck was better, and he won a gold coin on the "high- card." Whereupon he promptly ordered a round of drinks for the men grouped about him, a formality always precedent to overtures ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... Chrystobel Lanman, to a theater and supper party. The programme was to hear a reigning farce at Hooley's, then to sup at the Richelieu, and finally to visit a certain exclusive gambling-parlor which then flourished on the South Side—the resort of actors, society gamblers, and the like—where roulette, trente-et-quarante, baccarat, and the honest game of poker, to say nothing of various other games of chance, could be played amid exceedingly ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... remembrance of things pass'd away. 'Twas a sight that was pleasant, indeed, to be seen, These friends exchange greetings;—the men who had been Foes so nearly in days that were past. This, no doubt, Is why, on the night I am speaking about, My Lord Alfred sat down by himself at roulette, Without one suspicion his bosom to fret, Although he had left, with his pleasant French friend, Matilda, half vex'd, at the room's ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... "cure." Rode horseback, motored, played roulette at the casino for big stakes, and scorned the American plan of service for the smarter European idea, with a special a la carte menu for each meal. Extraordinary-looking mixed drinks, strictly against the mandates of the "cure," appeared at their table. Strange midnight goings-on ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... men were playing roulette. I looked in as I went back, and Judson had a gun in his hand. He said; 'I found it, Jack.' I saw he was very drunk, and I told him to put it up, I'd got mine. It had occurred to me that I'd better warn ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... birthright for a mess of pottage. They had conceded the right of gambling to the Casino, the proprietors purchasing the right by certain outlays in the way of improvements, a new public garden, and so on. As yet roulette and rouge-et-noir are not permitted at Nice, the gambling at present carried on being apparently harmless. It is in reality even more insidious, being a stepping-stone to vice, a gradual initiation into desperate play. Just as addiction to absinthe is imbibed ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... a crowd was beginning to come together, and booths were being put up for the sale of apples and porter and cakes. A train had come in a little before at a station a mile or so away, and a number of the usual trick characters, with their stock-in-trade, were hurrying down to the sea. The roulette man passed us first, unfolding his table and calling out at the ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... was only to trust. Johann gambled, and wine always brought back the mad fever for play. The night before he had lost rather heavily, and he wanted to recover his losses. Rouge-et-noir had pinched him; he would be revenged on the roulette. All day long combinations and numbers danced before his eyes. He had devised several plans by which to raise money, but these had fallen through. Suddenly he smiled, and ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... departed; I concluded that he only strikingly resembled some one I knew. But who in the world was it he resembled? The ladies went off to their lodgings, which were near by, and I turned into the gaming-rooms and hovered about the circle at roulette. Gradually I filtered through to the inner edge, near the table, and, looking round, saw my puzzling friend stationed opposite to me. He was watching the game, with his hands in his pockets; but singularly ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... he, when his fortune, already much impaired, hung on chances as uncertain as those in a game of roulette? What nonsense! The failure of a great financial company had brought about a crisis on the Bourse. The news of the inability of Wermant, the 'agent de change', to meet his engagements, had completed the downfall of M. de Nailles. Not ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... gambler in the ordinary sense. He never plays cards. Little pictures on paste-board fidget him, he says; he loathes Monte Carlo because it's vulgar, and he dislikes roulette and bridge. He's only a gambler in the best sense of the word—and that's a very ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... in the corner by the roulette table, and here, his chair tipped back against the wall and a glass of whisky in front of him, sat a sufficiently strange specimen of humanity. He was a man of about fifty years, large boned and gaunt. Dressed in fringed buckskin ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... mention them. For the few persons, at any rate, abnormal or not, with whom my anecdote is concerned, literature was a game of skill, and skill meant courage, and courage meant honour, and honour meant passion, meant life. The stake on the table was of a different substance, and our roulette was the revolving mind, but we sat round the green board as intently as the grim gamblers at Monte Carlo. Gwendolen Erme, for that matter, with her white face and her fixed eyes, was of the very type ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... one of these gambling resorts. A long, low room, probably a saloon, with the pretentious bar in front; tables on either side of the room, and an eager group round each one, the game being roulette, faro, highball, poker, crapps or monte. The dealers, or professional gamblers, are easily distinguished. Their dress consists invariably of a well-laundered "biled" (white) shirt, huge diamond stud in front, no collar or tie, perhaps a silk handkerchief tied loosely ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... glittered crystal glasses of all shapes and sizes, arranged in pyramids and cubes. The whole of the main floor was carpeted heavily. Down the centre were stationed two rows of gambling tables, where various games could be played—faro, keeno, roulette, stud poker, dice. Beyond these gambling tables, on the other side of the room from the bar, were small tables, easy chairs of ample proportions, lounges, and a fireplace. Everything was most ornate. The ceilings and walls were ivory white and much gilt. Heavy chandeliers, with the ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... great, trumpery ornaments, and reminded Flemming of the Indians in the frontier villages of America. Near the churchyard-gate was a booth, filled with flaunting calicos; and opposite sat an old woman behind a table, which was loaded with ginger-bread. She had a roulette at her elbow, where the peasants risked a kreutzer for a cake. On other tables, cases of knives, scythes, reaping-hooks, and other implements of ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... still fascinated them. These became the hawks of the gambling table; their quick and wild-glancing eyes were constantly looking out for suitable game during the day, and leaving it where it might be bagged at night. Both at the rouge et noir table and roulette the same sort of company might be met with. These gambling-houses were the very fountains of immorality: they gathered together, under the most seductive circumstances, the swindler and the swindled. There ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... and you were always clever.' "So Saint-Cyr had his way, and went to work accordingly, without loss of time, a little shyly at first, not daring to venture on any considerable stake. So he remained for a week at the roulette tables; because at the rouge et noir one can only play with gold. The week came to an end and found him neither richer nor poorer. Then he grew bolder and ventured into the deeper water. He played on rouge et noir, with luck the ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... They breakfasted at the Tete-Noir, where Castaing had not yet been; they treated themselves to a game of ring-throwing under the quincunx of trees of the grand fountain; they ascended Diogenes' lantern, they gambled for macaroons at the roulette establishment of the Pont de Sevres, picked bouquets at Pateaux, bought reed-pipes at Neuilly, ate apple tarts everywhere, and ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... scoffed Wunpost. "You're the crookedest dog that ever drew up a contract—and then talk to me about principle! Why don't you say what you mean and call it your system—like they use trying to break the roulette wheel? But I'm telling you your system is played out. I'll never locate another claim as long as I live, unless I'm released from that contract; so where do you figure on any more Willie Meenas? All you'll get will ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... made this discovery I felt an intense compassion for all persons of the Teutonic race to whom sea-bathing once a year happens to be indispensable. However, if dull, it must at least be economical, I thought; but this illusion was dispelled when I found that there was a roulette-table in the dingy little Conversations-Haus, and when my landlord handed me in a bill which would not have disgraced any hotel in Bond Street ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... did not stint himself, drew him into spending more than he intended, and he owed Suvorin a sum which was further increased at Monte Carlo by Chekhov's losing nine hundred roubles at roulette. But this loss was a blessing to him in so far as, for some reason, it made him feel satisfied with himself. At the end of April, 1891, after a stay in Paris, Chekhov returned to Moscow. Except at Vienna and for ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... problem to be ironed out was how to speed up transportation; and failing that, to construct spacious space ships which would attract pleasure-bent trade from Terra—Earth to you—with such innovations as roulette wheels, steam rooms, cocktail lounges, double rooms with hot and cold babes, and other ...
— Mars Confidential • Jack Lait
... Forty-second Street, with gold lettering on the door, a staff of stenographers, and a private branch exchange, and the New York police didn't pay no more attention to them than if they would of been running a poolroom with a roulette-wheel in the rear office. The consequence was that when them Bolshevists finally got pulled, Abe, they beefed so terrible about how they were being prosecuted in violation of the Constitution and ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass
... little impromptu ball followed, the ladies dancing with their cigarettes in their mouths. Keeping my eyes and ears on the alert, I saw an innocent-looking table, with a surface of rosewood, suddenly develop a substance of green cloth. At the same time, a neat little roulette-table made its appearance from a hiding-place in a sofa. Passing near the venerable landlady, I heard her ask the servant, in a whisper, "if the dogs were loose?" After what I had observed, I could only conclude ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... lighted anteroom and this, in turn, through a large arch, opened on a large room brilliantly lighted by chandeliers—one in the centre and one near each corner. Around three sides of this room were placed the keno layouts, roulette-wheels, faro-tables, and minor gambling devices. Off the casino itself small ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... appointed official safecrackers representing the Municipal Ownership of Petty and Grand Larceny. The only gambling houses left were under the direct supervision of the Mayor acting ex-officio and the Chairman of the Aldermanic Committee on Faro and Roulette. The Game of Bunco became a duly authorised official diversion under control of the Tax Assessors, and the Town Toper, being elected by popular vote, could get as leery as he pleased by public consent. Life Insurance Agents became ...
— Alice in Blunderland - An Iridescent Dream • John Kendrick Bangs
... again, miss," begged Tommy Ryan, the roulette-dealer. Mr. Ryan was a pale-faced person whose addiction to harmful drugs was notorious; his extreme pallor and his nervous lack of repose had gained for him the title of "Snowbird." Tommy's hollow eyes were glowing, his colorless lips were parted in an engaging smile. "Please run 'em once more. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... when the two men landed, but the town was awake. The recent railway and mining activity in the neighborhood had brought a considerable influx of people to King Phillip Sound, and the strains of music from dance-hall doors, the click of checks and roulette balls from the saloons, gave evidence ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... of the invited tribes which, it was noticed, had not arrived. This was the Beqai, or Jicarilla. The Navajo asked the Ute where the missing ones were, and the Ute answered that they had passed the Jicarilla on the way; that the latter were coming, but had stopped to play a game of roulette, or ná[n]joj, and were thus delayed. Shortly before dawn the Jicarilla came and entered the corral to exhibit their alìli or show. It was a dance of the ná[n]joj, for the wands and implements of the dance were the sticks and wheels used in playing ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... all back,' she said optimistically; 'but not here. These silly little horses are no good. I shall go somewhere where one can play comfortably at roulette. You needn't look so shocked. I've always felt that, given the opportunity, I should be an inveterate gambler, and now you darlings have put the opportunity in my way. I must drink your very good healths. Waiter, a bottle of PONTET CANET. Ah, it's number seven on the wine list; ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... one goes forth boldly to slay the bounding roebuck and brings back but the lowly jackrabbit, he must once in a blue moon be assured of the jackrabbit. And he must get the jackrabbit, not merely through the personal interposition of the little gods who preside at roulette tables, but because his bow arm held true and his release sweet and the shaft ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... largest hall in the place, a heavy gambling game was going on. There was roulette, faro, and monte, ...
— Wild Bill's Last Trail • Ned Buntline
... Through an avenue of scraggy poplars we approach a dilapidated chateau, whose owner is playing dominoes at the cafe of the nearest provincial town, or exhausting the sparse revenues of the estate at the theatres, roulette-tables, or balls of Paris. People leave these for a rural vicinage only to economize, to hide chagrin, or to die. So recognized is this indifference to Nature and inaptitude for rural life in France, that, when we desire to express the opposite ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... gamblers, who told me that this game was particularly pleasing because you did not see from whom you were winning, as is the case in other games; a lackey brought, not money, but chips; each man lost a little stake, and his disappointment was not visible . . . It is the same with roulette, which is everywhere ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... and beautiful hallway of the Empire Building, those stupendous heights of stone and glass which confront him in solid squares are evidently not the creations of the baccarat table and the roulette wheel. The most dignified temples of chance are designed to shelter pleasure and frivolity. These huge homes of the corporation and the bank, with entrances as sternly embellished as palaces of justice, are oppressively ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... at Gillespie's was at the front of the house. In the rear were the faro and poker tables, the roulette wheels, and the other conveniences for separating hurried patrons from their money. The Bear Cat House did its gambling strictly on the level, but there was the usual percentage in favor ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... proceeded. The roulette board was set going again in one corner of the hut and a crowd hung about it, while the two operators of it, "Diamond" Jack and his partner, strangers to the place, raked in their harvest. The air was thick with the reek of cheap cigars, sold at tremendous ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Graustarkian's heroic face was a study. He had just concluded a confidential hour in a remote corner of the library with the millionaire while the younger people were engaged in a noisy though temperate encounter with the roulette wheel at the opposite end of the room. "I've never met any one like him, Mr. King." He mopped his brow, and still looked ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... like a chance to earn some money easily, he very readily answered yes, and the man was overjoyed to find so willing a victim. Then, of course, Archie was introduced to the mysteries of the famous roulette wheel, of which he had read so much. Archie was interested in everything, and didn't mind losing four dollars in learning so much that was new. He succeeded in getting away when he had lost this sum, though the man assured him that he couldn't help winning back all he had lost, ...
— The Adventures of a Boy Reporter • Harry Steele Morrison
... as I could remember, Berry had had a weakness for Roulette. For Baccarat, Petits Chevaux, and the rest he cared nothing: fifty pounds a year would have covered his racing bets: if he played Bridge, it was by request. My brother-in-law was no gambler. There was something, however, about the shining wheel, sunk ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... small a sauce-pan as will hold it. Into the fat remaining in the pan put two finely-chopped onions, and cook until a pale yellow; then add two table-spoonfuls of flour, and stir three minutes longer. Pour upon this one pint and a half of boiling water. Boil up once, and pour over the roulette; then add two cloves, one-fourth of a teaspoonful of pepper and one heaping teaspoonful of salt. Cover the sauce-pan, and set where it will simmer slowly for three hours. After the first hour and a half, turn the roulette over. Serve hot; with the gravy strained over it. It is also nice to serve ...
— Miss Parloa's New Cook Book • Maria Parloa
... looks very anxious here when they play; it is not at all a joke as the roulette used to be at Nazeby; and they do put a lot on, although counters don't seem to be much to look at. It is not at all a difficult game, Mamma, and some of the people were so lucky turning up "naturels," but we lost in spite of them ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... doubtless little used to Parisian life, just now told me with what horror the things she sees here inspire her:—these vile posters, these "yellow" journals, these women with bleached hair, this crowd rushing to the races, to dance-halls, to roulette tables, to corruption—the whole flood of superficial and mundane life. She did not speak the word Babylon, but doubtless it was out of pity for one of the inhabitants ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... intoxication as an excuse for his riding down a child on his way to the hunt. Later, during the winter just past, we had been hearing from Monte Carlo of his disastrous plunges at that most imbecile of all games, roulette. ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... frugal old woman who month by month and season by season carried on her quiet trade at the foot of the Casino steps, catching, as it were, the tiny drippings from the flaring tapers in that Temple of Gold. And day after day, one turn of the roulette wheel took and gave more money than all her years of frugal trade ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... box. 'Gintlemen,' says he, 'th' game is closed. Business conditions are such,' he says, 'that I will not be able to cash in ye'er checks,' he says. 'Please go out softly, so's not to disturb th' gintlemen at th' roulette wheel,' he says, 'an' come back afther th' iliction, whin confidence is restored an' prosperity returns to th' channels iv thrade an' industhry,' he says. 'Th' exchange 'll be opened promptly; an' th' usual rule iv chips ...
— Mr. Dooley: In the Hearts of His Countrymen • Finley Peter Dunne
... one of them. The biggest boy holds the blades between the fingers and thumb of his closed hand, and whoever draws the blade with the knot has to act as herdsman" (543. 221). Nowadays, children are employed to turn roulette-wheels, sort cards, pick out lottery-tickets, select lucky numbers, set machinery going for the first time, and perform other like actions; for, though men are all "children of fortune," there is something about ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... fitted past the train winds. (Scenery! There had been two charges for scenery! "Friedmann, Samuel . . . Scenery . . . $3711" and "Unitt and Wickes . . . Scenery . . . $2120"). He was suffering the torments of the ruined gamester at the roulette-table. Thirty-two thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine dollars, sixty-eight cents! And he was out of pocket ten thousand in addition from the check he had handed over two days ago to Uncle Chris as his share of the investment of starting Jill in the motion-pictures. ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... cared for domestic things. I'd rather wear a dinner-gown than an apron; I'd a damn sight rather spin a roulette wheel than rock a cradle. And, perhaps, Peyton wanted a housewife; though heaven knows he hasn't turned to one. It's her blonde, no bland, charm and destructive air of innocence. I've admitted and understood too much; but I couldn't help it—my ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... for a moment, then turned his eyes up, to the sky. Somewhere up there a tiny satellite spun wildly about the earth, a little silver ball in some celestial roulette wheel. Gradually it would spiral closer and closer, caught by the planet's implacable grasp, until it flared brightly like a cigarette in the heavens before dissolving into drops of ...
— Sound of Terror • Don Berry
... fact, the operators on that night were almost exclusively Italians. The sailor, take him in the bulk, is a tolerable fool all the world over; but the northerner has some grains of sense though he is a sportsman, and roulette with twenty-six numbers and a zero is a trifle too strong ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... last resources. All the romance with which he had invested the idea of his suicide now vanished, leaving bare the stern and ignoble reality. He must kill himself, not like the gay gamester who voluntarily leaves upon the roulette table the remains of his fortune, but like the Greek, who surprised and hunted, knows that every door will be shut upon him. His death would not be voluntary; he could neither hesitate nor choose the fatal hour; ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... to the conclusion that an experienced gambler was in their midst—one who had spared the soldier and his scanty pay that he might feed fat, eventually, on the officer. Rumor had it that Case's trunk contained a roulette wheel and faro "layout." In fine, long before orderly call at noon, in the whimsical humor of the garrison, he was no longer Case, the bookkeeper, but "Book, the Case Keeper," and every frontiersman, civil or military, in those days ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... through the lane which composes the town, and is occupied by a succession of bar-rooms, dancing-shops, and faro-banks or roulette-tables: they were each in full operation, although it was not ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... did excellent business, especially the gambling tables where roulette was in full swing. At the end of the day all the roulette boards and other gambling impedimenta were confiscated. This was the arrangement. But between sunrise and sunset we did not suffer the slightest interference with our enjoyment and merriment. This unexpected spell of free action ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... witness, there is not a sign. The games strike the bystander as singularly dull and uninteresting; one wearies of the perpetual deal and turn-up of the cards at rouge-et-noir, of the rattle of the ball as it dances into its pigeonhole at roulette, of the monotonous chant of "Make your game, gentlemen," or "The game is made." The croupiers rake in their gains or poke out the winnings with the passive regularity of machines; the gamblers sit round the table with the vacant solemnity of undertakers. ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... many recesses and deep windows, an apartment which took up the whole of one side of the large house, had all the dignity and even splendour of a drawing-room, and yet, with its little palm court, its cosy divans, its bridge tables and roulette board, encouraged an air of freedom which made ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... plenty of associates as idle and thoughtless, and as good-natured, as himself, to make a jest of domestic life and domestic virtues. And, by-and-by, there is a stronger stimulus wanted, and the jest becomes more wanton over the roulette table or the keenly contested rubber; and the wine circulates more freely as the fire of youth goes out and leaves the ashes of mental and moral desolation. Ah no! the club-house is no conservator of the purity of social life, and this Catherine Grant soon felt, as night after night her husband ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... and fro with fruits and goblets of champagne. The company was perhaps sixteen in number, all men, few beyond the prime of life, and, with hardly an exception, of a dashing and capable exterior. They were divided into two groups, one about a roulette-board, and the other surrounding a table at which one of their number held a bank ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reply, as he wiped his ear. The fire that burned in his stomach demanded whiskey, and he would brook any insult to get it. He had reached the level of the sodden, and others passed him by. It was yet early in the night, and crowds were gathering in the rear of the large room, about the roulette wheel, the crap tables and faro layout, back of which the lookout was seated on a raised platform. Stacks of coin in gold and silver were on the tables to tempt the players. At other tables men were ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... polished manner of the salon was dropped. A wife spoke, a woman listened. The visit was already a long one when Jean Palliot took charge of the equipage, and, on leaving, it was into his hand the gentleman thrust a roulette of Napoleons. ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... "wild and woolly" Western town have disappeared. The people of Reno are very docile indeed .... there are no cowboy yells nor Indian whoops, which some of our Eastern and Southern friends imagine still to exist. And the click of the roulette-wheel has passed with the years that have departed. Reno has developed into a cosmopolitan city with a cosmopolitan population. The cafes have cabarets with excellent talent, and there is dancing every evening in several of the hotels, where ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... smart at Monte. That's what I've been promised, and Lady Dauntrey'll entertain a good deal. If that doesn't amuse her husband he can shoot pigeons, and gamble at the Casino. He's got a system at roulette that works splendidly on his little wheel. We were playing it this evening. But I expect I'm boring you. You look sleepy. I'll turn in, ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... not notice all this at first. What I did notice, however, was a faro-layout and a hazard-board, but as no one was playing at either, my eye quickly travelled to a roulette-table which stretched along the middle of the room. Some ten or a dozen men in evening clothes were gathered watching with intent faces the spinning wheel. There was no money on the table, nothing but piles of chips of ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... as Joe thought he had sufficiently impressed young Melville, he drifted him to a roulette table, left ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... evening. Octavia and I wanted to see everything, gambling saloons, dance halls, fights, whatever was going, and as Lola has done it all before, she said she would stay with the girls, and have a little mild flutter in the saloon of the hotel at roulette while our stalwart cavaliers escorted us "around." Gaston, too, remained behind with them; the Senator manoeuvred this, because he said, it was not wise to be with people who were quarrelsome, and Gaston is that now and then with ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... the elite of Tucson in the dance-hall the evenin' I has in mind. The bar is busy; while up an' down each side sech refreshin' pastimes as farobank, monte an' roulette holds prosperous sway. Thar's no quadrille goin' at the moment, an' a lady to the r'ar is carollin' "Rosalie, the ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... in any sense an attractive type. The Wall Street men are lilies that toil and spin ("tiger" lilies, one might term them, in remembrance of the old gambler-slang about faro and roulette); but their industries, however distinct, are what the political economists would call those of non-productive consumers. They are active drones, to speak with paradox, in the great hive of human energy. Like all gamesters, all men who live by the turning of the dice-box, they ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... range riders baked almost as brown by the relentless sun. Pima Indians and Chinamen and negroes crowded round the faro and dice tables. Games of monte and chuckaluck had their devotees, as had also roulette and poker. ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... doorway gave glimpse of another large room where the crowd was even denser. From this room, in the lulls in the music, came the pop of corks and the clink of glasses, and as an undertone the steady click and clatter of chips and roulette balls. ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... enamel, tan leather coating, fur robes, air cushions, gold-topped flasks, and petrol. Giddy knew Como and Villa D'Este as the place where that pretty Hungarian widow had borrowed a thousand lires from him at the Casino roulette table and never paid him back; London as a pleasing potpourri of briar pipes, smart leather gloves, music-hall revues, and night clubs; Berlin as a rather stuffy hole where they tried to ape Paris and failed, but you had to hand it to Charlotte when it came to the skating at the Eis Palast. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... him. That spacious square soon became as thronged as the Rue de Quincampoix : from morning to night it presented the appearance of a fair. Booths and tents were erected for the transaction of business and the sale of refreshments, and gamblers with their roulette tables stationed themselves in the very middle of the place, and reaped a golden, or rather a paper, harvest from the throng. The Boulevards and public gardens were forsaken; parties of pleasure took their walks in preference in the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... machinery with which the fire game is played in New York. In great glass cases were glistening brass and nickel machines with discs and levers and bells, tickers, sheets of paper, and annunciators without number. This was the fire-alarm telegraph, the "roulette-wheel of the fire demon," as some ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... straight, and no part of the front was open to enfilade. Stuart and his artillery, withdrawn to a more favourable position, secured the left. D.H. Hill on the right, though part of his force had given way, still held the Roulette House and the sunken road, and the troops in the West Wood were well protected from the Northern batteries. The one weak point was the gap occupied by Greene's Federals, which lay between Grigsby's regiments in the northern angle of ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... was Peter a god. While he was at all times chivalrous, yet he was not painstakingly thoughtful in the small matters which are supposed to advance the cause of love at a high pace. Nor was he guided by a set of fixed rules such as men are wont to employ at roulette and upon women. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... coriolus force. [things that go around] carousel, merry-go-round; Ferris wheel; top, dreidel^, teetotum; gyroscope; turntable, lazy suzan; screw, whirligig, rollingstone^, water wheel, windmill; wheel, pulley wheel, roulette wheel, potter's wheel, pinwheel, gear; roller; flywheel; jack; caster; centrifuge, ultracentrifuge, bench centrifuge, refrigerated centrifuge, gas centrifuge, microfuge; drill, augur, oil rig; wagon ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... there are no weeds in the gardens. The profits of the gambling-tables provide the most efficient municipality in the world, and no one who lives in Monaco is charged any taxes; the revenue derived from roulette covers all that and more besides. At the same time, no actual resident is allowed to stake his ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... daily life are sufficient stimuli for the beneficial excitement of their nerve centers. It has remained for civilized man, protected in a measure from the natural dangers of existence, to invent artificial stimulants in the form of cards and dice and roulette wheels. Yet when necessity bids there are no greater gamblers than the savage denizens of the jungle, the forest, and the hills, for as lightly as you roll the ivory cubes upon the green cloth they will gamble with ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... me down to see the town. I didn't know much about a city then; I had grown up over in the sage-brush country, and I never had heard of a highball. To start with I had two, then I got interested in a game of roulette, and the last I remember I was learning to play poker. But I must have had more high-balls; the boys said afterwards they left me early in the evening with a new acquaintance; they couldn't get me to go home. I never knew how I got back to the dorm, and the next day, when ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... now, of course, as the races for the day were run. But I could imagine it doing a fine business in the afternoon. There were many other games now in progress, games of every description, from poker to faro, keno, klondike, and roulette. There was nothing of either high or low degree with which the ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... Not being a fright! The fourth. How rich she was! But was there not something else? Oh, yes! Sadly she smiled. A clear conscience! She had forgotten that and that came first. Youth, health, lungs, looks, these were gamblers' tokens in the great roulette of life. In the hazards of chance at any moment she might lose one or all, as eventually she must lose them and remain no poorer than before. But her first asset which she had counted last, that was her fortune, the estate she held by virtue of a trust so guardedly ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... abandon, from a New Year's Eve celebration in New York. Not even Paris can offer a gayer night life than the Rumanian capital, for at the Jockey Club it is no uncommon thing for 10,000 francs to change hands on the turn of a card or a whirl of the roulette wheel; out the Chaussee Kisselew, at the White City, the dance floor is crowded until daybreak with slender, rather effeminate-looking officers in beautiful uniforms of green or pale blue and superbly gowned and bejewelled women. Indeed, I doubt if ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... risk twenty thousand francs to buy a secret that may make rich men of you?' Why, the risk usually is in proportion to the profit, gentlemen. You stake twenty thousand francs on your luck. A gambler puts down a louis at roulette for a chance of winning thirty-six, but he knows that the louis is ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... another form of separation called rouletting, from the French "roulette", a little wheel, its simplest form being produced by a small wheel with an edge of sharp points. By this process a series of small cuts is made between the stamps but none of the paper ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... gambling, in the sense treated of in this book, has ceased in England. If there be here and there a Roulette or Rouge et Noir table in operation, its existence is now known only to a few 'sworn-brethren;' if gambling at cards 'prevails' in certain quarters, it is 'kept quiet.' The vice is not barefaced. It slinks and skulks away into ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... stared blankly at Racey. "Oh, them! Hell, they didn't have nothin' to do with it, them cattle didn't. I'd worked out a system, Racey—a system to beat roulette, and I was shore it was all right. By Gawd, it was all right! They was nothin' wrong with that system. But I had bad luck. I had most awful ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... lay it on the wheel—an' say: I got a hunch! I played every number on that wheel except the thirteen—judgin' it to be onlucky." The forlorn one grinned his understanding, and clutching the piece of silver, elbowed into the group that crowded the roulette wheel. The cowpuncher turned once more to ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... laughter—sometimes curses and the sounds of revolver shots, of battles fought close and quick and to a finish—wheezy music, click of ivory chips, the clink of glasses, from old Bonanza's and similar rendezvous of hilarity lured to the dance, faro, roulette, the poker table or the ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... in his veins, and just so much of the gambler's spirit as cannot be divided from a certain recklessness in a man with a temperament. He had seen plenty of life in his own country, in the nine years since he was twenty, and he knew all about roulette and trente et quarante, among other ...
— Rosemary - A Christmas story • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... That the roulette wheel at Monte Carlo is controlled by a wire as thin as a hair which is controlled in turn by a button hidden beneath the rug near the ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... to confess, but I have a friend, a brilliant player I call him, and he permits me to contribute his experiences, as mine are short and simple. To my mind, Whist would not be a bad game, if the element of skill were excluded; but give me Roulette. If foreign ladies would not snatch up my winnings, I should be a master at Roulette, where genius is really served, for I play on inspiration merely. But let me turn to the confessions of my friend, my Mentor, I may call him, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 12, 1892 • Various
... the sun and Tolleson's was practically deserted. No devotees sat round the faro, roulette, and keno tables. The dealers were asleep in bed after their labors. So too were the dance girls. The poker rooms upstairs held only the stale odor of tobacco and whiskey. Except for a sleepy negro roustabout attendant and two young fellows at a table well back ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... was broken one night by Mink himself, who shot and all but killed the livery-stable keeper in a dispute over roulette. Knowing that his deed would bring the new marshal down upon him at once, the gambler immediately declared ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... Philippe maintained his coolness. He won at first, and gained as much as six thousand francs; but he let himself be dazzled by the idea of getting out of his difficulties at one stroke. He left the trente-et-quarante, hearing that the black had come up sixteen times at the roulette table, and was about to put five thousand francs on the red, when the black came up for the seventeenth time. The colonel then put a thousand francs on the black and won. In spite of this remarkable piece of luck, his head ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... ROULETTE, a game of chance, very popular in France last century, now at Monaco; played with a revolving disc ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... a hundred or two ahead in checks, put him down as no good. The man who is habitually broke on the road is generally the man who thinks he has the "gentle finger," and that he can play in better luck than the fellow who rolls the little ivory ball around a roulette wheel. There are not many of this kind, though; they don't last long. It's mostly the new man or the son of the boss who thinks he can pay room ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson
... the man who had looked in upon a scene inordinately, fantastically brilliant, underwent, after those first few moments of comparative indifference, a curious transformation. He was contemplating one of the sights of the world. Crowded around the two roulette tables, promenading or lounging on the heavily cushioned divans against the wall, he took note of a conglomeration of people representing, perhaps, every grade of society, every nationality of importance, yet with a curious common likeness by reason of ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... have happened if it had not been for cards and roulette and the perpetual desire of increasing their capital— for the worthy couple fell into the hands of a talented company, whose agents robbed them at Frascati's in Paris, and again in Hamburg and various health resorts, so that hardly a year had passed ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... the steer, and a couple of others that had been killed, and then knocked off for the day. Jurgis went downtown to supper, with three friends who had been on the other trucks, and they exchanged reminiscences on the way. Afterward they drifted into a roulette parlor, and Jurgis, who was never lucky at gambling, dropped about fifteen dollars. To console himself he had to drink a good deal, and he went back to Packingtown about two o'clock in the morning, very much the worse for his ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... considers—and justly I think—that he is a far more important personage than the Plenipotentiary of his Highness of Monaco; a despot who exercises sway over about 20 acres of orange trees, 60 houses, and two roulette tables. The diplomatists are not, however, alone in their protest. Everybody has protested, and is still protesting. If it is a necessity of war to throw shells into a densely populated town like this; ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... ball to rolling for that," he instructed the roulette man, tossing down a bill. "Dropped again!" he lamented humorously. "Can't ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... biting gibes, the soft invitations of some of the masks. Though he was so handsome as to rank among those exceptional persons who come to an opera ball in search of an adventure, and who expect it as confidently as men looked for a lucky coup at roulette in Frascati's day, he seemed quite philosophically sure of his evening; he must be the hero of one of those mysteries with three actors which constitute an opera ball, and are known only to those who play a part in them; for, to young wives who come merely to say, "I have ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... not deductions from the formula, but are comic through their relationship with those that are. To quote Pascal again, I see no objection, at this stage, to defining the process by the curve which that geometrician studied under the name of roulette or cycloid,—the curve traced by a point in the circumference of a wheel when the carriage is advancing in a straight line: this point turns like the wheel, though it advances like the carriage. Or else we might think of an immense avenue ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... the small man turned and glanced toward Mose. The woman bowed and drove on, and Mose walked slowly up the street, lonely and irresolute. At the door of a gambling house he halted and looked in. A young lad and an old man were seated together at a roulette table, and around them a ring of excited and amused spectators stood. Mose entered and took a place in the circle. The boy wore a look of excitement quite painful to see, and he placed his red and white chips with nervous, blundering, and ineffectual gestures, ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... concourse. There were riots and quarrels all the time. They often had to send a troop of cavalry to clear the street at night. Gamblers posted themselves with their implements among the speculators, who gambled harder than the gamblers, and took an occasional turn at roulette by way of slackening the excitement; as people go to sleep, or go into the country. A hunchback fellow made a good deal of money by letting people write on his back. When Law had moved into the Hotel de Soissons, the former owner, the Prince de Carignan, reserved the gardens, ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... is the downward fluttering of the wearied eagle!" mused Alan Hawke. "Women, roulette, champagne, and high life—all these past riches fade away into the gloomy pleasures of restaurant cognac, dead-shot absinthe, and the vicarious smiles of a broken soubrette or so! And all the more you can be now dangerous to ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... They were roulette players. They noticed nothing but the table and the wheel. Malone wondered what they were thinking about, decided to ask Queen Elizabeth, and then decided against it. He felt it would make him ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... of the men were playing faro, roulette or keno, and the others sat in softly upholstered chairs and talked. Liquors were served from a bar in the corner, where dozens of brightly polished glasses of all shapes and sizes glittered on marble and reflected the light of the gas in ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... wealth descended, he never spent more than he had to spend. Perhaps there was but little praise in this, as he could hardly have got beyond his enormous income unless he had thrown it away on race-courses and roulette tables. But it had long been remarked of the Mount Fidgett marquises that they were too wise to gamble. The family had not been an honour to the country, but had nevertheless been honoured by the country. The man who had just died had perhaps ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... with the turbulent life that drifts to every wild frontier on the boom. Faro dealers from the Klondike, poker dealers from Nome, roulette croupiers from Leadville, were all here to reap the rich harvest to be made from investors, field workers, and operators. Smooth grafters with stock in worthless companies for sale circulated in and out ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... and one saloons and gambling dives that Pan had seen could not in any sense compare with this one. This was on a big scale without restraint of law or order. Piles of gold and greenbacks littered the tables where roulette, faro, poker were in progress. Black garbed, pale hard-faced gamblers sat with long mobile hands on the tables. Bearded men, lean-faced youths bent with intent gaze over their cards. Sloe-eyed Mexicans ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... eatin' tables; the roulette tables," corrected Meakim. "Of course," he continued, grinning, "if you're fond of the game, Mr. Holcombe, it's handy having them in the same house, but I can steer you against a better one back of the French Consulate. Those at ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... brick instead of wood with false fronts. The sidewalks were cement instead of boards. The main street was even paved. A sort of New England respectability and quietness hung over it. There was not a single saloon, and the drone of the little marble in the roulette wheel was gone from the land. Even the horses, hitched by drooping heads to racks, were scarce, and their place was taken by numerous tin automobiles of popular ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... 1620. What is more to the point is that five Acts of George II, the 9th, 12th, 13th, 18th, and 30th, impose penalties upon the keepers of public houses for permitting gambling, and lay heavy penalties upon hazard, roulette, and other gambling games, on the keepers of gambling houses and those who play there. Having received complaints of several young men being rooked in the place, we can, if we prove that some of its frequenters ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... tiger was out with all its claws. Rouge et noir, roulette, faro, keno, and stud-poker were going in full blast. The proprietor, his elegant diamonds flashing in the light, was seated on a raised platform from whence he could survey the entire company—his face, impassive as marble and unreadable ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... unbalanced by a well-cooked lunch at perhaps the best restaurant in any town of Europe. I have lost my little pile. The eight five-franc pieces which I annually devote out of my scanty store to the tutelary god of roulette have been snapped up, one after another, in breathless haste, by the sphinx-like croupiers, impassive priests of that rapacious deity, and now I am sitting, cleaned out, by the edge of the terrace, on a brilliant, cloudless, February afternoon, looking across the zoned and ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... were six tables with layouts for games of chance. Faro, "klondike," roulette, stud-poker, almost anything possibly to be desired was there. All were in full blast. Three deep the men were gathered about the wheel and the "tiger." Gold money in stacks stood at every dealer's hand. Bostwick had never seen so much metal ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... the centre of this apartment was a long table covered with green cloth. The room was crowded with persons busily engaged in gambling. Different games of chance are in vogue in the United States; but the favorite game of European gamblers, roulette, was not tolerated in the establishment we were then visiting. In almost all the States, games of chance, for money, no matter what its amount, are prohibited, and gambling houses, being considered as contrary to good morals, are forbidden. Gambling for money was not, therefore, ostensibly ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... drummed with his fingers on the mahogany arm of the sofa. "My goodness, child—what a long column there was of words rhyming with 'ette.'" He laughed to himself as he mused: "You know, my dear, I had to let 'brevet' and 'fret' and 'roulette' go, because I couldn't think of anything to say about them. You don't know how that worries a poet." He looked at the verses in the book before him and then shook his head sadly: "I was young then—it seems strange to think I could write ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... Dunkelsbaum had risen to his feet and was in the act of hurling himself in the direction of Nobby, and the latter, with his small tail well over his back, was circling delightedly about his victim, still barking like a fiend and ricochetting like a roulette ball. ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... "Honest, I liked Von Blatzer, for all his freaky ways. He was human, he was, and we understood each other. He'll be at Monte Carlo now. Roulette, you know. That's all he lives for. Plays a system. Nice little income he has; not big, but comfortable. And during the season he feeds it all into the wheel. Someone ought ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... going to have a little roulette in my rooms to-night," he said, as we walked across the quad. "Will ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... effort to recoup face for Russian sportsmanship, many of these refugees grimly began playing almost non-stop games of "Russian roulette," which gives the player a five-to-one chance of living. Some extreme chauvinists proudly reduced the odds to three-to-one by inserting two bullets, and a former Red Army major named Tolbunin even used three. His ...
— The Golden Judge • Nathaniel Gordon
... down pretty low," he replied. "The truth is, Mr. Ranger, I blew in all my wages at roulette last week." ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... a coach-horn and the black-and- scarlet drag of the local garrison trundles into view. The unsophisticated gun-horses in the lead shy violently at the flapping canvas of an orange-stall and swerve to the left into a roulette-booth presided over by a vociferous ancient in a tattered overcoat and blue spectacles. The gamblers scatter like flushed partridges and the ancient bites the turf beneath his upturned board amid a shower of silver coins. The leaders, scared by the animated table, and the blood-curdling invocations ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... "that gambling is one of the wants of civilized men. The 'rouge-et-noir' and 'roulette' tables are forbidden; the hells closed: but the passion for making money without working for it must have its vent, and that vent is the Bourse. As instead of a hundred wax-lights you now have one jet of gas, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the room, behind a roulette wheel, a man who looked more like a country parson than a gambler sat reading a thumbed copy of Taine's "English Literature." Three faro layouts stretched themselves in line as if watching for newcomers, and in the rear a man was lighting the coal-oil lamps of the dance hall. ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... He was quick in observing, just in estimating, prompt and fearless in acting. But in finance there is always the element of luck, which, however one may eliminate it, still remains, like the blank at roulette, a constantly present handicap upon the operator. And so it was that Worlington Dodds had come to grief. On the best advices he had dabbled in the funds of a South American Republic in the days before South American Republics had been found out. The Republic ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... now stands, and one could walk a mile, it is said, over the tops of these boats without going ashore. No doubt Lincoln went, too, to live in the boatmen's rendezvous, called the "Swamp," a wild, rough quarter, where roulette, whiskey, and ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... been seen by other eyes than Cassidy's. By some odd fortuity, a phonograph broke into wheezy song as the wayfarers swung down the street. Dice began to roll invitingly across the bars, and from a distant spot came the hollow sound of the roulette-ball. Quite by chance, a man appeared in a doorway, holding a glass of beer. He was seen to drain it, just as they passed. Then he noticed them for the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... likes cards and horses and roulette it isn't so nice, I know, mamma; but it don't need to mean he's a born gambler, does it? Boys have got to sow ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... eternity seem more rapid than it really is. That hot and fevered youth who stands in the betting-ring and nervously pencils his race-card never thinks that the time of weakness and sadness and weariness is coming on; that gray and tremulous old man who bends over the roulette-table never thinks that he will speedily drop into a profundity deeper than ever plummet sounded. The gliding ball does not swing round in its groove faster than the old man's soul fares towards ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... do I care, sir, how a man like you loses his money, and whether it is at hazard or roulette?" screamed the baronet, with a multiplicity of oaths, and at the top of his voice. "What I will not have, sir, is that you should use my name, or couple it with yours. Damn him, Strong, why don't you keep him in better order? I tell you he has gone and used ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... on, walking slowly, passing about the first poker table, then by the faro table, the roulette wheel, and finally to the table where the Kid sat. Bedloe had not moved again: he had not turned, his cards lay unheeded before him. The other men were silent with a jack pot ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... bastard. Who was Morny? We will say, "A noted wit, an intriguer, but in no way austere, a friend of Romieu, and a supporter of Guizot possessing the manners of the world, and the habits of the roulette table, self-satisfied, clever, combining a certain liberality of ideas with a readiness to accept useful crimes, finding means to wear a gracious smile with bad teeth, leading a life of pleasure, dissipated but ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... the moment by his hands. A sleeve of the girl's frock was torn away, the outworn fabric in streamers. The man's hands came down and Mormon recognized him for Jim Plimsoll, owner of the Good Luck Pool Parlors, in the little cattle town of Hereford, where faro, roulette, chuckaluck and craps were played in the back room, owner also of a near-by horse ranch. There was blood on his face, the marks ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... infliction and a sacrifice. Books and pictures he had cared for once, but as he now put it, he had 'no use for them.' It seemed that all his eighty thousand pounds was destined to be flung upon the great roulette table of stock and share speculations. It was not that he was avaricious; few men cared less for money in itself; but he could not live without the excitement of speculation. 'I prefer the air of Throgmorton Street to any air in the world,' he observed. 'I am unhappy if I leave it for ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... of portentous balances. The amount of money that he was keeping idle in the banks was beginning to weigh upon him. He finally ended by involving himself in some speculation; like a gambler who cannot see the roulette wheel without putting his hand in ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... devotion to hazard fully as meek as theirs. In England there has been a wonderful revival of cards. Baccarat may rival dead faro in the tale of her devotees. We have all seen the sweet English chatelaine at her roulette wheel, and ere long it may be that tender parents will be writing to complain of the compulsory ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... her violet eyes as she smiled and said more quietly, "Then you are in even worse trouble than I thought. I hear a lot about what happens to these strange people who never lose at cards or at dice or at roulette. Aren't you afraid of winding up in the gutter with your throat slit? Isn't that what happens to people with psi powers who gamble?" she insisted. "What's your trick, Tex? Do you stack the deck ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett |
