Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 291: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

274 REYNOLDS’ WORKS may form an idea of that class of “ respectable married females ’’ who frequented the den. There are at this mo- ment several gambling-houses for females in London, and many a small tradesman finds out to his cost that his wife has been allured to one of these pandemonia. As a matter of course, the idea of those who frequent such places is, as we have above hinted, that they will convert their pence into shillings, and their shillings into pounds. Insensate fools! infatuated wretches! If they only paused and reflected for a single moment, they would perceive that the keeper of the gaming-house alone nets the profit, and that this profit is to the loss of the gamesters themselves. But to return to the thread of our narrative: Madge Somers continued playing, at first cautiously, as we have seen her, then, as she lost, with a growing recklessness, and ultimately, as her losses increased, with a kind of desperation. She did not give way to any outburst of passion, she neither vociferated nor gesticulated, but her looks, her attitude. her entire bearing indicated one prolonged, continuous, and concentrated sense of terrific excitement. Now her eyebrows were drawn up, now they became corrugated; now her half-open mouth and the suspended breath showed the poignancy of her suspense, then the nervous quickness with which she drew forth another note and hazarded another stake served as a further proof of the desperate recklessness with which she was playing. Ultimately, at about two o’clock in the morning, she rose from her seat at the foot of the table, muttering to herself, ‘‘ Not a shilling left! no, not a penny! ”’ But still she thrust her long, bony fingers into every recess of the greasy old pocketbook, to ascertain if perchance a bank-note, or even a sovereign, might have become em- bedded in some corner. No, it was empty, and she was indeed penniless. The remains of the last sum of money she had received from Lady Saxondale had that night been -swallowed up in the same vortex to which hundreds and hundreds of pounds of the woman’s money — the ill-gotten gains of long years of crime — had already found their way. ‘Now then for supper!’ ejaculated that same young girl whom we have already noticed as being in Fortune’s favour on this particular night; and well she might speak exultingly, Gomichbooks (E(0) m Pp