A Lady of Rome by F. Marion Crawford

Monsieur Jules de Maurienne gambled, and, like most rich men who do, he generally won more than he lost. He did not gamble for the sake of winning money, however, for he was a gentleman and avarice was not among his faults, though he was not extravagant in his way of living, and knew very nearly to a penny what he spent from month to month. What he enjoyed was the excitement of fearing that he was going to lose, as he occasionally did, though with no serious damage to his fortune. Some people do daring things when there is a good reason for doing them, and they are like cats at bay; others are incapable of physical fear and never believe in danger, and they are likely healthy puppies; but one meets men now and then who fully realise every risk, and take a real pleasure in trying how far they can go without breaking their necks. None of the lower animals will do this; it is a characteristic of the born gambler.

De Maurienne did not play much in drawing-rooms or at the clubs. The stakes were rarely high enough to give him an emotion, and the sensation of winning much from friends who could not always afford to lose made him uncomfortable. He therefore frequented one of those quiet little establishments in the neighbourhood of the Piazza di Spagna where baccara, roulette, and rouge et noir go on from three in the afternoon till three in the morning, or later. He was far too refined in his taste for pleasure to waste a whole evening at such a place, and he frequented it at odd moments late in the afternoon. A man is rarely missed at that hour, and if he occasionally finds an acquaintance in a gambling den, the encounter is not mentioned afterwards, any more than those who meet there would think of calling each other by their names. For the society in the haunts of vice is extremely mixed, to say the least of it, though the owners of the establishments take infinite trouble to make it select.