Explore "The City of the Discreet" by Pio Baroja on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The coterie was the most select in the Casino. Its members used to meet there in order to speak ill of everybody. There were young men who did nothing but ride horseback, try the strength of young bulls by prodding them with long pikes from horseback, and gamble their souls away; old men whose sole occupation was talking politics; and a great variety of persons who had made a business of amusing themselves -- a fact which did not prevent one from reading a gloomy weariness in their expressions.
This meeting of aristocrats and plebeians, of rich men and poor men, of vagrants employed and unemployed, possessed a rare character, which was produced by a preponderance of aristocratic prejudices, mixed with a great simplicity.