The Dolly Sisters, Rose and Jenny. 

On Thelma's (Viscountess Furness, 1904-1970) honeymoon with Duke (Marmaduke, Viscount Furness), in 1926, the happy couple would travel to Monte Carlo and then decide to "push on" to Cannes.  Thelma notes that the Casino at Cannes was much larger than the Sporting Club at Monte Carlo, and what she saw at the "big table, roped off to keep the spectators from crowding the players," scared her.  "If I thought the betting high at Monte, this was astronomical," she recounts in her memoir, Double Exposure, (p. 197).  But when the manager approaches and says, "Lady Furness, there's a place at the big table now.  Would you care to take it?" Thelma does, because as she explains, "I was still young, inexperienced, and shy."

At the table are the Aga Khan, the millionaire gambler Major John "Dashing Jack" Coats, and Gordon Selfridge, the American-born department-store tycoon of England, with the woman he'd offered a fortune to marry him, Jenny Dolly.

"I had never seen so many jewels on any one person in my life," writes Thelma, "as on Jenny Dolly, and every one of them was an emerald.  The magnificent necklace she wore must have cost a king's ransom.  Her bracelets reached almost to her elbows.  The solitary ring she wore must have been the size of a small ice cube."

I think it's so important in these difficult times to remember that life always holds some risks.  As Congress proceeds to investigate the failure of the American Off Track Betting investment banking system, expensive lessons will surely be learned.  There is always a price to be paid.  For instance, former Lehman CEO Richard Fuld's wife Kathy Fuld is having to sell her $20 million abstract expressionist art collection [Source].

Consider the story of Jenny Dolly, whose wild life, once she and her identical twin sister were discovered by Flo Ziegfeld, quickly became a seemingly endless string of "millionaires and Stage-Door Johnnies" [IMDB bio].  Spurred on by an "insatiable appetite" for jewelry which men like Gordon Selfridge attempted to satisfy, Jenny was torn between marriage to Gordon or romance with the aviatrix Max Constant.  A near fatal car accident with Max resolved the matter.  Selfridge would spend millions on the plastic surgeons who attempted to restore her beauty, but without success.  Jenny was never herself again, and in 1941 she hung herself in her Hollywood apartment, using either the shower curtain or living room drapes [reports vary].

But that night in 1926, at the big table in Cannes, sitting across from Lady Furness, Jenny must have looked dazzling.  Curiously, each of them identical twins, out on the town without their sisters.  Perhaps Jenny was even a little scared at the wealth being gambled away before her eyes, although I doubt Jenny was ever quite as "inexperienced and shy" as Thelma.  Still, she must have been having the time of her life.  She must have felt that life at the big table was one glorious and glittering adventure, one exhilarating gamble.