though the Devil would not accept the homage of his votaries if not
rendered with the well-bred manners of true gentlemen. It was not enough
that men should be ruined--they should be ruined with easy propriety and
thorough good-breeding. Whatever their hearts might feel, their faces
should express no discomfiture; though their head should ache and their
hand should tremble, the lip must be taught to say 'rouge' or 'noir'
without any emotion.

I do not scruple to own that all this decorum was more dreadful than any
scene of wild violence or excitement The forced calmness, the pent-up
passion, might be kept from any outbreak of words; but no training could
completely subdue the emotions which speak by the bloodshot eye, the
quivering cheek, the livid lip.

No man's heart is consecrated so entirely to one passion as a gambler's.
Hope with him usurps the place of every other feeling. Hope, however
rude the shocks it meets from disappointment, however beaten and
baffled, is still there; the flame may waste down to a few embers, but a
single spark may live amid the ashes, yet it is enough to kindle up into
a blaze before the breath of fortune. At first he lives but for moments
like these; all his agonies, all his sufferings, all the torturings of a
mind verging on despair are repaid by such brief intervals of luck. Yet
each reverse of fate is telling on him heavily; the many disappointments
to his wishes are sapping by degrees his confidence in fortune. His hope
is dashed with fear; and now commences within him that struggle which is
the most fearful man's nature can endure. The fickleness of chance,
the waywardness of fortune, fill his mind with doubts and hesitations.
Sceptical on the sources of his great passion, he becomes a doubter
on every subject; he has seen his confidence so often at fault that
he trusts nothing, and at last the ruling feature of his character is
suspicion. When this rules paramount, he is a perfect gambler; from that
moment he has done with the world and all its pleasures and pursuits;
life offers to him no path of ambition, no goal to stimulate his
energies. With a mock stoicism he affects to be superior to the race
which other men are running, and laughs at the collisions of party and
the contests of politics. Society, art, literature, love itself, have no
attractions for him then; all excitements are feeble compared with the
alternations of the gamingtable; and the chances of fortune in real life