petite palled with pleasure: the insolence of the
successful parvenu is only the necessary continuance of the career of
the needy struggler: our mental changes are like our grey hairs or our
wrinkles--but the fulfilment of the plan of mortal growth and decay:
that which is snow-white now was glossy black once; that which is
sluggish obesity to-day was boisterous rosy health a few years back;
that calm weariness, benevolent, resigned, and disappointed, was
ambition, fierce and violent, but a few years since, and has only
settled into submissive repose after many a battle and defeat. Lucky he
who can bear his failure so generously, and give up his broken sword
to Fate the Conqueror with a manly and humble heart! Are you not
awestricken, you, friendly reader, who, taking the page up for
a moment's light reading, lay it down, perchance, for a graver
reflection,--to think how you, who have consummated your success or
your disaster, may be holding marked station, or a hopeless and nameless
place, in the crowd--who have passed through how many struggles of
defeat, success, crime, remorse, to yourself only known!--who may have
loved and grown cold, wept and laughed again, how often!--to think how
you are the same, You, whom in childhood you remember, before the voyage
of life began? It has been prosperous, and you are riding into port, the
people huzzaing and the guns saluting,--and the lucky captain bows from
the ship's side, and there is a care under the star on his breast which
nobody knows of: or you are wrecked, and lashed, hopeless, to a solitary
spar out at sea:--the sinking man and the successful one are thinking
each about home, very likely, and remembering the time when they were
children; alone on the hopeless spar, drowning out of sight; alone in
the midst of the crowd applauding you.

CHAPTER LXI. Conversations

Our good-natured Begum was at first so much enraged at this last
instance of her husband's duplicity and folly, that she refused to give
Sir Francis Clavering any aid in order to meet his debts of honour,
and declared that she would separate from him, and leave him to the
consequences of his incorrigible weakness and waste. After that fatal
day's transactions at the Derby, the unlucky gambler was in such a
condition of mind that he was disposed to avoid everybody; alike his
turf-associates with whom he had made the debts which he trembled lest
he should not have the means of paying, and his wife,