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I think that for the first instant, oddly, what I felt was merely satisfaction, not hatred; for I all but asked him whether, by not smoking to-day, he had got a keener edge to his thrills. I understood him, and for an instant this sufficed me. Those pursed-out lips, so queerly different from the compressed lips of the normal motorist, and seeming, as elsewhere last night, to denote no more than pensive interest, had told me suddenly all that I needed to know about Pethel. Here, as there,–and, oh, ever so much better here than there!–he could gratify the passion that was in him. No need of any “make-believe” here. I remembered the queer look he had given when I asked if his gambling were always “a life-and-death affair.” Here was the real thing, the authentic game, for the highest stakes. And here was I, a little extra stake tossed on to the board. He had vowed I had it in me to do “something big.” Perhaps, though, there had been a touch of make-believe about that. I am afraid it was not before my thought about myself that my moral sense began to operate and my hatred of Pethel set in. Put it to my credit that I did see myself as a mere detail in his villainy. You deprecate the word “villainy”? Understand all, forgive all? No doubt. But between the acts of understanding and forgiving an interval may sometimes be condoned. Condone it in this instance. Even at the time I gave Pethel due credit for risking his own life, for having doubtless risked it–it and none other–again and again in the course of his adventurous (and abstemious) life by field and flood. I was even rather touched by memory of his insistence last night on another glass of that water which just MIGHT give him typhoid; rather touched by memory of his unsaying that he “never” touched alcohol–he who, in point of fact, had to be ALWAYS gambling on something or other. I gave him due credit, too, for his devotion to his daughter. But his use of that devotion, his cold use of it to secure for himself the utmost thrill of hazard, did seem utterly abominable to me.

And it was even more for the mother than for the daughter that I was incensed. That daughter did not know him, did but innocently share his damnable love of chances; but that wife had for years known him at least as well as I knew him now. Here again I gave him credit for wishing, though he didn’t love her, to spare her what he could. That he didn’t love her I presumed from his indubitable willingness not to stake her in this afternoon’s game. That he never had loved her–had taken her in his precocious youth simply as a gigantic chance against him, was likely enough. So much the more credit to him for such consideration as he showed her, though this was little enough. He could wish to save her from being a looker-on at his game, but he could–he couldn’t not–go on playing. Assuredly she was right in deeming him at once the strongest and the weakest of men. “Rather a nervous woman!” I remembered an engraving that had hung in my room at Oxford, and in scores of other rooms there: a presentment by Sir Marcus (then Mr.) Stone of a very pretty young person in a Gainsborough hat, seated beneath an ancestral elm, looking as though she were about to cry, and entitled “A Gambler’s Wife.” Mrs. Pethel was not like that. Of her there were no engravings for undergraduate hearts to melt at. But there was one man, certainly, whose compassion was very much at her service. How was he going to help her?