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Volume I

The Gaming Table by Andrew Steinmetz, Volume II

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Anecdotes Of The Passions And Vicissitudes Of Gamesters

'Affairs now began to be serious. His supper was not so hearty.
While the rest were eating, he walked about the room, and began
to limit his ambition to recovery, and not to gain.

'When you play to win back, the fun is over: there is nothing to
recompense you for your bodily tortures and your degraded
feelings; and the very best result that can happen, while it has
no charms, seems to your cowed mind impossible.

'On they played, and the duke lost more. His mind was jaded. He
floundered--he made desperate efforts, but plunged deeper in the
slough. Feeling that, to regain his ground, each card must tell,
he acted on each as if it must win, and the consequences of this
insanity (for a gamester at such a crisis is really insane) were,
that his losses were prodigious.

'Another morning came, and there they sat, ankle-deep in cards.
No attempt at breakfast now--no affectation of making a toilet,
or airing the room. The atmosphere was hot, to be sure, but it
well became such a hell. There they sat, in total, in positive
forgetfulness of everything but the hot game they were hunting
down. There was not a man in the room, except Tom Cogit, who
could have told you the name of the town in which they were
living. There they sat, almost breathless, watching every turn
with the fell look in their cannibal eyes, which showed their
total inability to sympathize with their fellow-beings. All the
forms of society had been forgotten. There was no snuff-box
handed about now, for courtesy, admiration, or a pinch; no
affectation of occasionally making a remark upon any other topic
but the all-engrossing one.

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