"Tush, Jack, you love to put on the dolefuls! That melancholy air of yours has been but too successful with women. There's nothing so fascinating as the sadness of a _roué_." "I dreamt of my mother last night, Durnford. It was Miss Bosworth's face that was in my mind as I laid my head on my pillow; but it was the mournful countenance of my mother which visited my slumbers. She pleaded with me against my evil passions, as she had done many a time when I was a wayward wilful boy; urged me to lead a good life. 'Yes, for your sake,' I answered; 'only for your sake, mother;' and woke with those words on my lips. My voice had a ghostly sound as I woke in the darkness and heard it; and after that there was not a wink of sleep for me in all the long slow hours that followed the summer dawn. I lay and thought of Judith. O Herrick, how I loved that woman!" "Yes, and love her still, and yet would marry another." "I must marry in order that I may mend. Nothing but a good wife and a happy home can cure my wounds. Do you call this a home, for instance?" he asked bitterly, looking round the large room, with its handsome ponderous furniture and crimson damask hangings, so dark a red as to seem almost black in the dim light of the two tall candles. "Has it not a funereal air? And yet it smells of old orgies. It seems to me as if those curtains exhale Burgundy and champagne, and still reek of strong waters." Late as it was by the time they had supped, Lavendale insisted upon going out and on taking Durnford with him. There would be some of the chocolate-houses or gambling-dens in the neighbourhood of Leicester Fields or Soho still open, though it was past eleven o'clock. "I will go with you if you like," said Durnford, "but I shall be like a skeleton at your feast, for I have made up my mind never again to touch a card." "And how many nights or hours will that mind of yours last, do you suppose, Herrick, when you hear the musical rattle of the ivories, the soft seductive sound of the dice sliding gently on to the board of green cloth? Pshaw, man! as if I did not know you, and that you are at heart a gambler!" "Perhaps, but my gambling henceforth shall take a loftier aim. I will play at cards with fortune, and my counters shall be courage and industry. I am going to turn over a new leaf, Jack." "You have turned over so many that you must be pretty well through the book of good resolutions by this time. But what in the name of all that's wonderful has made you virtuous, Herrick? You are not in love with an heiress, and bent upon domesticity as I am." "If you are so, stop at home." "Not in this house. It smells like the tomb of dead pleasures. When I look back and think of my wild youth within these four walls I feel like an old man. And yet thirty-one is hardly on the confines of senility, is it, Herrick?" "Thirty-one should be the bloom of youth."