"That's quite enough: you might as well play a thousand times; for you're a lost man, Caudle. Only once, indeed! I wonder, if I was to say 'Only once,' what would you say to me? But, of course, a man can do no wrong in anything. "And you're a lord of the creation, Mr. Caudle; and you can stay away from the comforts of your blessed fireside, and the society of your own wife and children--though, to be sure, you never thought anything of them--to push ivory balls about with a long stick upon a green table-cloth. What pleasure any man can take in such stuff must astonish any sensible woman. I pity you, Caudle! "And you can go and do nothing but make 'cannons'--for that's the gibberish they talk at billiards--when there's the manly and athletic game of cribbage, as my poor grandmother used to call it, at your own hearth. You can go into a billiard-room--you, a respectable tradesman, or as you set yourself up for one, for if the world knew all, there's very little respectability in you--you can go and play billiards with a set of creatures in mustachios, when you might take a nice quiet hand with me at home. But no! anything but cribbage with your own wife! "Caudle, it's all over now; you've gone to destruction. I never knew a man enter a billiard-room that he wasn't lost for ever. There was my uncle Wardle; a better man never broke the bread of life: he took to billiards, and he didn't live with aunt a month afterwards. "A LUCKY FELLOW? "And that's what you call a man who leaves his wife--a 'lucky fellow'? But, to be sure, what can I expect? We shall not be together long, now: it's been some time coming, but, at last, we must separate: and the wife I've been to you! "But I know who it is; it's that fiend Prettyman. I WILL call him a fiend, and I'm by no means a foolish woman: you'd no more have thought of billiards than a goose, if it hadn't been for him. Now, it's no use, Caudle, your telling me that you have only been once, and that you can't hit a ball anyhow--you'll soon get over all that; and then you'll never be at home. You'll be a marked man, Caudle; yes, marked: there'll be something about you that'll be dreadful; for if I couldn't tell a billiard-player by his looks, I've no eyes, that's all. They all of 'em look as yellow as parchment, and wear mustachios--I suppose you'll let yours grow now; though they'll be a good deal troubled to come. I know that. Yes, they've all a yellow and sly look; just for all as if they were first cousins to people that picked pockets. And that will be your case, Caudle: in six months the dear children won't know their own father.