So, letting love be as well as she could, she now disregarded any irritation she might cause, and began to "pester" him about his health: saying that whether it was overwork or not he must see a doctor. Until one evening, Antony having gone out after dinner, as she was complaining about the stupid insensibility of men to their own well-being, he said that it really was a very common complaint and not worth seeing a doctor about: just bad-luck, he said. "But how bad-luck? Do be serious, please, Roger.... I am so tired of fantasies...." "Just the thing itself, my dear--just bad-luck. Now why should that be a fantasy? Isn't it expressive enough, or do you think that the only serious illnesses are those that doctors get paid for discovering and the Lord be thanked for curing?" "It's not that, but when one hears of some one being ill of his luck one thinks of a boneless, watery kind of man who thinks the world is against him because a favourite has lost him a fiver." "But I told you, Iris, that I meant just the fact of bad-luck, not any particular loss from it." And then he explained, but ever so mildly, as though to a child who mightn't very readily understand an obvious fact. "'It's very simply, and quite logical, I think. Have you ever realised, Iris, that since you met me I have always won? Well, all my life has been like that, I have always won--I don't mean only at cards and racing but at everything that is supposed to make life worth living, those various prizes that we put our names down for. Some men take their paths in life steadily and calculate their progress step by step by hard work, and some men just have a throw at what they most want from time to time--they may work hard to have deserved it after they have got it, but they get it by a chance, by backing themselves against the field. But that is such a poor description, for it's never such a conscious thing as that, the throw comes from a real part of one's nature. It's only a conscious trait in that awful type of "hotel-lounge" American who has many diamond tie-pins and wants every one to know that he lives by bluff and hazard, and in other fools who think that a strange glamour reflects on them from taking chances--whereas to take a chance is just the business of one's nature, it's the business of one's life, just like art or grocery. One gambles naturally or not at all, and the people who lose are mainly those who gamble for some other purpose than the mere fact of gambling, as any _croupier_ in any Casino will tell you....' "He stopped and looked absently across at me with that half satiric smile that crept about his face when he spoke about himself--which was so seldom that I was now listening with all the nerves of my body. And then, each word very slowly and distinctly, as one might count the caskets of a fabulous treasure-- "'I have always won,'" he said.