The five hundred dollars that he had drawn from the ten thousand, the first payment on his old home, melted away within a week. Only a few years ago Vandover would have stopped to reflect upon the meaning of this, would have resisted the temptation that drew him constantly to the gambling-table, but the idea of resistance never so much as occurred to him. He did not invest his fifteen thousand, but drew upon it continually to satisfy his last new craze. It was not with any hope of winning that he gambled--the desire of money was never strong in him--it was only the love of the excitement of the moment. Little by little the fifteen thousand in the bank dwindled. It did not all go in cards. Certain habits of extravagance grew upon Vandover, the natural outcome of his persistent gambling, the desire of winning easily being balanced by the impulses to spend quickly. He took a certain hysterical delight in flinging away money with both hands. Now it was the chartering of a yacht for a ten-days' cruise about the bay, or it was a bicycle bought one week and thrown away the next, a fresh suit of clothes each month, gloves worn but once, gold-pieces thrust into Flossie's pockets, suppers given to bouffe actresses--twenty-four-hour acquaintances--a racehorse bought for eight hundred dollars, resold for two hundred and fifty--rings and scarf-pins given away to the women and girls of the Imperial, and a whole world of follies that his poor distorted wits conceived from hour to hour. His judgment was gone, his mind unbalanced. All his life Vandover had been sinking slowly lower and lower; this, however, was the beginning of the last plunge. The process of degeneration, though inevitable, had been gradual as long as he indulged generally in all forms of evil; it was only now when a passion for one particular vice absorbed him that he commenced to rush headlong to his ruin. The fifteen thousand dollars--the price of his old home--he gambled or flung away in a little less than a year. He never invested it, but ate into it day after day, sometimes to pay his gambling debts, sometimes to indulge an absurd and extravagant whim, sometimes to pay his bill at the Lick House, and sometimes for no reason at all, moved simply by a reckless desire for spending.