'But how can I wash your young mind clean from the foul stain
which has already defiled it? Why did you sit down to play? Was
it to win the money which these men had in their pockets?'
'Not particularly.'
'It cannot be that a rational being should consent to risk the
money he has himself,--to risk even the money which he has not
himself,--without a desire to win that which as yet belongs to his
opponents. You desired to win.'
'I suppose I did hope to win.'
'And why? Why did you want to extract their property from their
pockets, and to put it into your own? That the footpad on the
road should have such desire when, with his pistol, he stops the
traveller on his journey we all understand. And we know what to
think of the footpad,--and what we must do to him. He is a poor
creature, who from his youth upwards has had no good thing done
for him, uneducated, an outcast, whom we should pity more than we
despise him. We take him as a pest which we cannot endure, and
lock him up where he can harm us no more. On my word, Gerald, I
think that the so-called gentleman who sits down with the
deliberate intention of extracting money from the pockets of his
antagonists, who lays out for himself that way of repairing the
shortcomings of fortune, who looks to that resource as an aid to
his means,---is worse, much worse, than the public robber! He is
meaner, more cowardly, and has I think in his bosom less of the
feeling of an honest man.
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