mself. It was not simply that beneficent harness of routine
which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live
calmly--it was a perpetual claim on the immediate fresh application of
thought, and on the consideration of another's need and trial. Many of
us looking back through life would say that the kindest man we have
ever known has been a medical man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine
tact, directed by deeply informed perception, has come to us in our
need with a more sublime beneficence than that of miracle-workers. Some
of that twice-blessed mercy was always with Lydgate in his work at the
Hospital or in private houses, serving better than any opiate to quiet
and sustain him under his anxieties and his sense of mental degeneracy.

Mr. Farebrother's suspicion as to the opiate was true, however. Under
the first galling pressure of foreseen difficulties, and the first
perception that his marriage, if it were not to be a yoked loneliness,
must be a state of effort to go on loving without too much care about
being loved, he had once or twice tried a dose of opium. But he had no
hereditary constitutional craving after such transient escapes from the
hauntings of misery. He was strong, could drink a great deal of wine,
but did not care about it; and when the men round him were drinking
spirits, he took sugar and water, having a contemptuous pity even for
the earliest stages of excitement from drink. It was the same with
gambling. He had looked on at a great deal of gambling in Paris,
watching it as if it had been a disease. He was no more tempted by
such winning than he was by drink. He had said to himself that the
only winning he cared for must be attained by a conscious process of
high, difficult combination tending towards a beneficent result. The
power he longed for could not be represented by agitated fingers
clutching a heap of coin, or by the half-barbarous, half-idiotic
triumph in the eyes of a man who sweeps within his arms the ventures of
twenty chapfallen companions.

But just as he had tried opium, so his thought now began to turn upon
gambling--not with appetite for its excitement, but with a sort of
wistful inward gaze after that easy way of getting money, which implied
no asking and brought no responsibility. If he had been in London or
Paris at that time, it is probable that such thoughts, seconded by
opportunity, would have taken him into a gambling-house, no longer to
watch t