This perception of his own inward applause explained something in regard
to himself about which he had been wondering ever since the beginning
of dinner--the absence of any pang, of any shade of envy, to see another
man win where he had been so ignominiously defeated. He saw now that it
was a field on which he never _could_ have won. Within "the best Boston
society" he might have had a chance, though even there it must have been
a poor one; but out here in the open, so to speak, where the prowess and
chivalry of Christendom furnished his competitors, he had been as little
in the running as a mortal at a contest of the gods. That he was no
longer in love with her he had known years ago; but it palliated
somewhat his old humiliation, it made the word failure easier to swallow
down, to perceive that his love, when it existed, had been doomed, from
the nature of things and in advance, to end in nothing, like that of the
nightingale for the moon.

* * * * *

By dwelling too pensively on these thoughts he found he had missed some
of the turns of the talk, his attention awakening to hear Henry Guion
say:

"That's all very fine, but a man doesn't risk everything he holds dear
in the world to go cheating at cards just for the fun of it. You may
depend upon it he had a reason."

"Oh, he had a reason," Mrs. Fane agreed--"the reason of being hard up.
The trouble lay in its not being good enough."

"I imagine it was good enough for him, poor devil."