gamester's daring in the vein to men who had no deep knowledge of him and
his lightning arithmetic for measuring, sounding, and deciding.

Naturally he was among the happiest of human creatures; he willed it so,
with consent of circumstances; a boisterous consent, as when votes are
reckoned for a favourite candidate: excepting on the part of a small band
of black dissentients in a corner, a minute opaque body, devilish in
their irreconcilability, who maintain their struggle to provoke discord,
with a cry disclosing the one error of his youth, the sole bad step
chargeable upon his antecedents. But do we listen to them? Shall we not
have them turned out? He gives the sign for it; and he leaves his
buoying constituents to outroar them: and he tells a friend that it was
not, as one may say, an error, although an erratic step: but let us
explain to our bosom friend; it was a step quite unregretted, gloried in;
a step deliberately marked, to be done again, were the time renewed: it
was a step necessitated (emphatically) by a false preceding step; and
having youth to plead for it, in the first instance, youth and ignorance;
and secondly, and O how deeply truly! Love. Deep true love, proved by
years, is the advocate.

He tells himself at the same time, after lending ear to the advocate's
exordium and a favourite sentence, that, judged by the Powers (to them
only can he expose the whole skeleton-cupboard of the case), judged by
those clear-sighted Powers, he is exonerated.

To be exonerated by those awful Powers, is to be approved.

As to that, there is no doubt: whom they, all-seeing, discerning as they
do, acquit they justify.