hearth. You can go into a billiard-room--you, a respectable
tradesman, or as you set yourself up for one, for if the world knew
all, there's very little respectability in you--you can go and play
billiards with a set of creatures in mustachios, when you might take
a nice quiet hand with me at home. But no! anything but cribbage
with your own wife!

"Caudle, it's all over now; you've gone to destruction. I never knew
a man enter a billiard-room that he wasn't lost for ever. There was
my uncle Wardle; a better man never broke the bread of life: he took
to billiards, and he didn't live with aunt a month afterwards.

"A LUCKY FELLOW?

"And that's what you call a man who leaves his wife--a 'lucky
fellow'? But, to be sure, what can I expect? We shall not be
together long, now: it's been some time coming, but, at last, we
must separate: and the wife I've been to you!

"But I know who it is; it's that fiend Prettyman. I WILL call him a
fiend, and I'm by no means a foolish woman: you'd no more have
thought of billiards than a goose, if it hadn't been for him. Now,
it's no use, Caudle, your telling me that you have only been once,
and that you can't hit a ball anyhow--you'll soon get over all that;
and then you'll never be at home. You'll be a marked man, Caudle;
yes, marked: there'll be something about you that'll be dreadful;
for if I couldn't tell a billiard-player by his looks, I've no eyes,
that's all. They all of 'em look as yellow as parchment, and wear
mustachios--I suppose you'll let yours grow now; though they'll be a
good deal troubled to come. I know that. Yes, they've all a yellow