little speech. »To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a
man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win
her may be a discipline!«
 

                                 Chapter LXVII

 Now is there civil war within the soul;
 Resolve is thrust from off the sacred throne
 By clamorous Needs, and Pride the grand-vizier
 Makes humble compact, plays the supple part
 Of envoy and deft-tongued apologist
 For hungry rebels.
 
Happily Lydgate had ended by losing in the billiard-room, and brought away no
encouragement to make a raid on luck. On the contrary, he felt unmixed disgust
with himself the next day when he had to pay four or five pounds over and above
his gains, and he carried about with him a most unpleasant vision of the figure
he had made, not only rubbing elbows with the men at the Green Dragon but
behaving just as they did. A philosopher fallen to betting is hardly
distinguishable from a Philistine under the same circumstances: the difference
will chiefly be found in his subsequent reflections, and Lydgate chewed a very
disagreeable cud in that way. His reason told him how the affair might have been
magnified into ruin by a slight change of scenery - if it had been a
gambling-house that he had turned into, where chance could be clutched with both
hands instead of being picked up with thumb and forefinger. Nevertheless, though
reason strangled the desire to gamble, there remained the feeling that, with an
assurance of luck to the needful amount, he would have liked to gamble, rather
than take the alternative which was beginning to urge itself as inevitable.
    That alternative was to apply to Mr. Bulstrode. Lydgate had so many times
boasted both to himself and others that he was totally independent of Bulstrode,
to whose plans he had lent himself solely because they enabled him to carry out
his own ideas of professional work and public benefit - he had so constantly in
their personal intercourse had his pride sustained by the sense that he was
making a good social use of this predominating banker, whose opinions he thought
contemptible and whose motives often seemed to him an absurd mixture of
contradictory impressions - that he had been creating for himself strong ideal
obstacles to the proffering of any considerable request to him on his own
account.
    Still, early in March his affairs were at that pass in which men begin to
say that their oaths were delivered in ignorance, and to perceive that the act
which they had called impossible to them is becoming manifestly possible. With
Dover's ugly security soon to be put in force, with the