“Ha, Mr. Caudle! I only wish I didn’t know. No; you were not at any of these places; but I know well enough where you were.
“Then why do I ask if I know?
“That’s it: just to prove what a hypocrite you are: just to show you that you can’t deceive me.
“So, Mr. Caudle - you’ve turned billiard-player, sir.
“Only once?
“That’s quite enough: you might as well play a thousand times; for you’re a lost man, Caudle. Only once, indeed! I wonder, if I was to say ‘Only once,’ what would you say to me? But, of course, a man can do no wrong in anything.
“And you’re a lord of the creation, Mr. Caudle; and you can stay away from the comforts of your blessed fireside, and the society of your own wife and children - though, to be sure, you never thought anything of them - to push ivory balls about with a long stick upon a green table-cloth. What pleasure any man can take in such stuff must astonish any sensible woman. I pity you, Caudle!
“And you can go and do nothing but make ‘cannons’ - for that’s the gibberish they talk at billiards - when there’s the manly and athletic game of cribbage, as my poor grandmother used to call it, at your own 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?