“Well, and so I think would I.”
“It would kill him as sure as we are here, Johnny. He would look upon it that I have become a confirmed gambler, and I believe the shock and grief would be such that he’d die of it. No: I have not been so particularly dutiful a son, that I should bring that upon him.”
I balanced myself on the bed-rail. Tod paced the carpet slowly.
“No, never,” he repeated, as if there had not been any pause. “I would rather die myself.”
“But what is to be done?”
“Heaven knows! I wish the Pells had been far enough before they had invited us up.”
“I wish you had never consented to play with the lot at all, Tod. You might have stood out from the first.”
“Ay. But one glides into these things unconsciously. Johnny, I begin to think Crayton is just a gambler, playing to win, and nothing better.”
“Playing for his bread. That is, for the things that constitute it. His drink, and his smoke, and his lodgings, and his boots, and his rings. Old Brandon said it. As to his dinners, he generally gets them at friends’ houses.”
“Old Brandon said it, did he?”