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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 fore - finger . 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 proceeds of his practice immediately absorbed in paying back debts , and with the chance , if the worst were known , of daily supplies being refused on credit , above all with the vision of Rosamond’s hopeless discontent continually haunting him , Lydgate had begun to see that he should inevitably bend himself to ask help from somebody or other . At first he had considered whether he should write to Mr . Vincy ; but on questioning Rosamond he found that , as he had suspected , she had already applied twice to her father , the last time being since the disappointment from Sir Godwin ; and papa had said that Lydgate must look out for himself . “ Papa said he had come , with one bad year after another , to trade more and more on borrowed capital , and had had to give up many indulgences ; he could not spare a single hundred from the charges of his family . He said , let Lydgate ask Bulstrode : they have always been hand and glove . ”
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