Little by little the fifteen thousand in the bank dwindled.  It did not all go in cards.  Certain habits of extravagance grew upon Vandover, the natural outcome of his persistent gambling, the desire of winning easily being balanced by the impulses to spend quickly.  He took a certain hysterical delight in flinging away money with both hands.  Now it was the chartering of a yacht for a ten-days’ cruise about the bay, or it was a bicycle bought one week and thrown away the next, a fresh suit of clothes each month, gloves worn but once, gold-pieces thrust into Flossie’s pockets, suppers given to bouffe actresses—­twenty-four-hour acquaintances—­a racehorse bought for eight hundred dollars, resold for two hundred and fifty—­rings and scarf-pins given away to the women and girls of the Imperial, and a whole world of follies that his poor distorted wits conceived from hour to hour.  His judgment was gone, his mind unbalanced.  All his life Vandover had been sinking slowly lower and lower; this, however, was the beginning of the last plunge.  The process of degeneration, though inevitable, had been gradual as long as he indulged generally in all forms of evil; it was only now when a passion for one particular vice absorbed him that he commenced to rush headlong to his ruin.

The fifteen thousand dollars—­the price of his old home—­he gambled or flung away in a little less than a year.  He never invested it, but ate into it day after day, sometimes to pay his gambling debts, sometimes to indulge an absurd and extravagant whim, sometimes to pay his bill at the Lick House, and sometimes for no reason at all, moved simply by a reckless desire for spending.

On the evening of a certain Thanksgiving day, nine months after he had sold the house, Vandover came in through the ladies’ entrance of the Imperial, going slowly down the passageway, looking into the little rooms on his right for Ellis or the Dummy.  There had been a great intercollegiate football game that day, and Vandover, remembering that he had once found an interest in such things, had at first determined to see it.  But toward eleven o’clock in the morning the rain had begun to fall, and Ellis, who was to have gone with him, declared that he did not care enough about the game to go out to it in the rain.  Vandover was disappointed; he fancied that he could have enjoyed the game—­as much as he could enjoy anything of late—­but he hated to go to places alone.  In the end, however, he resolved to go whether Ellis went or not.  It was a holiday.  Vandover had Ellis and the Dummy to lunch with him at the hotel, where they arranged the menu of a famous Thanksgiving dinner for that evening:  they would meet in one of the little rooms of the Imperial and go from there to the restaurant.  As they were finishing their lunch Vandover said: 

“I got a new kind of liqueur yesterday—­has a colour like violets and smells like cologne.  You fellows better come up to my room and try it.  I’ve got to go up and change anyway, if I go out to that game.”  They all went up to Vandover’s cheerless room, and Ellis began to argue with Vandover against the folly of going anywhere in the rain.