The ulterior conditions of the game, the price paid for a victory, they thought little of:  for they were feverish worshippers of the phantasmal deity called the Present; a god reigning over the Past, appreciable only in the Future; whose whiff of actual being is composed of the embryo idea of the union of these two periods.  Still he is occasionally a benevolent god to the appetites; which have but to be continuous to establish him in permanence; and as nothing in us more readily supposes perpetuity than the appetite rushing to destroy itself, the rational nature of the most universal worship on earth is perceived at once.

Now, the price paid for a victory is this:  that having been favoured in a single instance by the spouse of the aforesaid eminent divinity—­the Black Goddess of the golden fringes—­men believe in her for ever after, behold her everywhere, they belong to her.  Their faith as to sowing and reaping has gone; and so has their capacity to see the actual as it is:  she has the power to attach them to her skirts the more by rewarding their impassioned devotion with cuffs and scorns.  They have ceased to have a first notion upon anything without a second haunting it, which directs them to propitiate Fortune.

But I am reminded by the convulsions of Dame Gossip, that the wisdom of our ancestors makes it a mere hammering of commonplace to insist on such reflections.  Many of them, indeed, took the union of the Black Goddess and the Rosy Present for the composition of the very Arch-Fiend.  Some had a shot at the strange conjecture, figuring her as tired of men in the end and challengeing him below—­equally tired of his easy conquests of men since the glorious old times of the duelling saints.  By virtue of his one incorrigible weakness, which we know him to have as long as we have it ourselves:  viz., the belief in her existence, she is to get the better of him.

Upon this point the experience of Captain Abrane has a value.  Livia was a follower of the Red and Black and the rounding ball in the person of the giant captain, through whom she received her succession of sweetly teasing thrills and shocks, as one of the adventurous company they formed together.  The place was known to him as the fair Philistine to another muscular hero; he had been shorn there before, and sent forth tottering, treating the friends he met as pillars to fall with him; and when the operation was done thoroughly, he pronounced himself refreshed by it, like a more sensible Samson, the cooler for his clipping.  Then it was that he relapsed undistractedly upon processes of his mind and he often said he thought Fortune would beat the devil.

Her power is shown in the moving of her solicitors to think, instantly after they have made their cast, that the reverse of it was what they intended.  It comes as though she had withdrawn the bandage from her forehead and dropped a leaden glance on them, like a great dame angry to have her signal misinterpreted.  Well, then, distinguished by the goddess in such a manner, we have it proved to us how she wished to favour:  for the reverse wins, and we who are pinched blame not her cruelty but our blind folly.  This is true worship.  Henceforth the pain of her nip is mingled with the dream of her kiss; between the positive and the imagined of her we remain confused until the purse is an empty body on a gallows, honour too, perhaps.