Page:Gissing - The Unclassed, vol. I, 1884.djvu/57

 before he had turned his fiftieth year. As a youth he had made a good thing of games of skill, but did not pursue them as a means of profit when he no longer needed the resource. He continued, however, to love the games for their own sake, and still delighted in chess. It was but seldom, however, that he indulged the liking, and for the simple reason that he could not support a defeat. To be beaten roused his vile temper to such a fearful pitch that he with difficulty refrained from physical violence. Few people who knew him ventured to play with him and win; at the same time very few were capable of defeating him.

He married at the age of thirty. This, like every other step he took, was well planned; his wife brought him several thousand pounds, being the daughter of a retired publican with whom Woodstock had had business relations. He would have told you, in his brutally ingenuous way, that his wife was doubly profitable to him; she helped him to capital, and saved him the expenditures which had hitherto been rendered necessary by his bodily temperament. For