From that time on, Vandover's only pleasure was gambling.

Night and day he sat over the cards, the passion growing upon him as he continued to lose, for his ill luck was extraordinary.

It was a veritable mania, a wild blind frenzy that knew no limit.

At first he had contented himself with a game in which twenty or thirty dollars was as much as he could win or lose at a sitting, but soon this palled upon him; he was obliged to raise the stakes continually in order to arouse in him the interest, the keen tense excitement, that his jaded nerves craved.
The five hundred dollars that he had drawn from the ten thousand, the first payment on his old home, melted away within a week.

Only a few years ago Vandover would have stopped to reflect upon the meaning of this, would have resisted the temptation that drew him constantly to the gambling-table, but the idea of resistance never so much as occurred to him.