eight o’clock
One of the diversions in their pitiful and narrow lives was to gather in some room and indulge in petty gambling ; sitting for hours upon hours with their faculties alert upon the attempt to get from each other some small fraction of that weekly stipend which kept them alive . Sometimes they played `` penny-ante '' , and sometimes _ vingt _ _ et _ _ un _ ; once , as it chanced , they needed another player , and they urged Thyrsis to join them . And so , for the first time in his life , Thyrsis learned what it meant to lay his soul upon the lap of the goddess of chance . From eight o'clock that evening until two the next morning , he sat in a suffocating room full of cigarette-smoke , trying in vain to win back the dollar or two he had lost at the outset ; flushed and trembling with excitement , and hating himself with a bitter and tormenting hatred . And so he discovered his vice ; he discovered that he had in him the soul of the gambler ! And all the rest of the winter he had to wrestle with that shame . He would go to his dinner , tired and heartsick ; and they would ask him to play again ; and he -- the man who carried a message for humanity in his heart -- he would yield !