[Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray]@TWC D-Link book
Barry Lyndon

CHAPTER XIII
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Indeed, I will say this for myself, that losing money at play never in the least put me out of good-humour with the winner, and that wherever I found a superior, I was always ready to acknowledge and hail him.
Lyndon was very proud of winning from so celebrated a person, and we contracted a kind of intimacy; which, however, did not for a while go beyond pump-room attentions, and conversations over the supper-table at play: but which gradually increased, until I was admitted into his more private friendship.

He was a very free-spoken man (the gentry of those days were much prouder than at present), and used to say to me in his haughty easy way, 'Hang it, Mr.Barry, you have no more manners than a barber, and I think my black footman has been better educated than you; but you are a young fellow of originality and pluck, and I like you, sir, because you seem determined to go to the deuce by a way of your own.' I would thank him laughingly for this compliment, and say, that as he was bound to the next world much sooner than I was, I would be obliged to him to get comfortable quarters arranged there for me.

He used also to be immensely amused with my stories about the splendour of my family and the magnificence of Castle Brady: he would never tire of listening or laughing at those histories.
'Stick to the trumps, however, my lad,' he would say, when I told him of my misfortunes in the conjugal line, and how near I had been winning the greatest fortune in Germany.

'Do anything but marry, my artless Irish rustic' (he called me by a multiplicity of queer names).

'Cultivate your great talents in the gambling line; but mind this, that a woman will beat you.' That I denied; mentioning several instances in which I had conquered the most intractable tempers among the sex.
'They will beat you in the long run, my Tipperary Alcibiades.


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