actly right. In the first place I hate bridge! Whenever I attempt to play, I get hot all over, and I wish I could unhook my tight collar and roll up my prickly sleeves. When it comes my turn to play, and I find myself desperately at a loss to know whether to trump or not—my partner looking daggers at me across the table and everybody waiting in dead silence—I simply give up all responsibility in the matter, repeat to myself: "Eenie, meenie, mynie moe, Catch a nigger by the toe," etc., and fling down the card that's "it," in utter abandon. Of course, that isn't good bridge, and Edith says I'll never make a player. She says I don't possess any more card-sense than social-sense. I wonder what kind of sense I do possess anyhow! It was a big consolation when I learned that the emptiest-headed women often make the best card players, simply because no superfluous ideas are at work in their brains to interrupt the train of concentrated card thought.
I'm not much more successful in conversation than I am in bridge. I seem to be always on the outside of women's intimacies somehow. Edith's set know one another so confidentially—keep tabs on the gowns, the hats, the jewellery, the number of servants each one has, and guess at one another's incomes. And then they use such a lot of mysterious signs! Sometimes raised eyebrows, a little nod toward a person's back, very tightly pursed lips, somebody abruptly twirling her two thumbs, will set off a whole roomful into peals of laughter, while I simply sit dazed and blank. It's just so with Ruth's younger crowd too. They're always giggling or making unintelligible remarks. You see I'm a kind of an in-
