Now I am not a whist-player.  Ask those who have played with me, and see the well-bred murder in their eyes as they remember their wrongs.  They will tell you that I can take all the tricks—­not just the odd, but three, four, and five tricks—­yet I am not playing whist.  I am just winning the game, that is all.  If my partner, in an unthinking moment, says, “Let’s win this game,” we win it.  But it is like saying to the cab-driver, “You make that train.”  We make the train and say nothing about taking off a wheel or two in the process.  Once, after a game of this kind, my partner said to me, “Allow me to congratulate you upon a most brilliant game—­of cards!”

Now you must not think me either stupid or blundering.  I play with magnificent effrontery, often rushing in where angels fear to tread; but, somehow, effrontery is not the best qualification for a whist-player.  I am too lucky at holding the cards, and play each one to win.  I am lavish with trumps.  I delight to lead them first hand round, but I have not the courage of my convictions, for I always feel little quivers of fear when I do it, because when my trumps and aces are gone, then I’m gone too.  I have no skill in finesse, in the subtlety, the delicate moves which are the inherent qualities of a game of whist.  To tell the brutal truth, I play my own hand.  Could anything be worse, dear shade of Sarah Battle, even if I do win?  In short, my manner of playing whist is the way some men, most men, make love.

Now you know, brothers—­I call you brothers to prove how very friendly my feelings are towards you, even if I do show you up from our side—­you know that a good whist-player is only slightly interested in the play of the great cards.  His fine instinct comes into play when the delicate points of the game are in evidence; when it is a question of who holds the seven of clubs, if he leads the six in the last hand, or of the lurking-place of the thirteenth trump.  I never can remember anything below the jack, and I give up playing whist forever at least once every month.  But I am so weak that I return to it again and again, as a smoker does to his brier-wood.  I feel partly vexed and partly sorry for myself when I realize that I cannot play—­I can only win.  I have seen men win very superior girls, but they have done it in a manner which would disgust a good whist-player.  Yet they, too, keep on with their indifferent love-making with the same fatal human weakness which sees me brave the baleful light in my partner’s eyes night after night—­when I am in a whist-playing community.  Many men make love because the girl is convenient and they happen to think about it.  It never would occur to me to hunt up three people at a country-house and ask them to play whist.  But if three are at a table, and there is no one else, I drop into the vacant place, which could be filled much better by a skilled player, with pathetic willingness.

I wonder if a man ever deliberately made up his mind to marry, and then hunted up his ideal girl?  Alas, alas, if he did, I never heard of him!  But I have seen scores of them drop into vacant chairs at the girls’ sides, and make love just because they were handy.