Dummy again. She seemed to be dummy often, this afternoon. They
were playing for quarter cents, but even that low stake, Nancy
thought irritably, ran up into a considerable sum, when one's
partner bid as madly as young Mrs. Billings bid. She was doubled,
and redoubled, and she lost and lost; Nancy saw Elsie's white
hand, with its gold pencil, daintily scoring four hundred--two
hundred--three hundred.

"I thought I might as well try it," said Mrs. Billings blithely,
"but you didn't give me much help, partner!"

"I didn't bid, you know," Nancy reminded her.

"Oh, I know you didn't--it was entirely my own fault! Well, now,
let's try again. ..."

Suddenly it seemed to Nancy all wrong--her sitting here in the
tempered summer light, playing cards throughout the afternoon.
Inherited from some conscientious ancestor, shame stirred for a
few minutes in her blood and she hated herself, and the club, and
the women she played with. This was not a woman's work in the
world. Her children scattered about their own affairs, her
household in the hands of strange women, her husband playing
another game, with other idle men, and she, the wife and mother
and manager, sitting idle, with bits of pasteboard in her hands.
She was not even at home, she was in a public club--

She laughed out, as the primitive wave of feeling brought her to
the crude analysis. It was funny--life was funny. For a few
strange minutes she felt as curiously alien to the Marlborough