Archie shook hands, and then his eyes went back to Helena again. She had never looked more entrancingly pretty, but she was made of wood. And then Jessie came in; they were all there, and dinner was ready, and down they went. In this wooden world, everything went on in precisely the same way as it had done when people were made of flesh and blood. Some cunning mechanical contrivance enabled them to talk and smile and eat: food tasted the same and so did the champagne in which presently they drank Helena's health. It was the same prickly, bubbly stuff, with a little sting in it, that he so seldom drank. But it unfroze the surface of the stricture that bound him, as when the first stir of a thawing wind moistens the surface of ice. He began to feel again, to be conscious that somewhere within him was a deep well of the waters of pain. But anything was better than that cataleptic insensibility, which was like being unconscious, and, all the time, knowing that he was unconscious. They were not going out that night, and after dinner they sat down to a rubber of bridge, in which as usual Helena took Archie as a partner, because she always insisted that she could form some idea of the principles on which he played, whereas the other two but wandered in a starless and Cimmerian gloom when mated with him. But Helena claimed that her spiritual affinity with Archie enabled her to perceive that, when he declared hearts, he wished her to understand that he hadn't got any, and that she would do well to declare something different. "Bridge, properly understood," Archie had enunciated once, "is a form of poker: you must bewilder and terrify your adversary. And then the fun begins, and you get fined." What added to the hilarity was the concentrated seriousness which Jessie and her partner brought to bear on the game, and the miser's greed and avaricious eye with which Jessie was popularly supposed to see her score mounting. All these jokes, these squibs of light-hearted nonsense, were there to-night, but there was nothing behind them. It was as if they were spoken from habit; a frigid rehearsal of some pithless drama was going on; they were tinsel flowers stuck into arid and seedless ground, and sprang no longer from the warm earth.