One Friday, when I was confined to my room with a touch of neuralgia (it was in my face, if you are interested, and the whole right side swelled up until it was twice its normal size--I'd like to tell you more about it some time), I could hear the sounds of carnival going on downstairs. The noises made by women playing bridge are distinctive. At first the listener is aware of a sort of preliminary conversational murmur, with a running accompaniment of shuffling pasteboards. Then follows an unnatural quiet, punctuated by the thud of jeweled knuckles or the clank of bracelets as the cards are played against the baize, with now and then little squeals of dismay or delight from some of the more demonstrative and an occasional "Good for you, partner!" from an appreciative dummy. Gradually, as the hand draws toward its close, there begins a low sound, like the murmurings of the stage mob in the wings, which rapidly increases, until the room is filled with a shrill chatter, resembling that in the Bird House in Central Park, from which there is distinguishable merely a wild medley: "If you had led me your queen--was so afraid she might trump in with--my dear, I didn't have a face card in my--threw away just the wrong--had the jack, 10, 9, and 7--thought Alice had the king--ace and three little ones--how about honors?--my dear, _simply_ frightful--if you had returned my lead--my _dear_!" This listening in at bridge, however, was the nearest I had ever been to the front, until it came time for the Friday Afternoon Club to let down the bars and have a Men's Night. I had no illusions about this "Men's Night," but it was a case of my learning to play bridge and accompanying Dora, or of her getting some man in from off the sidewalk to take my place, and I figured that it would cause less talk if I were there to play myself. As I think it over now, I feel that the strange-man scheme might have worked out with less comment being made than my playing drew down. But it was for this purpose that I allowed myself to be instructed in the rudiments of bridge. I had nothing permanent in mind in absorbing these principles, fully expecting to forget them again the day after the party. I miscalculated by about one day, it now seems. The expert, whose article has been such an inspiration to me, had some neat little diagrams drawn for him, showing just where the cards lay in the four hands, and with the players indicated as A, B, Y, and Z; apparently the same people, come up in the world, who, in our algebras some years ago, used to buy and sell apples to each other with feverish commercialism and to run races with all sorts of unfair handicaps. What a small world it is, after all! It seems to me, therefore, that, since this is a pretty fairly technical article, it might be well if I were to utilize the same diagrammatic device and terse method of description, to show the exact course of the first hand in which I participated at the party.