"Poker chips are neither here nor there," said Sidney, in the lofty, judicial tone which she had maintained throughout the controversy. She eyed Miss Pettus, however, silently and a little severely, as she loosed several rounds of yarn from her big ball, and held them out and deliberately shook them apart at arm's length. It did not please her to hear of poker chips--or anything else of interest--through Miss Pettus or any other person. It was her own special and exclusive province to discover and distribute the news. She felt much as the editor of a great daily newspaper might feel if some casual passer-by should drop in to tell him of the day's greatest public event. "Poker chips are neither here nor there," she repeated coolly, and almost contemptuously, as one looking to larger things. "No matter what Anne Watson does, and no matter how she does it, there's one thing that you may always be sure of, Miss Pettus, and that is--that she believes she is doing right." "Who said she didn't?" retorted Miss Pettus. "Have I said anything about the right or wrong of it? I don't care anything about the right or wrong of card-playing. Some folks think one way and some another--and they may go on thinking so for all me. What I do say is that a body ought to stick to what she does believe, whatever it is, no matter whether she's a Methodist like me or a Christian like Anne." "Well--'pon my word!" exclaimed Sidney, seeing a chance for reprisal, and furtively winking the eye next to the doctor's wife. "To hear you talk, Miss Pettus, folks would think there wasn't anybody but Methodists and Christians. Where, pray, do the rest of us come in? There's Jane there--a Cumberland Presbyterian, dyed blue in the wool. Yonder's Miss Judy, an Episcopalian of the highest latitude and the greatest longitude, and a-training Doris to be just like her. And here am I--a Baptist--a Baptist born and a Baptist bred--and a Whiskey Baptist at that." "If I were you, Sidney Wendall," replied Miss Pettus, with offended dignity, "I wouldn't make fun of my own religion if I did make fun of every other earthly thing I came across. You know as well as I do, and as Jane here does, that there is no such thing as a Whiskey Baptist--and never was and never will be."