For some little time I shrank from this course. To pry into their past was bad enough, but to attempt to look into their future, which even Time has the decency to keep covered for a while, seemed positively immoral, an action compared with which the publication of a man’s love-letters was a mark of friendship. It was not long, however, before I had stifled this feeling by some sophistry about warning them of dangers and so forth; and so I proceeded to satisfy my curiosity. As I shuffled and laid out the cards, I saw myself as the sinister magician of lurid fiction, and relished the part. I had only to take up the cards and the stage was set for great dramas, bravely tricked out in crimson and sable for one secret spectator. If this is not puissance, then where is it to be found among men? What were books when one could spell out the narrative of the cards, and make each friend in turn the hero or heroine of the pictured story. Or if books were to continue, what magnificent plots could be evolved from these strange combinations of coloured paste-board! But if, through the cards, my own existence had assumed brave proportions, though everywhere smirched by villainy, that of my friends was no less highly-coloured and crowded with incident. As I ranged the cards, and spied into the secret life, past and future, of one friend after another, I was dumbfounded, aghast at my former ignorance. Men who had been hidden away, for the last twenty years, in college rooms and lecture-halls, whose outward existence had appeared as smooth and unruffled as the immemorial lawns outside their windows, now seemed to be moving in a violent Elizabethan drama. They made love to dark ladies, and were in turn adored by fair ones; they lost and gained great sums of money, aroused the jealousy of dark men, wrecked innumerable homes, and lived in a constant whirl of good and evil tidings, sea-voyages, railway journeys, and strong passions. Here was a set of men who had been living like this (and were to go on doing so) for years, and yet I, who counted myself as one of their friends, had been kept in ignorance. What consummate actors!--to present an unruffled front to the world, and even to their friends, and yet all the while to know, in secret, a life that resembled nothing so much as a thunderstorm. Could such things be? In truth, I came, in the end, to doubt the cards.