"Mother told me a week or so ago. She'd been recognized. Shortly after I married, when she found out how the women played bridge and poker here, she made me promise I'd never touch a card, never play any sort of gambling game. I promised readily enough, and I thought nothing of her insistence. Maman was old-fashioned in many ways--I mean the life we lived in. Rouen was so different from this that I could understand how many things would shock her. I never thought about it--but--it was about six months ago--you were away for a week and I stayed with Polly Roberts at the Fairmont. I knew of course that she played and that Aileen and a lot of the others did, but I hadn't given the matter a thought. One heard nothing but bridge, bridge, bridge. I was sick of the word. "But I found they played poker. Polly and Aileen, Alice Thorndyke, Janet Maynard, Mary Kimball, Nick Doremus, Rex and one or two other men who could get off in the afternoons. "I never had dreamed any one in society played for such high stakes. Janet Maynard and Mary Kimball could afford it, but Polly and Alice and Aileen couldn't. Still they often won--enough, anyhow, to clean up and go on. Doremus is a wonderful player. That is how I got interested, watching him after he had explained the game to me. "It was a long time before I was persuaded to take a hand. It was so interesting just to watch. And not only the game, but their faces. Some would have a regular 'poker face,' others would give themselves away. Once Aileen had the most awful hysterics. We were afraid some one outside would hear her; the deadening was burnt out of the walls of the Fairmont at the time of the fire. But we were in the middle room of the suite. "Nick told her in his dreadful cold expressionless voice that if she ever did that again he'd never play another game with her. That meant that they'd all drop her, and she came to and promised, and she kept her word. Poker is the breath of life to her. I think she'd become a drug fiend if she couldn't have it. "At last they persuaded me to play. We were playing at Nick's, and after a light dinner served by his Jap, we went right on playing until midnight. I never thought of you or anything. I seemed to respond with every nerve in my body and brain. I won and won and won, and even when I lost I didn't mind. The sensation, the tearing excitement just under a perfectly cool brain was wonderful. "I only ceased to enjoy it when I realized what it meant. When I couldn't keep away from it. When I lived for the hour when we would meet,--at Polly's, or at Nick's or at Aileen's--any of the places where we were supposed to be dancing, but where there was no danger of being found out. Of course I dared not have them at home, and the others lived with their families, or had too many servants.... "I came fully to my senses one day when Nick told me I was a born gambler if ever there was one. Then, when I realized, I became desperately unhappy.