"And Mamma is not--we'll say, particularly highly educated. Oh, you've been very nice to her. She adores you. You won _her_ over completely when you took so much trouble to get her the out-of-print paper novels--about the village maidens and the wicked dukes--in that idiotic Carnation Series she is always reading. The whole affair was just like both of you, I think." "But, oh, my dear--!" I laughed. "No, not one man in a thousand would have remembered it after she had said she did think the titles 'were real tasty'; and I don't believe any other man in the world would have spent a week in rummaging the second-hand bookstores, until he found them. Only I don't know, even yet, whether it was really kindness, or just cleverness that put you up to it--on account of me. And I do know that you are nice to her in pretty much the same way you were nice to the negro cook yesterday. And I have had more advantages than she's had. But at bottom I'm really just like her. You'd find it out some day. And--and that is what I mean, I think." I spoke at some length. It was atrocious nonsense which I spoke; in any event, it looked like atrocious nonsense when I wrote it down just now, and so I tore it up. But I was quite sincere throughout that moment; it is the Townsend handicap, I suspect, always to be perfectly sincere for the moment. "Oh, well!" she said; "I'll think about it." 7 That night Elena and I played bridge against Nannie Allsotts and Warwick Risby. I was very much in love with Elena, but I hold it against her, even now, that she insisted on discarding from strength. However, there was to be a little supper afterward, and you may depend upon it that Mrs. Vokins was seeing to its preparation. She came into the room about eleven o'clock, beaming with kindliness and flushed--I am sure,--by some slight previous commerce with the kitchen-fire. "Well, well!" said Mrs. Vokins, comfortably; "and who's a-beating?" I looked up. I must protest, until my final day, I could not help it. "Why, we is," I said. And Nannie Allsotts giggled, ever so slightly, and Warwick Risby had half risen, with a quite infuriate face, and I knew that by to-morrow the affair would be public property, and promptly lost the game and rubber. Afterward we had our supper. When the others had gone--for my footing in the house was such that I, by ordinary, stayed a moment or two after the others had gone,--Elena Barry-Smith came to me and soundly boxed my jaws. "That," she said, "is one way to deal with you." A minute ago I had been ashamed of myself. I had not room to be that now; I was too full of anger. "I did make rather a mess of it," I equably remarked, "but, you see, Nannie had shown strength in diamonds, and I simply couldn't resist the finesse. So they made every one of their clubs. And I hadn't any business to take the chance of course at that stage, with the ace right in my hand--"