Chapter  Thirty-one

Dummy  again.  She  seemed  to  be  dummy
often,  this  afternoon.  They  were  playing  for
quarter  cents,  but  even  that  low  stake,  Nancy
thought  irritably,  ran  up  into  a  considerable
sum,  when  one's  partner  bid  as  madly  as  young
Mrs.  Billings  bid.  She  was  doubled,  and  re-
doubled, and  she  lost  and  lost;  Nancy  saw
Elsie's  white  hand,  with  its  gold  pencil,  daintily
scoring  four  hundred — two  hundred — three  hun-
dred.
"I  thought  I  might  as  well  try  it,"  said  Mrs.
Billings  bhthely,  "but  you  didn't  give  me  much
help,  partner!"

"I  didn't  bid,  you  know,"  Nancy  reminded
her.
"Oh,  I  know  you  didn't — it  was  entirely  my
own  fault!    Well,  now,  let's  try  again.     .     .     ."

201


203  UNDERTOW

Suddenly  it  seemed  to  Nancy  all  wrong — her
sitting  here  in  the  tempered  summer  hght,
playing  cards  throughout  the  afternoon.  In-
herited from  some  conscientious  ancestor,  shame
stirred  for  a  few  minutes  in  her  blood  and  she
hated  herself,  and  the  club,  and  the  women  she
played  with.  This  was  not  a  woman's  work  in
the  world.  Her  children  scattered  about  their
own  affairs,  her  household  in  the  hands  of
strange  women,  her  husband  playing  another
game,  with  other  idle  men,  and  she,  the  wife  and
mother  and  manager,  sitting  idle,  with  bits  of
pasteboard  in  her  hands.  She  was  not  even  at
home,  she  was  in  a  public  club

She  laughed  out,  as  the  primitive  wave  of
feehng  brought  her  to  the  crude  analysis.  It
was  funny — Hfe  was  funny.  For  a  few  strange
minutes  she  felt  as  curiously  alien  to  the  Marl-
borough Gardens  Yacht  Club  as  if  she  had  been
dropped  from  another  world  on  to  its  porch.
