“You must be particularly nice to Mrs. Gregory,” Hugh told her when she was starting off for the bridge party at the exclusive Mrs. Arnold’s Fifth Avenue home. “She’s one of ‘the’ Gregorys, you know, and it will mean a great deal socially to have her good will.”
Marjorie promised. This would not be hard, for was it not her way to be particularly nice to all her own and her husband’s friends and acquaintances? It was Mrs. Gregory who gave Mrs. Hugh Benton her surprise and shock, however. At the table where she sat with three other players, including Hugh’s Mrs. Gregory, Mrs. Allen cut the cards languidly and remarked:
“Well, what shall it be? May I suggest a quarter of a cent?”
Mrs. Gregory suppressed a polite yawn.
“Oh, my dear!” was her reproof. “How can you suggest wasting our time so! You know I never play for anything less than two cents—it’s boring enough even then.”
So Marjorie Benton played for money. She had not in the least intended to, but she was too embarrassed to utter a protest. She played, and with a mind perturbed, of course, played badly. At the end of the afternoon she had lost sixty dollars. Her cheeks burned as she made out her check and laid it on the table.
All the way home as she sat comfortably in her limousine she thought of it. It wasn’t the money—sixty dollars meant nothing to Marjorie Benton—she would have felt precisely the same had she won. It was the principle of the thing that worried her—she felt utterly debased to think that she had spent an afternoon gambling. She couldn’t imagine just why it should affect her that way, unless it was her puritanical upbringing that arose to the surface, despite all her efforts to force it back.
When she told Hugh about it, he laughed, and called her a “little old-fashioned country girl.”
“Have you forgotten about ‘living in Rome,’ honey?” he said lightly. “Don’t let it upset you. You’ll get used to it!”
But Marjorie knew better. There was only one thing to do. So never again did she play bridge. Bridge bored her, she insisted, and she didn’t enjoy it.