Sometimes on trains or boats there are signs like this: “Beware the Professional Gambler; He is Smarter Than You.” This is romantic. But it is not the type of romance which appeals to most young women, and as a rule they ignore the signs and play bridge. On the chance that you do not know your Dreiser, I shall attempt to describe the requisite technique.
Carrie is sitting forlornly in her chair in the Pullman, with a closed Red Book in her lap. Sunk in the crack of the chair is a discarded College Comics. She doesn’t want to buy another magazine; she wishes the man with the cap would stop bothering her with Eskimo Pies and perfume, and bananas and paper-backed novels. The train smells sooty. Large hard balls of soot keep falling into her lap. Outside the window is the same yellowed field that she has been watching all day. It twists and presents various corners to the passing train, but it’s the same field just the same, with the same wheat lining up into orderly ranks that fall apart into chaos as the train passes on. Twenty more hours and nothing left to think about....
You walk down the aisle, staggering as the train sways. She looks at you idly. You are tall and skinny, and when she sees that you are beginning to get bald, she loses interest. At the same time you see her. You have been looking for her ever since she passed through the club car on her way from lunch: you like them small and blonde and young when there are no tall and blonde and snappy ones. Stop by her chair and smile at her.
“Would you like to join a party at bridge, if I can start a game?” you ask. Her first impulse is to refuse; not from caution, but from inertia. It’s the same feeling that made her turn down the man with the cap on his last journey when she really wanted a bar of Hershey’s. But as she shakes her head she changes her mind. Bridge! Something to do!
“Why—yes, I guess so.” And she giggles a little, from shyness.
“Good! I’ll get someone else and be back in a minute.” But you return with bad tidings. Everyone else is already playing.
“I guess we got the idea too late,” you announce, sitting down in the next seat. “I wish I’d thought of it before. There was an old fellow in the back that asked me this morning, but he was getting off at Chicago. Isn’t that where you got on? How far are you going?”
“Colorado. I’m going to get off this train at La Junta.” Whistle.
“You have pretty near as long a ride as I have. I go clear across. Tiresome, isn’t it? I ought to be used to it, but I never am, somehow.”
“What do you do?”