Bridge without stakes was not much of a game, in Dare’s opinion; but he was obliged to acknowledge that Blanche Maitland played remarkably well. He had never seen a girl play with such skill; and she held good cards. They were partners. This might have been due to chance, since they cut; but he had a suspicion that Mrs Carruthers manipulated the cards. She was clever enough, and deep enough, to do it, he reflected.
He did his best to oblige her in the matter of being agreeable; but, as he complained to her later, when discussing the evening after the guests had left, had he been the vainest of men he could not have flattered himself that he had created a favourable impression in the quarter in which she insisted he should exert his powers of fascination.
“She thought me a stick,” he said. “I’m not at all comfortably assured in my mind that she didn’t think me a fool. I had an exhausting time racking my brain for agreeable conversation. She wouldn’t help me. It isn’t a ha’p’orth of use, my dear, trying to interest me in these sphinx-like young women with no small talk. You said she wasn’t clever.”
“She isn’t.”
“You are mistaken. No one who isn’t clever dare be so deadly dull. She is profound. I don’t think I like your selection of a wife.”
“You can’t judge on a first acquaintance like that,” she insisted.
“There you are entirely out. All my loves have been at first sight.”
“Then why haven’t you married one of them?”
“Because they have all been provided with husbands,” he answered. “When it is a matter of transgressing the moral law, one naturally hesitates.”
“You seem singularly unfortunate,” Mrs Carruthers observed sarcastically. “I believe you have only been in love once in your life. You are true to that first love still.”