A few months ago the poor lady died and a well-known bridge wag in New York composed for her the following epitaph:
“Here lies Lily Maltravers,
In confident expectation of
The last trump.”
A delightful bridge player is Mrs. R. U. Rich, who, though stone deaf, still manages to understand the declarations, or makes, by an elaborate series of manual signs. In playing with her, if the make is a heart, you must point to your heart; diamonds, to your ring; spades, you must make a shovel of your hand, and, when clubs have been declared, you must shake your fist at her. The other evening at a fashionable house in New York she was playing a rubber in which her husband was her partner. It was after a large dinner and, Mrs. Rich, having mistaken her husband’s signal, excitedly asked him what trump had been declared. At this, her better half shook his fist at her two or three times in a very convincing way. An elderly lady, on the other side of the room, unaware of Mrs. Rich’s infirmity, gathered her dress about her and, with great dignity, begged the host to send for her carriage.
“Why, Mrs. ——,” he said, “are you leaving us so early?”
“Well,” said the lady of the old school, “I think that when a husband and wife come to blows over the bridge table it is time to call the carriages.”
A reduced gentlewoman, living in a small way in the suburbs, was at an employment agency trying to secure a cook. As the lady and her husband lived some distance from any neighbor, and as the wages she could afford to pay were meager, the cooks displayed a decided unwillingness to assume the cares of office.
Finally, to the great elation of the lady, a very respectable and well-mannered English girl seemed disposed to risk the rigors of suburban life. The searching questions which the girl had put to the lady had been satisfactorily answered, when, at the very last, she asked the number in the family, to which the lady replied that there were only two—herself and her husband.
“Oh!” said the girl, “I could not think of going into service with only three in the house. I would not work anywhere unless we could make up a four at bridge.”