Most formally I offered her a chair by the card-table, and resumed my own chair with what I meant for an air of inhospitable abstraction. She declined the chair, preferring to stand by the table as was her custom.
"It was on this spot years ago," I said, laying down the second eight cards, "that Solon Denney first told me he was about to marry."
Discursive gossip seemed best, I thought.
"Two long yellow braids," she remarked. It would be too much to say that her words were snapped out.
"And now he has told me again—I mean that he's going to marry again."
"What did you do?" she asked more cordially, studying the cards.
"The first time I went to war," I answered absently, having to play up the ace and deuce of diamonds.
"I have never been able to care much for yellow hair," she observed, also studying the cards; "of course, it's effective, in a way, but—may I ask what you're going to do this time?"
"This time I'm going to play the game."
Again she studied the cards.