“Well, now, that is the last place in which I should expect to find my bridge portrait.”
“Don’t you remember how Saul’s servants asked his permission to ‘seek out a man who is a cunning player’? That is exactly what I am doing. Come to the smoking room. There are two other men there, and one is a fellow countryman of yours.”
The Rev. Mr. Hare was a genial soul, a Somersetshire vicar who took his annual holiday by accepting a temporary position in some Alpine village where there was an English church. He did not dream that he was acting the part of Hermes, messenger of the gods, at that moment, for indeed his appearance on the scene just then changed the whole trend of Spencer’s actions.
“What a delightful place this is!” he went on as they walked together through a long corridor. “But what is the matter with the people? They don’t mix. I would not have believed that there were so many prigs in the British Isles.”
Some such candid opinion had occurred to Spencer; but, being an American, he thought that perhaps he might be mistaken. “The English character is somewhat adaptable to environment, I have heard. That is why you send out such excellent colonists,” he said.
“Doesn’t that go rather to prove that everybody here should be hail fellow well met?”
“Not at all. They take their pose from the Alps,—snow, glaciers, hard rock, you know,—that is the subtlety of it.”
The vicar laughed. “You have given me a new point of view,” he said. “Some of them are slippery customers too. Yes, one might carry the parallel a long way. But here we are. Now, mind you cut me as a partner. I have tried the others, and found them severely critical—as bridge players. You look a stoic.”
The vicar had his wish. Spencer and he opposed a man from Pittsburg, named Holt, and Dunston, an Englishman.
While the latter was shuffling the cards for Hare’s deal he said something that took one, at least, of his hearers by surprise. “Bower has turned up, I see. What has brought him to the Engadine at this time of year I can’t guess, unless perhaps he is interested in a pretty face.”