“That’s a little difficult to explain, isn’t it, if you don’t know anything about the game? Don’t you play cards at all?”
“Mother won’t have them in the house. We have ‘Quartettes,’ but they are different. ... Can you lose much at shilling points?”
“A fair amount, if you’re unlucky, but you can win it, too! I generally do win, as a matter of fact!”
“What is the most you ever lost in a night?”
Geoffrey grimaced expressively.
“Sixty pounds; but I was a fool, and doubled no trumps on a risky hand, on the chance of making the rubber. That was quite an exceptional drop!”
“I should hope so, indeed!” Elma’s horror was genuinely unassumed. “Sixty pounds! Why, it’s more than many a poor family has to live on all the year round! Think of all the good you could do with sixty pounds! It seems awful to lose it on cards in one evening!”
“The next sixty pounds I win, I’ll give to a workmen’s charity! Will that wipe away my offence?”
Elma was not at all sure that it would. Money won in unworthy fashion could never bring with it a blessing, according to Mrs Ramsden’s theories. She shook her head sadly, and ventured another question.
“You go to races, too, don’t you?”