I

“Who expects to have fun for forty cents?” I ask her.

“But she can’t never win,” says the Missus.

“That’s right!” I says. “I forgot that part of it. It’s the feminine plungers that grabs all the coin. What do you say if I and you take all your winnin’s o’ the last two years and go downtown some evenin’ and buy a fountain-pen filler?”

They’s six of us that usually gets together two or three nights a week at our house or the Hatches’ or Tuttles’. Nothin’s ever said about card playin’ when the invitation’s issued. For instance, Mrs. Tuttle calls up Mrs. Hatch and my wife along in the afternoon and asks ’em to come over that evenin’ and bring their keepers and listen to the new records Joe brought home yesterday. So we go and set round a while, expressin’ admiration o’ “ Poor Butterfly ” and “ Wackie Hickie ” and “ My Honolulu Hop-Eater ,” till Hatch can’t stand it no longer.

“How about a little friendly game?” he says.

“Maybe the rest don’t feel like playin’,” says Mrs. Hatch.

Then I say:

“What’s the use o’ concealin’ the hellish purpose for which this party was got up?”

So then we all beat it to the dinin’ room, where they keep the other table, and Mrs. Tuttle brings along a ten-cent deck o’ the papes, and a box o’ checks, half o’ which is missin’ on account o’ little Joe and Millicent havin’ either bit em’ in two or rolled ’em under the piano.

Then the argument comes up about how much the checks’ll be worth.

“Let’s have ’em a nickel apiece,” says Mrs. Hatch, figurin’ that that way she’ll only lose twenty cents instead o’ forty.