"It's your lead, if you don't mind," says A very distinctly. "You have made only one false start out of a possible three. Try again." I pretend not to hear this sarcasm, and, just to show him that there is life in the old dog yet, I lead my ace of spades.
"Look here, my dear sir!" says A, quite upset by now. "Only one hand ago you refused spades and trumped them. That revoking on your part gives us three tricks and we throw up the hand."
"Fair enough," I retort cheerfully, "three is just what you bid, isn't it? Quite a coincidence, I call it," and with that I throw my cards on the table with considerable relief. Nothing good could have come of this hand, even if we had played until midnight.
From all sides now arose the familiar sounds of the post-mortem: "I had the jack, 10, 9, and 7, all good, but I just couldn't get in with them.... If you had only led me your king, we could have set them at least two.... I knew that Grace had the queen, but I didn't dare try to finesse.... We had simple honors.... As soon as I saw you leading spades, I knew that there was nothing in it," etc., etc.
But at our table there was no post-mortem. Not because there had been no death, but there seemed to be nothing to say about it. So we sat, marking down our scores, until Dora came up behind me and said: "Well, dear, how is your game coming on?"
As no one else seemed about to speak, I said: "Oh, finely, I'm getting the hang of it in no time."
My partner muttered something about hanging being too good, which seemed a bit uncalled for.
And so I went through the evening, meeting new people and making new friends. And, owing to Dora's having neglected to teach me the details of score keeping, I had to make a system up for myself, with the result that I finished the evening with a total of 15,000 points on my card and won the first prize.
"Beginner's luck," I called it with modest good nature.
One of the necessary qualifications of an efficient business man in these days of industrial literature seems to be the ability to write, in clear and idiomatic English, a 1,000-word story on how efficient he is and how he got that way. A glance through any one of our more racy commercial magazines will serve nicely to illustrate my point, for it was after glancing through one of them only five minutes ago that the point suggested itself to me.