I had a good opinion of my whist, though how I arrived at it I cannot explain. Henderson was my partner and he seemed to me to do the most odd things. For instance when I led a spade and he took the trick, instead of leading another spade he would begin some fresh suit, which made me wonder what in the world he was doing. And he did not seem to think his trumps half as valuable as I thought mine, but just led them whenever he felt inclined. When Nina, Foster and I played whist it was considered pretty bad form to lead trumps when we had anything else to lead, and we kept them for a big outburst at the finish. I pitied myself considerably for having Henderson as a partner, and I was very surprised to see Murray doing the same odd sort of things. So at the end of one rubber Foster and I played together, but I cannot say that we had much luck, and just at the end I made a revoke which Murray was brute enough to notice. When Henderson had gone I said that he seemed to be a rare good sort, but it was a pity he did not know a little more about whist. I hoped Murray would take that remark partly to himself, because at the end of every hand he had talked to Henderson about what might have happened if he had led a different card, and sometimes he even went on jawing when he had got his fresh hand, which quite put me off my game. But all Murray did was to laugh, while Foster said to me that he was afraid our way of playing whist was all wrong, and I had some difficulty in persuading him that it was not. Then Murray said something about reading Cavendish carefully, but I had heard some one say that Cavendish was out of date, so I borrowed this man's opinion and expressed it as my own, which amused Murray so much that if I had not been sorry for him I believe I should have lost my temper.
At last, however, we stopped discussing whist, and after I had made Foster and Murray swear they would tell no one else, I gave them an account of Owen coming to see me. Before I began Foster declared that the reason I bound them to keep my secret was because I wanted to tell it to every one myself. In fact he expected the whole thing to be some miserable little affair, for I had a habit, which I have since abandoned, of extracting the most terrific promises of secrecy from my friends and then telling them something which they did not think as important as I did. I started that game because I had once told something really funny to a lot of fellows at Cliborough, and they went and spread it about so quickly that I could never find any one else who did not know it, which was simply nothing less than a fraud.