“If I’m to go to the bad place,” Miss Todd had said to Miss Baker, “because I like to do something that won’t hurt my old eyes of an evening, I don’t see the justice of it. As for calling it gambling, it’s a falsehood, and your Mr Stumfold knows that as well as I do. I haven’t won or lost ten pounds in ten years, and I’ve no more idea of making money by cards than I have by sweeping the chimney. Tell me why are cards wicked? Drinking, and stealing, and lying, and backbiting, and naughty love-making,—but especially backbiting—backbiting—backbiting,—those are the things that the Bible says are wicked. I shall go on playing cards, my dear, till Mr Stumfold can send me chapter and verse forbidding it.”

Then Miss Baker, who was no doubt weak, had been unable to answer her, and had herself hankered after the flesh-pots of Egypt and the delights of the unregenerated.

All these things Miss Baker and Miss Mackenzie discussed, and Miss Baker learned to love her younger friend in spite of her heterodox philosophy. Miss Mackenzie was going to give a tea-party,—nothing as yet having been quite settled, as there were difficulties in the way; but she propounded to Miss Baker the possibility of asking Miss Todd and some few of the less conspicuous Toddites. She had her ambition, and she wished to see whether even she might not do something to lessen the gulf which separated those who loved the pleasures of the world in Littlebath from the bosom of Mr Stumfold.

“You don’t know what you are going to do,” Miss Baker said.

“I’m not going to do any harm.”

“That’s more than you can say, my dear.” Miss Baker had learnt from Miss Todd to call her friends “my dear.”

“You are always so afraid of everything,” said Miss Mackenzie.

“Of course I am;—one has to be afraid. A single lady can’t go about and do just as she likes, as a man can do, or a married woman.”

“I don’t know about a man; but I think a single woman ought to be able to do more what she likes than a married woman. Suppose Mrs Stumfold found that I had got old Lady Ruff to meet her, what could she do to me?”

Old Lady Ruff was supposed to be the wickedest old card-player in all Littlebath, and there were strange stories afloat of the things she had done. There were Stumfoldians who declared that she had been seen through the blinds teaching her own maid piquet on a Sunday afternoon; but any horror will get itself believed nowadays. How could they have known that it was not beggar-my-neighbour? But piquet was named because it is supposed in the Stumfoldian world to be the wickedest of all games.

“I don’t suppose she’d do much,” said Miss Baker; “no doubt she would be very much offended.”

“Why shouldn’t I try to convert Lady Ruff?”

“She’s over eighty, my dear.”