SOME LADIES OF THE OLD SCHOOL. 519 not tmf requently triumphed over the restraints of decorum, as well as over the rules of the game. There were high- born dowagers, with whom it was a costly honor to play. Nor were losses always borne with equanimity. A writer of the last century relates a terrific scene which he wit- nessed in a London drawing-room. ' Two elderly ladies were seated at a table, playing for pretty high stakes. Without going near them, it was easy to tell which was losing and which was winning, from the expression of their faces. At length, the game suddenly ended in a crushing disaster for one of them. The author describes the sweet and pleasant manner in which the gamester of fifty years' standing bore her loss. " Her face," he says, " was of a universal crimson: and tears of rage seemed ready to start into her eyes. At that moment, as Satan would have it, her opponent, a dowager whose hair and eyebrows were as white as those of an Albiness, triumphantly and briskly demanded pay- ment for the two black aces. " ' Two black aces ! ' answered the loser in a voice almost unintelligible by passion. 'Here, take the money; though, instead, I wish I could give you two black eyes, you old white cat ! ' accompanying the wish with a ges- ture that threatened a possibility of its execution. The stately, starched old lady, wdio, in her eagerness to receive her winnings, had half risen from her chair, sunk back into it as though she had really received the blow. She literally closed her eyes and opened her mouth, and for several moments thus remained fixed by the magnitude of her horror." "We hear a good deal about the high-breeding and invincible politeness of the old time. There was more ceremony ; there was more deference paid by poor to rich, by employed to employer, by commoner to lord, by citizens to their public servants ; but after a wide survey of the
