Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/132

 gested a scheme for combining a husband's golf and his wife's bridge score; but George Chaden had a better idea, and one much more applicable to the unmarried; any girl or woman, to be eligible for a bridge prize on Saturday, had to qualify by making a certain golf score during the five days previous; but if she didn't golf, she could—under certain elaborately amusing rules—get a man to qualify her.

Marjorie honestly attempted to become interested but she could not; what filled her mind was amazement that fripperies like these had previously fascinated her and that the planning and performing of them had given her satisfaction. To chatter at teas with girls as like as possible to herself; to dine between two men who had passed the tests of admission to your set; to play bridge with them, sometimes gambling mildly; golf with the same ones and, in the same company, perhaps motor; to go down town in your limousine—or in a neighbor's—to spend two hours weekly in winter in one of the seats in orchestra hall, to which your mother subscribed every year, listening to a Tschaikowsky overture and French and Italian concertos; to sit, also in carefully selected, subscribed-for seats surrounded by your own set, one night a week for the ten weeks of "opera"; to go with your mother or with Clara or Elsie to pick out dress materials at Field's or pick up something ready made in a Michigan Avenue shop; otherwise to spend your days dropping in on your neighbors, or receiving them when they dropped in on you, or idling along Davis Street unless somebody like Lord Dunsany or Tagore had been captured for the afternoon's sensation at the Woman's Club, in which case you'd drop in to look at him and hear a word or two to save you the trouble of reading