Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/108

 kinds I abominate; there is a new school of humour which fancies that it has been very clever when people of better breeding would only say that it had been unpardonably rude. Spenworth? Exactly! You could not have chosen a better example. And games of this kind always end in one way. . . “Surely,” I pleaded, “we need not run the risk of hurting any one’s feelings. If you take people who are known to us all by reputation. . .” “Oh, it’s much more fun this way,” I was assured by Will. “And there’s no need for any one to be offended; all the questions are about good qualities—charm and eloquence and so forth. If you think I have no charm, shove down a nought; that’s much better than having ‘Bad temper’ and being given ten marks for it by everybody. I’ll start, anyway, to give you all confidence.” I ought to have resisted more strongly, but I could not let them feel that I was what Will calls a “wet blanket” to everything they proposed. Already they had abandoned cards and interrupted their dancing out of deference to me. . . We began to play, and I confess that I found the game mercilessly tiresome. Imagine! A list of thirty or forty questions, which you had to answer fourteen or fifteen