BRIDGE PLAYERS.

Thames Star, Volume LXI, Issue 16940, 2 August 1927, Page 6

BRIDGE PLAYERS.

CHATTY AND OTHERWISE. “A clean hearth, a bright fire, and the rigour of the game,” 'was Mss Battle’s recipe for a good game of whist. The same component parts are needed for bridge these winter evenings. Bridge is an excellent name for the most popular game of the moment. In the past quadrille was so named, because it took four people to play; bridge is aptly called so, for it bridges strangeness between players old and young, and those awkward moments of silence, because people who are gathered together may not have any mutual interests. The fortune-telling pack is no less revealing than the bridge hand. There is the grumbler, who has a “hoo-doo,” and makes a regular oratorio of her bad luck. The arithmetician, who is so wanting in the power of keeping her score correctly that she always queries every marking; the player who gives withering glances, because her partner has not played up to the “Campbell Convention” —which is a sin—or, perhaps, some new convention, that it is a new one to the player. It is., curious to note most men play a little slower than women; but then

women are more reckless in their calling than men. Those women who play a sound game look upon “Chatty Bridge” as the greatest sin in the calendar.. So far, bridge is the only power which has managed to silence women’s tongues—even for a little while. Half the horror of a tedious day in the train is robbed of it’s boredom, when a couple of packs of cards arc* produced and a keen game of bridge makes the hours fly. Bridge is one of the greatest time-killers qver invented. It is strange in how many different ways people gather in their tricks; some make an untidy pile—then you know that either you are playing with an artist, or a woman who keeps her dressing table with all its implements in a heedless disarray, and in the kitchen the *vvrong pots are used when cooking; other women arrange their cards in a cross-cross fashion —they have usually criss-cross minds, and their temper is usually an unpleasant factor in family life; the woman who puts her tricks so that they are easily counted shows an orderly mind —she would tabulate everything in life in correct form. There are people with trick deals, who seem to flick the cards off in to four neat piles; who shuffle the cards with a masterly movement.