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Updated: May 27, 2025
"That is so kind of you." Lord Mistletoe was a young man about thirty, less in stature than his father or uncle, but with the same handsome inexpressive face. Almost all men take to some line in life. His father was known as a manager of estates; his uncle as a whist-player; he was minded to follow the steps of his grandfather and be a statesman.
He wagged his head at his sister-in-law, and rubbed his hands together exultantly. "For once you'll have to admit I can play bridge." "For once," she conceded, as she moved toward the table. "You're still nothing more than a whist-player, yet had it not been for the honor score, you'd have beaten us disgracefully. One is fortunate when one has the honor score in one's favor."
But I despise a man who makes a business of his pleasures. When I hear that this man is the best whist-player in London, and that man the best billiard-player, I always know that they can do nothing else, and then I despise them." "You needn't despise me, because I do nothing well," said he, as he got up to take his leave. "I do so hope you'll get the seat, and win the Derby."
One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation. If you are in for the high jump, either jump higher than any one else, or manage somehow to pretend that you have done so. If you want to succeed at whist, either be a good whist-player, or play with marked cards.
But I am so weak that I return to it again and again, as a smoker does to his brier-wood. I feel partly vexed and partly sorry for myself when I realize that I cannot play I can only win. I have seen men win very superior girls, but they have done it in a manner which would disgust a good whist-player.
'I learnt my whist too late, he would say, with more pathos and solemnity, perhaps, than he would have used when speaking of more momentous matters of omission. He must be a wise man indeed who, being an habitual whist-player, is aware that he is a bad one.
The French could boast a regimental system, and chiefs who held them as the whist-player his hand of cards. Had we a better general than the Archduke Charles? or cavalry and artillery equal to the Hungarian? or drilled infantry numbering within eighty thousand of the Boulogne- Wimereux camps? We had nothing but the raw material of courage pluck, and no science.
Trained to business from boyhood, he had allowed it to become his life, and he took it very seriously. It was to him an absorbing game his vocation, and not a means to some ulterior end. He had already accumulated enough to maintain his family in affluence, but he no more thought of retiring from trade than would a veteran whist-player wish to throw up a handful of winning cards.
The French could boast a regimental system, and chiefs who held them as the whist-player his hand of cards. Had we a better general than the Archduke Charles? or cavalry and artillery equal to the Hungarian? or drilled infantry numbering within eighty thousand of the Boulogne-Wimereux camps? We had nothing but the raw material of courage pluck, and no science.
Of this Metternich was a striking example. If benevolent Nature ever intended a man for a whist-player one would have supposed that she had done so in his case, but had been baffled by some malign Destiny which had degraded him to that class by whom, in conjunction with Kings, it was fondly believed, previously to the recent general election, that 'the world was governed. Until late in life he never took to whist, when he grew wildly fond of it, and played incessantly, till it is said a certain memorable event took place which caused him never to touch a card again.
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