I take up a card. It slides against my glove. But in Sue''s hands, the deck is changed: she gathers and sorts it, shuffles and deals it, neatly and nimbly; and the golds and reds are vivid between her fingers, like so many jewels. She is astonished, of course, to learn I
cannot play; and at once makes me sit, so she may teach me. The games are things of chance and simple speculation, but she plays earnestly, almost greedily—tilting her head, narrowing her eye as she surveys her fan of cards. When I grow tired, she plays alone— or else, will stand the cards upon their ends and tilt their tips together, and from doing this many times will build a rising structure, a kind of pyramid of cards—always keeping back, for the top-most point, a king and a queen.
''Look here,'' she says, when she has finished. ''Look here, miss. Do you see?'' Then she will ease a card from the pyramid''s foundation; and as the structure topples, she will laugh.
She will laugh. The sound is as strange, at Briar, as I imagine it must be in a prison or a church. Sometimes, she will sing. Once we talk of dancing. She rises and lifts her skirt, to show me a step. Then she pulls me to my feet, and turns and turns me; and I feel, where she presses against me, the quickening beat of her heart—I feel it pass from her to me and become mine.