To many people wholly free from superstition, except that, after
spilling the salt, they are careful to throw a little over the left
shoulder, and do not go out of their way to walk under ladders, and are
not improved in appetite by sitting thirteen at table, and much prefer
that may should not be brought into the house--to these people,
otherwise so free from superstition, it would perhaps be surprising to
know what great numbers of their fellow-creatures resort daily to such
black arts as fortune-telling by the cards.
Yet quite respectable, God-fearing, church-going old ladies, and
probably old gentlemen too, treasure this practice, to say nothing of
younger and therefore naturally more frivolous folk; and many make the
consultation of the two and fifty oracles a morning habit.
And particularly women. Those well-thumbed packs of cards that we know
so well are not wholly dedicated to "Patience," I can assure you.
All want to be told the same thing: what the day will bring forth. But
each searcher into the dim and dangerous future has, of course,
individual methods--some shuffling seven times and some ten, and so
forth, and all intent upon placating the elfish goddess, Caprice. There
is little Miss Banks, for example, but I must tell you about her.
Nothing would induce little Miss Banks to leave the house in the morning
without seeing what the cards promised her, and so open and
impressionable are her mind and heart that she is still interested in
the colour of the romantic fellow whom the day, if kind, is to fling
across her path. The cards, as you know, are great on colours, all men
being divided into three groups: dark (which has the preference), fair,
and middling. Similarly for you, if you can get little Miss Banks to
read your fate (but you must of course shuffle the pack yourself) there
are but three kinds of charmers: dark (again the most fascinating and to
be desired), fair, and middling.
It is great fun to watch little Miss Banks at her necromancy. She takes
it so earnestly, literally wrenching the future's secrets from their
lair.
"A letter is coming to you from some one," she says. "An important
letter."