These games may be divided broadly into two classes; namely,
paper games and guessing games. The initial disadvantage of the
paper game is that pencils have to be found for everybody;
generally a difficult business. Once they are found, there is no
further trouble until the game is over, when the pencils have to
be collected from everybody; generally an impossible business. If
you are a guest in the house, insist upon a paper game, for it
gives you a chance of acquiring a pencil; if you are the host,
consider carefully whether you would not rather play a guessing
game.
But the guessing game has one great disadvantage too. It demands
periodically that a member of the company should go out by
himself into the hall and wait there patiently until his
companions have "thought of something." (It may be supposed that
he, too, is thinking of something in the cold hall, but perhaps
not liking to say it.) However careful the players are,
unpleasantness is bound to arise sometimes over this preliminary
stage of the game. I knew of one case where the people in the
room forgot all about the lady waiting in the hall and began to
tell each other ghost stories. The lights were turned out, and
sitting round the flickering fire the most imaginative members of
the household thrilled their hearers with ghostly tales of the
dead. Suddenly, in the middle of the story of Torfrida of the
Towers--a lady who had strangled her children, and ever
afterwards haunted the battlements, headless, and in a night-
gown--the door opened softly, and Miss Robinson entered to ask
how much longer they would be.
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