A fashionable young woman plays a game of cards with an officer in an elegant interior, while another man offers her a pipe. Images of card-players and smokers in taverns and brothels where soldiers and female prostitutes meet had a long tradition in Netherlandish art. The amorous context is suggested by the lady's foot-warmer, a utilitarian object but also a symbol of the lovelorn man who seeks to satisfy a woman by subjecting himself to her will.