Too Cool to Bluff

On today’s errand walk, another sudden lyric occurrence, in isolation, apart from the song, leaving me wondering.
She was too pat to open and too cool to bluff
If you follow that link, you’ll find I got a lot more than I bargained for. After some preliminaries, there’s a lengthy excerpt from my old haunt The Well, where (notimetohate), writes:

My take on “She was too pat to open and too cool to bluff” is that he could tell she was satisfied with where she was at and she wasn’t going to initiate a conversation/friendship with him. And he could tell if he started it, that he couldn’t match what she had and would have to bluff, but knew that wouldn’t work with her.

Then (mellobelle), whom I met when I visited Lexington, KY in 2004, and who is totally cool, said:

Scarlet Begonias has my favorite woman in it of all the women in the Dead oeuvre. She’s cool, she’s together, she’s so confident and not afraid of drawing attention to herself, she wears scarlet begonias in her hair and bells on her shoes. She has no need of the singer, has that exactly right. Altho’, I think she enjoys his company for the evening, but when the evening ends, she’s done with him. And she doesn’t fake her interest. (Too cool to bluff)

There’s more, lots more. Craig Dudley starts with a poker game explanation, goes on to write 1,300 words full of interpretive wisdom, and wraps up with:

That’s what I see in the song: A description of a relationship gone bad, but also the singer’s realization that it’s okay for relationships to go bad–it doesn’t mean that one (or both) of the people had to be a bad person. Innocence isn’t lost just because we make choices and choose to be ourselves, even when it might lead to conflict or loss of love.

More perspectives than you could shake a stick at. If I try to do a gender inversion on the characters in the song my brain locks up and goes blank, pointing toward a huge opportunity for learning.
….in the strangest of places if you look at it right….