Peter Glover's room over the hardware store and trying to look as if
he didn't hold three aces,--in fact, giving absolutely no sign of it
beyond the wild flush in his face and the fact that his hair stands
on end.

That kind of reticence is a thing you simply have to learn in
banking. I mean, if you've got to be in a position where you know for
a fact that the Mariposa Packing Company's account is overdrawn by
sixty-four dollars, and yet daren't say anything about it, not even
to the girls that you play tennis with,--I don't say, not a casual
hint as a reference, but not really tell them, not, for instance,
bring down the bank ledger to the tennis court and show them,--you
learn a sort of reticence and self-control that people outside of
banking circles never can attain.

Why, I've known Pupkin at the Fireman's Ball lean against the wall in
his dress suit and talk away to Jim Eliot, the druggist, without
giving the faintest hint or indication that Eliot's note for
twenty-seven dollars had been protested that very morning. Not a hint
of it. I don't say he didn't mention it, in a sort of way, in the
supper room, just to one or two, but I mean there was nothing in the
way he leant up against the wall to suggest it.

But, however, I don't mention that as either for or against Mr.
Pupkin. That sort of thing is merely the A B C of banking, as he
himself told me when explaining why it was that he hesitated to
divulge the exact standing of the Mariposa Carriage Company. Of
course, once you get past the A B C you can learn a lot that is
mighty interesting.