silver-grizzled hair that fitted close like a cap, curling in a silver
brim above his ears.

He was talking about his business as if more than anything it amused him.

"There's nothing gross and material about stock-broking. It's like pure
mathematics. You're dealing in abstractions, ideal values, all the time.
You calculate--in curves." His hand, holding the unlit cigar, drew a
curve, a long graceful one, in mid-air. "You know what's going to happen
all the time.

"... The excitement begins when you don't quite know and you risk it; when
it's getting dangerous.

"... The higher mathematics of the game. If you can afford them; if you
haven't a wife and family--I can see the fascination...."

He sat holding his cigar in one hand, looking at it without seeing it,
seeing the fascination and smiling at it, amused and secure.

And her mother, bending over her bead-work, smiled too, out of their
happiness, their security.

He would lean back, smoking his cigar and looking at them out of
contented, half-shut eyes, as they stitched, one at each end of the long
canvas fender stool. He was waiting, he said, for the moment when their
heads would come bumping together in the middle.

Sometimes they would sit like that, not exchanging ideas, exchanging only
the sense of each other's presence, a secure, profound satisfaction that