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“How about a little game of rummy?”

“Carrie, get the cards,” Felman answered, in quick tones of bright relief. “Carl will play—he always was a rummy shark and he never changes in anything. Such a stubborn boy! I bet you that forty years from now he’ll be just as foolish as he ever was.”

“Your optimism concerning the length of my life intrigues me,” said Carl.

Ten-cent pieces were placed on the table and the cards were shuffled. To the other two men the card game would have lacked interest without the money to be battled for, not because of the tiny gain involved, but because their desires for relaxation were lacking in spontaneity and needed the pettily deliberate strokes of a familiar whip to encourage their birth. Whenever, on rare occasions, they romped upon some lawn, tossing a ball to a child, or read the lurid clumsinesses of some magazine, they showed a sheepish hesitation and hazily felt that they were wasting time that belonged to the shrewd importance of barter and exchange. The presence of a coin upon a table, however, held a glint of the missing coquette. They swore elaborately and interminably at lost hands—“that queen would have given it to me”—flung down the paper oblongs with a tense elation when they were winning, and enjoyed the presence of a milder but still keen market-place. The gambling instinct is never anything more than the desire to seduce an artificial uncertainty from a life that has grown mildewed and prearranged—the monotone must be circumvented with little, straining devices. It pleased Carl to imitate the motions of the other two men, outwitting them at their own small game while still remaining a repulsed bystander, and sneaking a morsel of enjoyment from their genuine dismay at some defeat. After several games had been played the father yawned mightily, creating a noise that sounded like a Mississippi River steamboat whistle heard at a distance, poignant and full-throated. Perhaps with this yawn his soul signaled a complaint against the disgrace which this day had cast upon it—a nightly remonstrance unheard by his mind and heart. Levy, subdued and impressed by Carl’s card-playing abilities, pelted him with commonplaces which he tried to make as genial as possible, and Carl, too sleepy to be belligerent or aloof, gave him softly vague responses. Mrs. Felman, for the first time, looked out with heavy peace from behind the crinkling newspaper where she had been placidly nibbling at the perfumed logics of a latest divorce scandal. Her son had finally redeemed the evening by exhibiting a small but ordinary proficiency which drew him a little nearer to the dully efficient level of mankind, and her reflections upon his material future became a shade less hopeless.