IV

She remembered the conversation. Her father sitting, straight and slender, in his chair, talking in that quiet voice of his that never went sharp or deep or quavering, that paused now and then on an amused inflection, his long lips straightening between the perpendicular grooves of his smile. She loved his straight, slender face, clean-shaven, the straight, slightly jutting jaw, the dark-blue flattish eyes under the black eyebrows, the 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 happin