She made a deprecating gesture. "Oh, yes, if you aren't a good enough gambler, then _I_ come into everything. It puts me in such a sweet position, doesn't it? So comfortable for me." Her smile was bitter; she was recalling what her brother had said to her at lunch, on that final day--that he wouldn't listen to her, because already he had heard the worst that she had to say. Originally, as she knew, he had intended to bequeath Henry a fourth of his property, and herself the remainder; and she knew that by her too vigorous indictment of Henry she had egged her brother into a state of mind which, regardless of the cause of it, she still considered to be unfathomable. The memory galled her, and so did the possibility of Henry's triumph. "Well," she said, "I wish you every happiness and success, Henry. I suppose you feel in your conscience you deserve it, don't you?"
When he left her, he was aware that the last tie had been severed.
His friend Bob Standish was a young man who in the past ten years had achieved many different kinds of success by the reason that mere acquaintances, as well as strangers, invariably underestimated him. For one thing, his skin was so tender, his eyes so blue and innocent, his mouth so wide and sensitive, his forehead so white and high, that he gave the impression of almost childish simplicity and ingenuousness. For another thing, he dressed with such meticulous regard for the fashion, and he moved about with such indolent amiability, that his clothes and his manners distracted attention from what was underneath.
And so, at college, a full battalion of kindly sophomores had volunteered to teach him poker, and couldn't understand why the profits went not to the teacher, but to the pupil. Immature professors, who liked to score off idlers and fat-brained sons of plutocrats, had selected him as the perfect target, and some of them had required several terms to realize that Standish, always baby-eyed, beau-attired and apparently dreaming of far distant things, was never lower in rank than the top twenty of his class. Out on the Field, visiting ends and tackles, meeting him for the first time, had nearly laughed in his face, and prepared to slaughter him, only to discover, with alarm and horror which steadily increased from the first whistle to the last, that Standish could explode his muscles with such a burst of dynamic energy that his hundred and sixty pounds felt like two hundred and ten. It was equally discouraging to learn, from breathless experience, that when he was in his stride he was as unpursueable as a coyote; and that he could diagnose the other fellow's tactics even before the other fellow had quite decided what to do next.