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.

In commerce, he had merely continued the same species of career; and
by virtue of being thoroughly depreciated, and even pitied, by his
customers, he had risen in six years from the grade of city insurance
solicitor to that of Mr. Starkweather's principal assistant. And now,
as casually as he had ever raked in a jack-pot from the bewildered
sophomores, he had bought the Starkweather business, and not on a
shoestring,