The other hammered the table with his palm. “Fetch on your dice,” he said, boisterously.
A box of dice was quickly set before them.
“Best two out of three?” asked Bob.
“Naw.... Let’s have swift action. One flop.”
“All right,” said Bob, rattling the cubes in their box and spreading them on the table with practised hand. “Beat that, my boy.” Three fives, an ace and a four lay exposed. “My gin, I guess,” Bob crowed.
“Not while the old man keeps his strength,” replied his friend. “Just peel your eye and watch this.” He made the cast. A pair of fours was the result. “Oh, hell!” he said, not petulantly, not angrily, but as if it were a duty. He pushed the dice back, and the incident was closed; apparently he brushed it from his mind as he had brushed back the ivory cubes. “Say, I hear Bogel is going to reduce the price of his car a hundred dollars....”
In Detroit in that day men could hazard seven thousand dollars on one cast of the dice without a quickened throb of the pulse. To those two the winning or losing of that sum was a trivial thing, a sort of matching of pennies.
“Did you see that?” Potter asked of the major.
“Yes,” said Major Craig, staring unbelievingly.
“Well, do you think our big men in Detroit are going to interest themselves in anything so dinky as a European war?... That’s the attitude of mind that frightens me, Major. It’s here; it’s all about us. A big, ingrowing selfishness; the ability to squander and the will to squander.... Do you think those men give a tinker’s dam about the United States or what happens to it so long as their ability to throw away thousands is left uninterfered with?”