The others smoked as if unhearing. Harvey D. walked to the opposite wall and straightened a picture, The Reading of Homer, shifting its frame precisely one half an inch.
"It is overchancy." This from Gideon after a long silence.
Harvey D. paused in his walk, regarded the floor in front of him critically, and stooped to pick up a tiny scrap of paper, which he brought to the table and laid ceremoniously in the ash tray.
"Overchancy," he repeated.
"Everything overchancy," said Sharon Whipple after another silence, waving his cigar largely at life. "She's a self-headed little tike," he added a moment later.
"Self-headed!"
Harvey D. here made loose-wristed gestures meaning despair, after which he detected and put in its proper place a burned match beside Sharon's chair.
"A bright boy enough!" said Gideon after another silence, during which Harvey D. had twice paced the length of the room, taking care to bring each of his patent-leather toes precisely across the repeated pattern in the carpet.
"Other one got the gumption, though," said Sharon.
"Oh, gumption!" said Harvey D., as if this were no rare gift. All three smoked again for a pregnant interval.