All about Sally were hundreds of men who looked as if they took their thoughts home with them and dined with them and slept with them and dreamed of them—the look had become settled, immutable. And it was not a pleasant look, about the eyes and lips. He saw everywhere the feverishness of the “game.” Insensibly the atmosphere of the place affected him, colored his thoughts, induced certain fancies. As he became more familiar with the technique of the business he grew to believe, like thousands of youthful or superficial observers, that stock-market movements were comparable only to the gyrations of the little ivory ball about the roulette-wheel. The innumerable tricks of the trade, the uses of inside misinformation, the _rationale_ of stock-market manipulation, were a sealed book to him. He heard only that his eighteen-year-old neighbor made $60 buying twenty shares of Blue Belt Line on Thursday and selling them on Saturday, 3⅜ points higher; or that Micky Welch, Stuart & Stern’s telephone-boy, had a “tip” from one of the big room traders which he bravely “played”—as you “play” horse or “play” the red or the black—and cleared $125 in less than a week; or that Watson, a “two-dollar” broker, made a “nice turn” selling Southern Shore. Or else he heard, punctuated with poignant oaths, how Charlie Miller, one of the New Street door-keepers, lost $230 buying Pennsylvania Central, after he accidentally overheard Archie Chase, who was “Sam” Sharpe’s principal broker, tell a friend that the “Old Man” said “Pa. Cent.” was due for a ten-point rise; instead of which there had been a seven-point decline. Always the boy heard about the apparently irresponsible “bulges” and “drops,” of the winnings of the men who happened to guess correctly, or of the losses of those who had failed to “call the turn.” Even the vernacular of the place savored of the technicalities of a gambling-house. As time wore on the glamour of the game wore off; likewise his scruples. His employers and their customers—all gentlemanly, agreeable people—speculated every day, and nobody found fault with them. It was not a sin; it was a regular business. And so, whenever there was a “good thing,” he “chipped in” one dollar to a telephone-boys’ “pool” that later operated in a New Street bucket shop to the extent of ten shares. His means were small, his salary being only $8 a week; and very often he thought that if he only had a little more money he would speculate on a larger scale and profit proportionately. If each time he had bought one share he had held twenty instead, he figured that he would have made no less than $400 in three months.