Cal went to his bureau and got the flat package from under his handkerchiefs in his drawer. He looked around the room and brought a porcelain pin tray to his desk. He breathed deeply and found the cool air good tasting. He lifted one of the crisp bills, creased it in the middle so’ that it made an angle, and then he scratched a match under his desk and lighted the bill. The heavy paper curled and blackened, the flame ran upward, and only when the fire was about his fingertips did Cal drop the charred chip in the pin tray. He stripped off another bill and lighted it.

When six were burned Lee came in without knocking. “I smelled smoke,” and then he saw what Cal was doing. “Oh!” he said.

Cal braced himself for intervention but none came. Lee folded his hands across his middle and stood silently—waiting. Cal doggedly lighted bill after bill until all were burned, and then he crushed the black chips down to powder and waited for Lee to comment, but Lee did not speak or move.

At last Cal said, “Go ahead—you want to talk to me. Go ahead!”

“No,” said Lee, “I don’t. And if you have no need to talk to me—I’ll stay a while and then I’ll go away. I’ll sit down here.” He squatted in a chair, folded his hands, and waited. He smiled to himself, the expression that is called inscrutable.

Cal turned from him. “I can outsit you,” he said.

“In a contest maybe,” said Lee. “But in day to day, year to year—who knows?—century to century sitting—no, Cal. You’d lose.”

After a few moments Cal said peevishly, “I wish you’d get on with your lecture.”

“I don’t have a lecture.”

“What the hell are you doing here then? You know what I did, and I got drunk last night.”

“I suspect the first and I can smell the second.”

“Smell?”

“You still smell,” said Lee.

“First time,” said Cal. “I don’t like it.”

“I don’t either,” said Lee. “I’ve got a bad stomach for liquor. Besides it makes me playful, intellectual but playful.”

“How do you mean, Lee?”

“I can only give you an example. In my younger days I played tennis. I liked it, and it was also a good thing for a servant to do. He could pick up his master’s flubs at doubles and get no thanks but a few dollars for it. Once, I think it was sherry that time, I developed the theory that the fastest and most elusive animals in the world are bats. I was apprehended in the middle of the night in the bell tower of the Methodist Church in San Leandro. I had a racquet, and I seem to have explained to the arresting officer that I was improving my backhand on bats.”

Cal laughed with such amusement that Lee almost wished he had done it.

Cal said, “I just sat behind a post and drank like a pig.”