In anger Robert had a repertoire of oaths that stained the air like the
trail of a wounded shark, his pupils receding to points and his mouth
pulling to an oblique.
Bruce, if anything, whitened and quieted. He had once, with hardly more
than a lightning lunge, broken a truck driver's wrist in an office
altercation over some manhandled scenery, and gone home rather sick
because the fellow's opened cheek had bled down over his desk.
His office manner was clipped, brisk, and highly impersonal. He
cultivated a little mustache to enhance that manner, yet the two
sixteen-year-old girls who pasted clippings into scrap books spitted
their curls for him, and, since his advent, even Ida Blair had discarded
her eye shade.
In moments of high pressure he stuttered slightly, grinding and whirring
over a sibilant like a stalled tire. Upon one occasion that was to be
memorable Lilly sat between the brothers, notebook in lap, her head bent
to dodge the fusillade of high words passing over it.
It was her third year in a firm that had not slipped a cog. She had
likened its growth to her child's--fine--sturdy--normal.
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