The Razor's Edge

by W. Somerset Maugham

One night, after we’d been playing for a while, he looked at me with that rather cruel, sarcastic smile of his which was the only way he knew how to smile, and said: “ ‘Shall I show you a few tricks?’ “He took the pack of cards and asked me to name one. He shuffled them and he told me to choose one; I did, and it was the card I’d named. He did two or three more tricks and then he asked me if I played poker. I said I did and he dealt me a hand. When I looked at it I saw I’d got four aces and a king. “ ‘You’d be willing to bet a good deal on that hand, wouldn’t you?’ he asked. “ ‘My whole stack,’ I answered. “ ‘You’d be silly.’ He put down the hand he’d dealt himself. It was a straight flush. How it was done I don’t know. He laughed at my amazement. ‘If I weren’t an honest man I’d have had your shirt by now.’ “ ‘You haven’t done so badly as it is,’ I grinned. “ ‘Chicken feed. Not enough to buy a dinner at Larue’s.’ “We continued to play pretty well every night. I came to the conclusion that he cheated not so much for the money as for the fun of it. It gave him a queer satisfaction to know that he was making a fool of me, and I think he got a lot of amusement out of knowing that I was on to what he was doing and couldn’t see how it was done.