The conversation—if you could call it that—had become a game. The object was to keep talking; not to talk continuously, which any idiot could do, but to pause only when the young man was not signaling—through bodily or facial language, or actually starting to speak—that he wanted to cut in. Instead, Gurgeh would stop unexpectedly in the middle of a point, or after having just said something mildly insulting, but while still giving the impression he was going to keep talking. Also, Gurgeh was quoting almost verbatim from one of his own more famous papers on game-theory; an added insult, as the
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