Explore "Young Wallingford" by George Randolph Chester on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In the old game of "pick or poe" one boy held out a pin, concealed between his fingers, and the other boy guessed whether the head or point was toward him. It was a great study in psychology. The boy who held the pin had to do as much guessing as the other one. Having held forward heads the first time, should he reverse the pin the second time, or repeat heads? In so far as one of the two boys correctly gaged the elaborateness of the other's mental process he was winner. At the age when he played this game Wallingford usually had all the pins in school. Now he was out-guessing the Doc Turner crowd.
He had foreseen every step in their mental process; he had foreseen that they would start an opposition company; he had foreseen their extravagant belief in his "pull," knowing what he did of their previous experience, and he had foreseen that now they would offer to buy up the stock held by his office force, so as to secure control, before opening fresh negotiations for the stock he had offered them.