 How might the card game had gone differently if Mr. Graham was not present?
I didn't notice the impending rain storm and had no umbrella when I reached the sidewalk, to find myself confronted with an almost tropical downpour. After an abnormal delay, I got one which exactly missed the express at Fourteenth Street. During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase "I'm just spitballing" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite, "The whole ball of wax," twelve times. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be allowed to perch, but were not allowed to. By some curious chance, they all wanted the same place in the sky to turn in, and several collided and fell. Since our building is usually very well behaved, I was astonished to hear what sounded like an incipient free-for-all, and among the angry voices I recognized that of my neighbor, Nat, a very quiet guy who works on a newspaper and has never, to my knowledge, given wild parties, particularly in the late afternoon. "Yeah, and only when you were dealer!" There were four men confronting him, evidently torn between the desire to make an angry exit and the impulse to stay and beat him up. Someone must have rung, because at that moment the elevator arrived and the four men, with half frightened, incredulous looks, and in silence, got in and were taken down. Every round normal, nothing unusual about the hands—three of a kind, a low straight, that sort of thing and one guy got queens over tens, until it gets to be my deal. On the sidewalk, a man walking in front of Nat stooped suddenly to tie his shoe and Nat, to avoid bumping him, stepped off the curb and a taxi swerved to avoid Nat. It turned sideways and, without any side-slip, went right up the stoop of a brownstone opposite, coming to rest with its nose inside the front door, which a man opened at that moment. The sight of this threw another driver into a skid, and when he and the taxi had stopped sliding around, they were face to face, arranged crosswise to the street. This gave them exactly no room to move either forward or backward, for the car had its back to a hydrant and the taxi to a lamp. Although rather narrow, this is a two-way street, and in no time at all, traffic was stacked up from both directions as far as the avenues.
 Nat would have a more random pattern of losing and winning hands
 Nat would have never hosted a card game in the late afternoon  Nat would have continued to win with straights and other rare hands  Nat would have lost all of his hands instead of won all of them  Nat would have a more random pattern of losing and winning hands