If you play your cards right_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

If you play your cards right

“If ever it occurs, you may bet your bottom dollar there'll be no mooning and spooning about it. I mean to marry money. She’ll have a good fat account at the bank or she won’t do for me.’

Little Chandler shook his head.

“Why, man alive,’ said Ignatius Gallaher, vehemently, ‘do you know what it is? I’ve only to say the word and tomorrow I can have the woman and the cash. You don’t believe it? Well, I know it. There are hundreds − what am I saying? − thousands of rich Germans and Jews, rotten with money, that’d only be too glad... You wait a while, my boy. See if I don’t play my cards properly. When I go about a thing I mean business, I tell you. You just wait.’

He tossed his glass to his mouth, finished his drink and laughed loudly. Then he looked thoughtfully before him and said in a calmer tone:

‘But I’m in no hurry. They can wait. I don’t fancy tying myself up to one woman, you know.’

- A Little Cloud, Dubliners, James Joyce.

2. When I pocketed my first driver’s licence, in Vancouver in the ’80s, Bruce Springsteen’s paeans to the highways ruled the airwaves (all those “Broken heroes on a last-chance power drive!”), Stephen King’s Christine was playing at the drive-ins (High-school geek falls in love with Haunted Homicidal Plymouth!) and cars, along with New Coke and Joe Camel, were being exuberantly marketed as a must-have gateway drug to full-fledged adulthood. All that hype had an impact: back then, my idea of a great summer vacation was a road trip down the I-5 to Tijuana in a gas-guzzling Oldsmobile — our version of On the Road, with punk rock on the cassette deck instead of jazz on the radio.