“Lot One-seven, six,” gabbled the auctioneer. “Mount Silver.”

“Eleven,” a voice shouted.

In the auditorium two men, their arms stretched rigid, sprang to their feet and screamed. “Three!” Flossie settled her furs and looked at them with interest. “Eleven-three,” said the auctioneer.

The chairs proper to the front of the hall had been replaced by rows of desks, each of which was labelled with the name of its occupant’s firm. Van Huys. Riven Brothers. Dubois. Yen. Steiner. James Ogden. Hartz. Ormerod. Rhodes. Markino. James Barnett. Dressed in business men’s suits woven from good wool, the buyers had come in from the four corners of the world for the summer wool sales. They might have been carefully selected types, so eloquently did they display their nationality. Van Huys’s buyer with his round wooden head and soft hat; Dubois’s, sleek, with a thin moustache and heavy grooves running from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth; old Jimmy Ormerod who bought for himself, screamed like a stallion, and turned purple in the face; Hartz, with horn-rimmed glasses, who barked; and Mr. Kurata Kan of Markino’s with his falsetto yelp. Each buyer held printed lists before him, and from time to time, like a well-trained chorus ensemble, they would all turn a page. The auctioneer’s recital was uninflected and monotonous yet, as if the buyers were marionettes and he their puppet master, they would twitch into violent action and as suddenly return to their nervously intent immobility. Some, holding the papers before their eyes, stood waiting for a particular wool clip to come up. Others wrote at their desks. Each had trained himself to jerk in a flash from watchful relaxation into spread-eagled yelling urgency. Many of them smoked continuously and Flossie Rubrick saw them through drifts of blue tobacco clouds.