The rules laid it down most categorically that a cardsharper had to be paid, but a tailor had not; that one must not tell a lie to a man, but might to a woman, that one must not deceive anyone but one may a husband; that one must not forgive an insult but may insult others, etc.
Somewhere, during his lost years on the continent, he picked up the cardsharper's skills.
Here an innocent rich youth is being fleeced by cardsharps – a scene the artist could witness every day in the area around Rome's Piazza Navona.
It appeals to the sort of doughty people who revel in dust and cold, fugged-up windows, the jarring pain of every bump, and the need for the dexterity of a cardsharp combined with the strength of a poker-bender to engage the low ratio of the four-wheel-drive system.That system, however, has been the other crucial part of the Land Rover's success.
Several people warned Woodman off, but he paid no mind and, on a few occasions, actually chased wary cardsharps down the street, begging them to take his money.
His comedy "Le Roman d'un Tricheur" (literally "The Novel of a Cheat," released here as "The Story of a Cheat") is the opposite — it's the cynical, picaresque story of the rise of an orphaned boy who, taking to heart an apprenticeship in decadent hotels and casinos, becomes a cardsharp who plunders the gaming tables of Monte Carlo where he had formerly worked as a croupier.
First, she is a cardsharp who sucks money from a wandering heir (Henry Fonda) on an ocean liner; then, scarred by his rejection, she becomes an English grande dame, bewitching him into a series of emasculating pratfalls; finally, she reverts to her first persona, fooling everyone except Muggsy, the hero's cynical valet.
He seems to have been a cardsharp rather than a magician; most of the book is taken up with cheating techniques, daintily not always called such.
From the choppy years of his youth he has retained the wary eyes of a cardsharp, a thief's nerve, the combativeness of a brawler, the aplomb of a professional athlete, the flamboyant instincts of a promoter, and the glibness of a con man.
Traverse's sons — Kit, a mathematician; Frank, an engineer; and Reef, a cardsharp and ladies' man — set out to avenge their father's murder.
Vernon had heard rumors of a cardsharp who was able to deal not merely the bottom card or the second card of the deck, in the usual way, but from its center — meaning that a chosen card could be dealt at will, no matter where the deck was cut — and, after years of looking in the hardscrabble gamblers' underground of Depression America, he found him, just outside Kansas City.
