"Is that an ultimatum?" Mrs. Pantin demanded.
Mr. Pantin gave a quick furtive look over either shoulder, then declared with emphatic gusto: "I mean every damn word of it!"
Mrs. Pantin stood speechless, thinking rapidly. There was nothing for it evidently but to play her trump card, which never yet had failed her. She wasted no breath in further argument, but threw herself full-length on the davenport and had hysterics.
Only a few times in their married life had Mr. Pantin risen on his hind legs, speaking figuratively, and defied her. In the beginning, before he was well housebroken, he was careless in the matter of cleaning his soles on the scraper, and had been obstinate on the question of changing his shirt on Wednesdays, holding that once a week was enough for a person not engaged in manual labor. Mrs. Pantin had won out on each issue, but it had not been an easy victory. Mr. Pantin had been docile so long now that she had expected no further trouble with him, therefore this outbreak was so unlooked for that her fit was almost genuine.
Having hurled his thunderbolt, Mr. Pantin stood above his wife regarding her imperturbably as she lay with her face buried in a sofa pillow. Unmoved, he even felt a certain interest in the rise and fall of her shoulder blades as she sobbed. Actually, she seemed to breathe with them--"like the gills of a fish," he thought heartlessly--and wondered how long she could keep it up.
"It's no use having this tantrum, Prissy," he said inexorably.
Tantrum! The final insult. Mrs. Pantin squealed with rage and gnawed the corner of the leather pillow.
"You might as well come out of it," he admonished further. "You'll only make your eyes red and give yourself a headache."
"You're a brute, Abram Pantin, and I wish I'd never seen you!"
Mr. Pantin suppressed the reply that the wish was mutual. Instead, he picked up the leather button which flew on the floor when Mrs. Pantin doubled her fist and smote the davenport.
"I doubt very much if she'd come, even if you ask her," said Pantin. It was a stroke of genius.
"Not come!" The eye which Mrs. Pantin exposed regarded Mr. Pantin scornfully. "Not come? Why, she'd be tickled to pieces."
But of that Mr. Pantin continued to have his own opinion.
Mrs. Pantin sat up and winked rapidly in her indignation.
"She's made if I take her up, and the woman isn't so stupid as not to know it, is she?"
"She may not see it from that angle," dryly. "At any rate, you'll be pleasing me greatly by asking her."