"Mother!"
"Me?" cried the bewildered Harrigan.
"Look at those tennis shoes; one white string and one brown one. It's
enough to drive a woman mad. What in heaven's name made you come?"
Perhaps it was the after effect of a good dinner, that dwindling away of
pleasant emotions; perhaps it was the very triviality of the offense for
which he was thus suddenly arraigned; at any rate, he lost his temper, and
he was rather formidable when that occurred.
"Damn it, Molly, I wasn't going, but Courtlandt asked me to go with him,
and I never thought of my shoes. You are always finding fault with me
these days. I don't drink, I don't gamble, I don't run around after other
women; I never did. But since you've got this social bug in your bonnet,
you keep me on hooks all the while. Nobody noticed the shoe-strings; and
they would have looked upon it as a joke if they had. After all, I'm the
boss of this ranch. If I want to wear a white string and a black one, I'll
do it. Here!" He caught up the book on social usages and threw it out of
the window. "Don't ever shove a thing like that under my nose again. If
you do, I'll hike back to little old New York and start the gym again."
He rammed one of the colonel's perfectos (which he had been saving for the
morrow) between his teeth, and stalked into the garden.
Nora was heartless enough to laugh.
"He hasn't talked like that to me in years!" Mrs. Harrigan did not know
what to do,--follow him or weep. She took the middle course, and went to
bed.
Nora turned out the lights and sat out on the little balcony. The
moonshine was glorious. So dense was the earth-blackness that the few
lights twinkling here and there were more like fallen stars. Presently she
heard a sound. It was her father, returning as silently as he could. She
heard him fumble among the knickknacks on the mantel, and then go away
again. By and by she saw a spot of white light move hither and thither
among the grape arbors. For five or six minutes she watched it dance.
Suddenly all became dark again. She laid her head upon the railing and
conned over the day's events. These were not at all satisfactory to her.
Then her thoughts traveled many miles away. Six months of happiness, of
romance, of play, and then misery and blackness.
"Nora, are you there?"
"Yes. Over here on the balcony. What were you doing down there?"
"Oh, Nora, I'm sorry I lost my temper. But Molly's begun to nag me lately,
and I can't stand it. I went after that book. Did you throw some flowers
out of the window?"