Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/316

 " No, by George, I can't 1 And I'm not going to cither." He slapped the table with Henry Van Dyke in ooze leather for emphasis. '* I want Kate Prentice in- vited here the next time she's in town. If you don't do as I ask, Priscilla, you shan't go a step not a step to Keokuk this winter."

" Is that an ultimatum? " Mrs. Pantin demanded.

Mr. Pantin gave a quick furtive look over cither 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, there- fore 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.