Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/278

266 at least, she was invited to "go ahead an' do it, then." But when Bailey opened a bad egg for breakfast and sat down for dinner to a rolled roast so tough that no one could eat it, there was a scene at the table, and Hetty declared, in a passion, that she would never buy another thing for the house. She went to bed almost weeping with anger.

Bailey played his cribbage and smoked his pipe.

"Leave her be," Mrs. Joliffe counseled him—and Hetty overheard her through the open door—"she 'll come out of her tantrums. I know her. Two fer 'his heels.' Go on now."

He tried letting her be and found it a poor plan. She let him be. She withdrew herself ostentatiously from the household life, was silent at the table, and turned her back on him when they were alone. She sat all day by herself, amid the furnishings of a room that she hated, brooding upon the incidents of a life that she despised. Bailey's manner during his courtship had flattered her by a tacit acknowledgment that she was something finer and better than he. (He had fallen in love with her "citified" sophistication.) She had not allowed him to see much of her mother, of whose simplicity and commonness she had been ashamed. She had never let him know that her father had been a butcher; she had intended to leave all that sort of thing behind her when she married. She had known that Bailey was a trusted man at Altgelt's, with a future before him, and she had counted on rising with him out of reach of her past. She had vaguely intended to