“And what do you intend to do this time?” Mr. Budlong demanded.  The skeptic in his tone stung her to revolt.  She could usually be strong in the presence of her husband.  She looked at least like Mrs. Boadicea as she said: 

“I intend to tell Sally Swezey what you told me to.  And I will accept no apologies, none whatever.”

When Mr. Budlong came home to dinner she avoided his gaze.  She confessed that she had changed her program.  She hadn’t the heart to insult poor Sally, and she had admitted that she was a hit dizzy and qualmish and she had—­well, she—­she—­

Mr. Budlong finished for her fiercely: 

“I know!  You ate a lot of her wine jelly, and you told her she was a love and you kissed her good-by, and would she excuse you from coming to the door because you were still a little wobbly.”

Mrs. Budlong looked at him in surprise:  “She told you!”

“Nah!  I haven’t seen her.”

“Then how on earth did you ever guess?” she babbled.

“It was my womanly intuition!” he snarled, and that evening he went down town and sat in the hotel lobby for a couple of hours.  He usually did this anyway—­in summer he sat on the sidewalk—­but this evening, he did it with a certain implication of escape.  He expressed renunciation in the mere shutting of the door.

On the way home Mr. Budlong was busy with schemes.  His mind turned again to his son.

In a smallish town, a growing boy is an unfailing source of casus belli.

As an inciter of feuds there was something almost Balkan or Moroccan about Ulysses Budlong Junior.  Nearly every day he had come charging into the house with bad news in some form or other.  Some rock or snowball he had cast with the most innocent of intentions had gone through a window or a milk wagon or somebody’s silk hat.  Or he had pulled a small girl’s hair, or taken the skates away from a helpless urchin.  He had bad luck too in picking victims with belligerent big brothers.

Mr. Budlong recognized these desperado traits and he fully expected Ulysses Junior to make him the father of a convict.  Suddenly now despair became hope.  Let Mrs. Budlong capitalize her spats; he would promote Ulie’s.  The affair Detwiller had turned out badly, but Mr. Budlong would not yield to one defeat.  He watched eagerly for the next misdemeanor of his young hopeless.  He relied on him to embroil, as it were, all Europe in an international conflict.

But the dove of peace seemed to have alighted on Ulysses’ shoulder.  He even began to go to Sunday School—­the Methodist this year because they had given the largest cornucopias in town the Christmas before.  And he talked nothing but Golden Texts till Mr. Budlong began to fear that he would one day be the father of a parson.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Budlong grew bellicose again.  She snubbed people right and left, but they generously imputed it to absent-mindedness.  She failed to go to the dinner party the Teeples gave in her honor, and she sent no excuse.  This was the unpardonable sin in Carthage and the Budlong chairs sat vacant through the dinner.