do?" I asked. My voice was shaking, in spite of
myself.

"I'm going to whale that youngster within an inch of his life," said
the master of the house, with a deadly sort of intentness.

"I don't want you to do that," I quavered, wondering why my words,
even as I uttered them, should seem so inadequate.

"Of course you don't," mocked my husband. "But this is the limit. And
what you want isn't going to count!"

"I don't want you to do that," I repeated. Something in my voice, I
suppose, must have arrested him, for he stood there, staring at me,
with a little knot coming and going on one side of his skull, just in
front of his upper ear-tip.

"And why not?" he asked, still with that hateful rough ironic note in
his voice.

"Because you don't know what you're punishing this child for," I told
him with all the quietness I could command. "And because you're in no
fit condition to do it."

"You needn't worry about my condition," he cried out--and I could see
by the way he said it that he was still blind with rage. "Come here,
you!" he called to Dinkie.

It was then that the fatal little bell clanged somewhere at the back
of my head, the bell that rings down the curtain on all the slowly
accumulated civilization the centuries may have brought to us. I not
only faced my husband with a snort of scorn, but I tightened my grip
on the child's hand. I tightened my grip on his hand and backed slowly
and deliberately away until I came to the door of my sewing-room.
Then, still facing my husband, I opened that door and said: "Go
inside, Dinkie." I could not see the boy, but I knew that he had done
as I told him. So I promptly slammed the door shut and stood there
facing the gray-lipped man with the riding-quirt in his hand. He took
two slow steps toward me. His chin was thrust out in a way that made
me think of a fighting-cock's beak. He had not shaved that morning,
and his squared jaw looked stubbled and blue and ugly.

"You can't pull that petticoat stuff this time," he said in a hard and
throaty tone which I had never heard from him before. "Get out of my
way!"

"You will not beat that child!" And I myself couldn't have made a
very pretty picture as I flung that challenge up in his teeth.

"Get out of my way," he repeated. He did not shout it. He said it
almost quietly. But I knew, even before he reached out a shaking hand
to thrust me aside, that he was in deadly earnest, that nothing I
could say would hold him back