For me that's a whole suit of pajamas."

"You come, Ted."

"Abbey, I wouldn't climb those stairs for a bottle of Horace's Falernian,
served on Seneca's famous citron table."

"Not a friend in the world," Abbott lamented.

Laughingly they hustled him into the hallway and fled. Then Courtlandt
went his way alone. He slept with the dubious satisfaction that the first
day had not gone badly. The wedge had been entered. It remained to be seen
if it could be dislodged.

Harrigan was in a happy temper. He kissed his wife and chucked Nora under
the chin. And then Mrs. Harrigan launched the thunderbolt which, having
been held on the leash for several hours, had, for all of that, lost none
of its ability to blight and scorch.

"James, you are about as hopeless a man as ever was born. You all but
disgraced us this afternoon."

"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-