Wint broke in: “Mother—please! It wasn’t my doing. I had nothing to do with it.”
“I said to your father last night, when he came home,” she insisted. “He came home so mad, and everything. He was in a terrible state, Wint. He ramped and tore around here like he was a crazy man; and I said to him that I didn’t see how a son could do a thing like that to him. He was tramping up and down, and he kept talking about you, and I said to him that I—”
“I tell you I had nothing to do with it, mother.”
“I think Congressman Caretall ought to have something better to do than to come home here and stir up a son against his father. I told your father so; and I said—”
“He didn’t stir me up against father, mother. It was a trick, a political game. I didn’t know anything about it till they told me I’d been elected.”
“I said to him that I just couldn’t believe it. And he said if it wasn’t true why weren’t you here at home where you belonged? He said you were probably down at Caretall’s, laughing at your father. And I said I just couldn’t see how a son could do a thing like that to a father like him. Because your father has been good to you, Wint. He’s been mighty good to you; and he’s stood a lot. I said to him that he’d stood a lot, and he said you were probably off drinking again somewhere, and that you’d—”
Hetty came in from the kitchen with the plate of biscuits, and set them before Mrs. Chase, and looked at Wint and laughed and pressed her hands to her ears and grimaced at Mrs. Chase’s unconscious head. Wint protested:
“Mother, I—”
Mrs. Chase broke in. “Hetty, those biscuits are just fine. I declare, your things always seem to come out better than mine. I wish I could do it that way. I wish your father was at home, Wint. He likes hot biscuits so. But goodness knows, he wouldn’t have any appetite to eat anything to-day. Hetty told me when she called me to come home that he’d telephoned he wasn’t coming. She told me you had come, and I came right over to tell you that I just didn’t see how you could—”
Wint was glad at last to finish and escape. He went up to his room, his mother’s words pursuing him. The reaction had set in; and he was terribly tired, and sick and full of sleep. He flung himself on his face on the bed, and he tossed there for a space, thinking miserably, and so at last he fell asleep.