When they were settled in the car for their snowy ride that afternoon, Mrs. Treharne turned in her seat to face Judd.
"You will understand," she said in a tone quite as hard as it was meant to be, "that I am not wasting words. If you repeat your grossness of last night in my daughter's presence, our—our friendship is at an end. That is understood?"
"Now, now, shush, shush, Tony," said the Gargantuan Judd, soothingly, and resorting to his habit of patting her hands, "not so severe, not so terrifically severe, you know. How did I know that your daughter would be there? Didn't know the least thing about it—forgot, I mean, that she was coming. Got a bit screwed at the club, and—"
"I don't elect to listen to that sort of an explanation," interrupted Mrs. Treharne, with cold deliberation. "I am unutterably weary of your porcine manners. It is bad enough that I have permitted myself to endure them. You are not imbecile enough to suppose that my daughter is to endure them, too? You are to meet her only when it is absolutely necessary; be good enough to remember that. While she is with me—I don't now know how long that is to be—you are to curtail your visits; and if you come even once again in the sodden condition that you were in last night, I am done with you from that instant. I make myself plain, I hope?"
"'Pon honor, Tony, you are horribly severe," blurted Judd, whiningly. "You know very well that if you were to cut and run I'd blow my head off." He felt that he meant it, too; for Judd was tremendously fond of the fading woman seated beside him, as he had been for years. He was blind to her departing prettiness; to him she was the one woman in the world—his prim, elderly wife, the mother of his family of grown children, being utterly negligible in his view; and Mrs. Treharne knew her complete power over him as well as she knew the lines of her face.
"I wish," she said, with a cutting way of dwelling upon each word, "that you had blown your head off before ever I met you. I might then have been able to cling to at least the shreds of self-respect."
Judd had no reply to make to that, and they rode the rest of the way in silence.