"Do you think I laid myself open to that charge by marrying you?" said Presbury, made cheerful despite his savage indigestion by the opportunity for effective insult she had given him and he had promptly seized. "I am far too gallant to agree with you. But I'm also too gallant to contradict a lady. By the way, you must be careful in dealing with Siddall. Rich people like to be fawned on, but not to be slobbered on. You went entirely too far."
Mrs. Presbury, whom indigestion had rendered stupid, could think of no reply. So she burst into tears. "And my own daughter sitting silent while that man insults her mother!" she sobbed.
Mildred sat stiff and cold.
"It'll be a week before I recover from that dinner," Presbury went on sourly. "What a dinner! What a villainous mess! These vulgar, showy rich! That champagne! He said it cost him six dollars a bottle, and no doubt it did. I doubt if it ever saw France. The dealers rarely waste genuine wine on such cattle. The wine-cellars of fine houses the world through are the laughing-stock of connoisseurs—like their picture-galleries and their other attempts to make money do the work of taste. I forgot to put my pills in my bag. I'll have to hunt up an all-night drug-store. I'd not dare go to bed without taking an antidote for that poison."
But Presbury had not been altogether improvident. He had hoped great things of Bill Siddall's wine-cellar—this despite an almost unbroken series of bitter disillusionments and disappointments in experience with those who had the wealth to buy, if they had had the taste to select, the fine wines he loved. So, resolving to indulge himself, he had put into his bag his pair of gout-boots.
This was a device of his own inventing, on which he prided himself. It consisted of a pair of roomy doe-skin slippers reenforced with heavy soles and provided with a set of three thin insoles to be used according as the state of his toes made advisable. The cost of the Presbury gout-boot had been, thanks to patient search for a cheap cobbler, something under four dollars—this, when men paid shoe specialists twenty, thirty, and even forty dollars a pair for gout-boots that gave less comfort. The morning after the dinner at which he had drunk to drown his chagrin and to give him courage and tongue for sycophantry, he put on the boots. Without them it would have been necessary to carry him from his room to a cab and from cab to train. With them he was able to hobble to a street-car. He tried to distract his mind from his sufferings by lashing away without ceasing at his wife and his step-daughter.
When they were once more at home, and the mother and daughter escaped from him, the mother said:
"I was glad to see that you put up with that wretch, and didn't answer him back."
"Of course," said Mildred. "He's mad to be rid of me, but if I offended him he might snatch away this chance."
"He would," said Mrs. Presbury. "I'm sure he would. But—" she laughed viciously—"once you're married you can revenge yourself—and me!"