“Sure he did.” Hardin’s face was black with his evil mood. “I’m only an underling, a disgraced underling. He’s my boss. He’s going to make me remember it.”
“You mustn’t say such things,” pouted his wife. “If it does not hurt you, if you do not care, think how I must feel—”
“Oh, rot!” exclaimed Hardin. The veneer was rubbed down to the rough wood. Innes saw the coarseness her mother had complained of, the Gingg fiber.
“I suppose you think I like to take orders, to jump at the snap of the whip?” He was deliberately beating up his anger into a froth. “Oh, sure, I do. That’s a Hardin, through and through.”
Again the angry blood flooded his wife’s cheeks. He, too, was throwing the boarding-house at her.
“You did it yourself.” Gerty with difficulty was withholding the angry tears. “I told you how it would be. You would do it.”
“Oh, hell!” cried Tom, pushing back his plate.
His sister looked drearily out the wire-screened door. Her view was a dusty street. Hardin got up, scraping his chair over the board floor.
“And to keep it from me,” persisted the wife. “To let me ask him to dinner—”
“Does that dismal farce have to go on?” demanded Hardin, turning back to the table. “You’ll have to have it without me, then. I’ll not stay and make a fool of myself. Ask him to dinner. Me! I’ll see myself.”