She darted at the bed, yanked from beneath it her suit-case, and into it began to throw her toilet articles.
Mr. Schwirtz sat upon the bed and laughed enormously.
“You women cer’nly are a sketch!” he caroled. “Going back to mamma, are you? Sure! That’s what the first Mrs. Schwirtz was always doing. Let’s see. Once she got as far as the depot before she came back and admitted that she was a chump. I doubt if you get that far. You’ll stop on the step. You’re too tightwad to hire a taxi, even to try to scare me and make it unpleasant for me.”
Una stopped packing, stood listening. Now, her voice unmelodramatic again, she replied:
“You’re right about several things. I probably was thoughtless about leaving you alone evenings—though it is not true that I ever left you without provision for supper. And of course you’ve often left me alone back there in the hotel while you were off with other women—”
“Now who’s insinuating?” He performed another characteristic peroration. She did not listen, but stood with warning hand up, a small but plucky-looking traffic policeman, till he ceased, then went on:
“But I can’t really blame you. Even in this day when people like my friend Mamie Magen think that feminism has won everything, I suppose there must still be a majority of men like you—men who’ve never even heard of feminism, who think that their women are breed cattle. I judge that from the conversations I overhear in restaurants and street-cars, and these pretty vaudeville jokes about marriage that you love so, and from movie pictures of wives beating husbands, and from the fact that women even yet haven’t the vote. I suppose that you don’t really know many men besides the mucky cattle-drover sort, and I can’t blame you for thinking like them—”
“Say, what is all this cattle business about? I don’t seem to recall we were discussing stockyards. Are you trying to change the conversation, so you won’t even have to pack your grip before you call your own bluff about leaving me? Don’t get it at all, at all!”
“You will get it, my friend!... As I say, I can see—now it’s too late—how mean I must have been to you often. I’ve probably hurt your feelings lots of times—”
“You have, all right.”