t. Suddenly now
despair became hope. Let Mrs. Budlong capitalize her spats; he would
promote Ulie's. The affair Detwiller had turned out badly, but Mr.
Budlong would not yield to one defeat. He watched eagerly for the
next misdemeanor of his young hopeless. He relied on him to embroil,
as it were, all Europe in an international conflict.

But the dove of peace seemed to have alighted on Ulysses' shoulder.
He even began to go to Sunday School--the Methodist this year because
they had given the largest cornucopias in town the Christmas before.
And he talked nothing but Golden Texts till Mr. Budlong began to fear
that he would one day be the father of a parson.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Budlong grew bellicose again. She snubbed people
right and left, but they generously imputed it to absent-mindedness.
She failed to go to the dinner party the Teeples gave in her honor,
and she sent no excuse. This was the unpardonable sin in Carthage
and the Budlong chairs sat vacant through the dinner.

But Mrs. Teeple graciously assumed that she was ill and sent over the
cut flowers off the table. And she hoped the poor dear would feel
better soon.

A few days later Mrs. Budlong's pet Maltese kitten was done to nine
deaths at once by the Disney's fox terrier. Mrs. Budlong mourned the
kitten, but there was consolation in the thought that she could now
cut the Disneys off her list.

Before she could get the kitten decently interred in the back yard,
Mrs. Disney was at the front door. She flung her arms round Mrs.
Budlong and wept, declaring that she had resolved to give the
murderous terrier away to a farmer, and had already sent to Chicago
for a pedigreed Angora to replace the Maltese. It would arrive the
day before Christmas.

IX

WORSE, AND MORE OF IT

As if that were not enough for one day, in the afternoon Johnetta
Ackerley called. She saw Mrs. Budlong at an upper window and waved to
her as she came along the walk. When the cook arrived upstairs like a
grand piano moving in, Mrs. Budlong said in an icy tone:

"Not at home."

"But I told her you was. And she seen you at the windy."

"Not!--at!--home!"

"But I'm after telling her--"

Mrs. Budlong could be as stern as steel with her husband or her
servants. She cowed Brigida into lumbering downstairs with the
message. Mrs. Budlong went to the window to triumph over her victim's
retreat in a panic of confusion.

Instead, she heard a light patter of footste