suspected,
secretly gratified as well. Wherefore Bud had deliberately done what
he could do to stimulate and emphasize both the surprise and the
gratification. Why is it that most human beings feel a sneaking
satisfaction in the downfall of another? Especially another who is, or
has been at sometime, a rival in love or in business?

Bud had no delusions concerning Joe De Barr. If Joe should happen to
meet Marie, he would manage somehow to let her know that Bud was going
to the dogs--on the toboggan--down and out--whatever it suited Joe to
declare him. It made Bud sore now to think of Joe standing so smug and
so well dressed and so immaculate beside the bar, smiling and twisting
the ends of his little brown mustache while he watched Bud make such
a consummate fool of himself. At the time, though, Bud had taken a
perverse delight in making himself appear more soddenly drunken, more
boisterous and reckless than he really was.

Oh, well, what was the odds? Marie couldn't think any worse of him than
she already thought. And whatever she thought, their trails had parted,
and they would never cross again--not if Bud could help it. Probably
Marie would say amen to that. He would like to know how she was getting
along--and the baby, too. Though the baby had never seemed quite real
to Bud, or as if it were a permanent member of the household. It was a
leather-lunged, red-faced, squirming little mite, and in his heart of
hearts Bud had not felt as though it belonged to him at all. He had
never rocked it, for instance, or carried it in his arms. He had been
afraid he might drop it, or squeeze it too hard, or break it somehow
with his man's strength. When he thought of Marie he did not necessarily
think of the baby, though sometimes he did, wondering vaguely how much
it had grown, and if it still hollered for its bottle, all hours of the
day and night.

Coming back to Marie and Joe--it was not at all certain that they would
meet; or that Joe would mention him, even if they did. A wrecked home is
always a touchy subject, so touchy that Joe had never intimated in his
few remarks to Bud that there had ever been a Marie, and Bud, drunk
as he had been, was still not too drunk to hold back the question that
clamored to be spoken.

Whether he admitted it to himself or not, the sober Bud Moore who lay on
his bunk nursing a headache and a grouch against the world was ashamed
of the drunken Bud Moore who had paraded his drunkenness before