"Huh!" jeered Balfame, "you two get me home! I'm not so drunk I can't see the joke of that. The matter with you is you think I'm disgracin' you, and you want to go on bein' the high cock-alorum of this bunch. Well, I'm sick of it, and I'm sick of bein' told to eat out when you're at matinees or that damned Woman's Club. Home's the place for women. Knittin's all right." He laughed uproariously. "But stay at home by the fire and knit your husband's socks. Smoke a pipe too, if you like it. That's what my granny did. The whole lot of you women haven't got one good man's brain between you, and yet you'd talk the head off the President of the United States--" He was about to launch upon his opinion of Elsinore society when a staccato cough interrupted the flow. Mrs. Balfame turned away with a gesture of superb disdain, although her face was livid. "The sex jealousy we have so often discussed!" Her clear tones from the first had carried all over the room. "He must be taken home." She looked at Dwight Rush and said graciously: "I am sure he will go with you. And he will apologise to the Club when he is himself again. I shall go back to our game." She held her head very high as she swept down the long room, but her jaw was set, her nostrils distended, a narrow strip of eye was fixed and glaring. An unforeseen situation had blown to flame such fires of anger as existed in her depths, and she was unable to extinguish them as quickly as she would have wished. To the intense surprise of the bridge women who had followed her out of the card-room and in again, she sank into a chair and burst into tears. But she managed to cry quietly into her handkerchief, and in a few moments had her voice under control. "He has disgraced me!" she exclaimed bitterly. "I must resign from the Club." "Well, I guess not." The ladies had crowded about her sympathetically. "We'll all stand up for you," cried Mrs. Battle. "The men will give him a good talking-to, and he'll write an apology to the Club and that will end it." These friends, old and more recent, were embarrassed in their genuine sympathy, for no one had ever seen Mrs. Balfame in tears before. Vaguely they regretted that, extreme as was the provocation, she should have descended to the level of mere womanhood. It was as if they were present at the opening of a new chapter in the life of Mrs. Balfame of Elsinore; as, in truth, they were. Mrs. Balfame blew her nose. "Pardon me," she said. "I never believed I should break down like this--but--but--" once more she set her teeth and her eyes flashed. "I have a violent headache. I must go home. I cannot finish the game." "I'll take you home," Dr. Anna spoke. "Oh, that beast!"