It was a year afterward that I began to fag regularly for the Drayton establishment. Jack Drayton, by rights, ought to have been poisoned. He'd be the first to acknowledge it now.

Perhaps if he'd married a girl who insisted on having things out the moment they began, the things wouldn't have happened. But Natica Melsford wasn't that sort. She was the kind that simply looked scorn into and clear through you, when she thought you were acting low down.

This, with a man strung like Jack was, simply put the fat into the fire. It would have been different with me. I'd-well-I'd have made an abject crawl, to be sure.

You see, her knowing this was the thing that must have always queered me with her. A woman prefers a man she can get furious at and who'll stick it out a bit, to one who caves in at the first sign of a frown. But Jack carried things too far.