Ten Dollars and a Job for Bud

To withhold for his own start in life only one ten-dollar bill from
fifteen hundred dollars was spectacular enough to soothe even so bruised
an ego as Bud Moore carried into the judge's office. There is an
anger which carries a person to the extreme of self-sacrifice, in the
subconscious hope of exciting pity for one so hardly used. Bud was
boiling with such an anger, and it demanded that he should all but give
Marie the shirt off his back, since she had demanded so much--and for so
slight a cause.

Bud could not see for the life of him why Marie should have quit for
that little ruction. It was not their first quarrel, nor their worst;
certainly he had not expected it to be their last. Why, he asked the
high heavens, had she told him to bring home a roll of cotton, if she
was going to leave him? Why had she turned her back on that little home,
that had seemed to mean as much to her as it had to him?

Being kin to primitive man, Bud could only bellow rage when he should
have analyzed calmly the situation. He should have seen that Marie too
had cabin fever, induced by changing too suddenly from carefree girlhood
to the ills and irks of wifehood and motherhood. He should have known
that she had been for two months wholly dedicated to the small physical
wants of their baby, and that if his nerves were fraying with watching
that incessant servitude, her own must be close to the snapping point;
had snapped, when dusk did not bring him home repentant.