There are moments in the life of every man when the impulse attacks him to sacrifice his future to the alluring gratification of the present.  The strong man resists such impulses.  Jerry Mitchell was not a weak man, but he had been sorely tried.  The annoyance of Ogden’s presence and conversation had sapped his self-restraint, as dripping water will wear away a rock.  A short while before, he had fought down the urgent temptation to massacre this exasperating child, but now, despised love adding its sting to that of injured vanity, he forgot the consequences.  Bounding across the room, he seized Ogden in a powerful grip, and the next instant the latter’s education, in the true sense of the word, so long postponed, had begun; and with it that avalanche of sound which, rolling down into the drawing-room, hurled Mrs. Pett so violently and with such abruptness from the society of her guests.

Disposing of the last flight of stairs with the agility of the chamois which leaps from crag to crag of the snow-topped Alps, Mrs. Pett finished with a fine burst of speed along the passage on the top floor, and rushed into the gymnasium just as Jerry’s avenging hand was descending for the eleventh time.

CHAPTER XI

JIMMY DECIDES TO BE HIMSELF

It was less than a quarter of an hour later—­such was the speed with which Nemesis, usually slow, had overtaken him—­that Jerry Mitchell, carrying a grip and walking dejectedly, emerged from the back premises of the Pett home and started down Riverside Drive in the direction of his boarding-house, a cheap, clean, and respectable establishment situated on Ninety-seventh Street between the Drive and Broadway.  His usually placid nervous system was ruffled and a-quiver from the events of the afternoon, and his cauliflower ears still burned reminiscently at the recollection of the uncomplimentary words shot at them by Mrs. Pett before she expelled him from the house.  Moreover, he was in a mild panic at the thought of having to see Ann later on and try to explain the disaster to her.  He knew how the news would affect her.  She had set her heart on removing Ogden to more disciplinary surroundings, and she could not possibly do it now that her ally was no longer an inmate of the house.  He was an essential factor in the scheme, and now, to gratify the desire of the moment, he had eliminated himself.  Long before he reached the brown-stone house, which looked exactly like all the other brown-stone houses in all the other side-streets of uptown New York, the first fine careless rapture of his mad outbreak had passed from Jerry Mitchell, leaving nervous apprehension in its place.  Ann was a girl whom he worshipped respectfully, but he feared her in her wrath.

Having entered the boarding-house, Jerry, seeking company in his hour of sorrow, climbed the stairs till he reached a door on the second floor.  Sniffing and detecting the odour of tobacco, he knocked and was hidden to enter.