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 the man who knew Marie.

He did not want Marie to hear what Joe might tell There was no use, he told himself miserably, in making Marie despise him as well as hate him.

There was a difference.

She might think him a brute, and she might accuse him of failing to be a kind and loving husband; but she could not, unless Joe told of his spree, say that she had ever heard of his carousing around.

That it would be his own fault if she did hear, served only to embitter his mood.
He rolled over and glared at Cash, who had cooked his supper and was sitting down to eat it alone.