onal concerns, too uncomprehending in a spiritual
crisis. Domesticity, to be practical, must consist of something else
than mere ability to keep a house and to extract from the butcher the
best cuts obtainable for one's income. One's spiritual bric-a-brac must
be taken down and dusted with just as careful reverence as one shows
the glass things on one's mantel. Catia could cut her own cloth up into
pieces, and then sew up the pieces into quite presentable garments; she
could make good coffee and cook lamb chops to perfection; but, that
done, she could not sit down of an evening and fling herself, heart and
soul, into the interests of her husband's life.

Of this, as yet, Scott Brenton was mercifully ignorant. He might have
known it; but, unhappily, he never had found it altogether worth his
while to meditate very much upon the question. He passed by Catia as an
established fact; he left her quite unanalyzed. Instead, he turned the
whole force of his analytic power upon the needs of his profession,
without in the least realizing that, in the case of a married man,
professional acumen and efficiency depend a good deal upon the quality
of his domestic atmosphere. Later on, he was destined to find out that
a family jar at breakfast, a discussion born of a muddy cup of coffee
or a sticky muffin, can wreck the fervour of a sermon born of a week of
prayer and meditation, wreck it at so late an hour that any salvage is
impossible.

"Really," Catia observed to her solitary bridesmaid, a week before the
wedding day; "you'd never think it that Scott was just getting ready to
be married; would you?"

The bridesmaid was not so much tactless as envious. As she and Catia
were well aware, Scott Brenton was the one really personable man upon
the horizon of their village life, the only man who seemed to have it
in him to translate a wife out of that humdrum village into the
seething world beyond. Of course, it was nice of Catia to have chosen
her for bridesmaid. Nevertheless, it would have been far, far more
agreeable, if only she could have been the bride. Therefore,--

"No," she answered flatly. "No; I never would. I'd think he ought to be
in a perfect twitter, by this time; but he takes it as calmly as if a
wedding weren't any more important than a sack of beans."

Catia, hoping for a prompt denial of the point of view she had put
forth, was conscious of a certain pique at the prompt agreement. She
showed her pique with equal pro