Brenton, who still clung to his bachelor habit of reading the newspaper
between swallows of coffee and snatches of toast and jam, looked up at
the arraignment which lay in Catia's tone, if not within her words.

"Smarten myself up?" he echoed, in blank question.

"Yes." Catia put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands around
her cup. "I was looking at you, Scott, all the time this last
convocation was going on."

He smiled benevolently, by way of preparation for flinging himself once
more upon the columns of his morning paper.

"You'd much better have been looking at the Bishop," he advised her
good-temperedly.

She shook her head.

"The Bishop was all right," she said, with an emphasis so caustic as to
catch and hold his attention.

Used as he had become, the past two years, to pinpricks of this sort,
his colour betrayed how much the present pinprick hurt him. None the
less, he still held on to his temper.

"And I wasn't?" he queried, with an effort at a smile. "Sorry, Catia.
What's the trouble?"

"All sorts of little things," she answered, with a disconcerting
frankness. "Not any one of them count for much; but, taken all
together, they're----" She hesitated for a word.

Brenton supplied it.

"Deplorable!" Then he added, "Sorry, Catia, as I said before. Still, I
suppose, if I'm not a beauty, I'm about what the good Lord made me."

"Fudge!" She put down her cup and rested her chin upon her palms. Seen
across the table and in a pose so undeniably feminine and so becoming
to almost every woman, Catia was good to look upon; would have been
good, that is, had not her personality been uncomfortably domineering.
The two years since her marriage had rubbed down certain of her angles,
and had given her at least a superficial polish. She occasionally
admitted to herself that she was very near to being handsome. A more
critical observer and one less prejudiced, however, might possibly have
added that she was curiously devoid of charm.

Brenton, on the other hand, was growing curiously magnetic, as the
months ran on, was developing a personal charm of which his student
days had given scarcely any hint. The old lines, born of hard work and
scanty nourishment, had vanished from his face. In place of them had
come other lines, vastly more becoming, lines engraved by earnest,
conscientious thought and study, by a life so ascetic as to be a little
narrow, perhaps, but noble enough in its aspirations to lift it