ledge of
youthful human nature. Over their Sunday dinners, the girls discussed
his sermons with increasing vigour. The echoes of these discussions,
coming to Brenton's ears, set him to preaching with increasing
conscientiousness. However, there still was salvation for him; it was
his sermons that he took so much in earnest, and not himself, the
preacher.

But, although it was upon his student hearers that Scott Brenton tossed
down, broadcast and unsaving, the best of all he had within himself, it
was among the permanent residents of Saint Peter's that his real work
was supposed to be done. He did that work most faithfully; he showed
himself both tireless and tactful in his arrangement of the parish
mechanism, in his gathering up and straightening and knotting here and
there the threads his predecessor had flung down in a tangled heap.
Nevertheless, his heart was in the other end of his work, not for any
individual interest in the different girls; but because his whole
instinct told him that here was the dynamic force of the whole
organization, that the rest of it was curiously static. Under those
befeathered hats were eager brains which weighed their theology and
measured it, not took it ready made. It was for him to serve it out to
them in such a guise that, weighed, they should not find it wanting.

Catia, on the other hand, looked upon the student end of her husband's
parish with disapproving eyes. The girls annoyed her by their cocksure
alertness, their little air of being primed, ready for any emergency
that chanced to offer. They vexed her by their manifest absorption in
her husband; they vexed her yet more by their inexplicable lack of
interest in herself.

Upon the older and more stable fraction of the parish, however, Catia
lavished an interested affection which would have seemed well-nigh
maternal, had it not been for the care she took to emphasize the gulf
in age which yawned between herself and certain of the individuals who
made up its list. She studied the list with no slight degree of care.
By the end of their first month in the new parish, she knew to a nicety
how the line of local social precedence ordered itself, where, at any
point in the procession, town must yield to gown, or the reverse. She
knew the lineage and history of all the wardens and their wives, and
then of all the vestry-men; she even cultivated a nodding acquaintance
with their family skeletons, and learned to recognize the seals upo