cret, and the pain.

CHAPTER TWELVE

It was Catia, then, or, rather, Kathryn, who kept a weather eye upon
the social powers of the parish. Brenton was too busy doing other
things. Somebody, though, she argued, must look out for the personal
end of life, as well as for the theological. Else, the parish would
fall to pieces about their ears. Brenton might be giving them the bread
of life; but man should not live by bread alone. He needed an
occasional cup of afternoon tea to wash it down. Therefore Kathryn
revised her social balance sheets often and with the utmost care.

Out of deference to what Kathryn was still pleased to term her
husband's cloth, the Brentons promptly had been received into the
inmost circles of the college set, an honour which they shared with
Prather, the fussy little novelist. Kathryn liked the novelist; he was
such an unctuous, eager little man, so redolent of the elements that
went into his careful grooming. She even tried in vain to read his
novels; but they proved too much for her. She explained to him that his
local colour was so brilliant that it dazzled her; but the ignoble
truth was that she found it boring, although her letters going out of
town were splashed thickly with his name.

At the faculty wives Kathryn looked askance. They most of them knew
things and they wore their clothes as if they were accustomed to them.
Nevertheless, they seemed to her a little bit old-fashioned. Some of
the grown-up daughters, the ones who had not been in college, she liked
a little better. Nevertheless, Kathryn's attempts at closest
comradeship were with certain of the young instructors. She told
herself that she was mothering them, giving their homeless selves an
outlook on domestic life. What the young instructors told, would be
better for the editing. Indeed, it was somewhat edited and pruned of
its finest flowers of speech, out of loyalty to Brenton whom they one
and all admired exceedingly.

Brenton himself, meanwhile, though liking those jovial youngsters who,
in reality, were of his age and epoch, was finding his most satisfying
intimacy in the friendship of two of the older men: Doctor Eustace
Keltridge, and Professor Opdyke.

Of the two of them, both mellow men of learning and of kindly humour,
Doctor Keltridge was easily first choice. Before Scott Brenton had been
a month over Saint Peter's Parish, he had fallen into the habit of
dropping in upon the doctor at all sorts of hours a