enton, it seemed
incredible to the doctor that he could have been so supinely idiotic as
to have allowed himself, against his will, to be gobbled up by
Kathryn--for it was thus that Doctor Eustace Keltridge diagnosed their
entrance into matrimony. However, the doctor lacked some knowledge of
the determining factors in the case. He had no notion how Kathryn had
spread her net before the idealistic young student who was too intent
upon his personal problems, as concerned his choice of a profession and
his duty to his mother, to heed the matrimonial pitfalls laid at his
unwary feet.

However, that there was a gulf, and that an ever-widening one, between
them was a fact to which the keen-sighted doctor could not blind
himself. He was seeing much of the Brentons, during these winter weeks.
Kathryn telephoned to him, almost daily, to consult him about her many
ills, real or imaginary, about every ill, in short, to which feminine
flesh was heir, from nervous palpitations of the heart down, or up, to
housemaid's knee. The doctor longed to give her a downright piece of
his mind. Instead, he gave her unmedicated sugar pills and as courteous
attention as he could pull together. His old-time instinctive dislike
of Kathryn was gathering point and focus, in these days, by reason of
her increasing references to Claims, and the All-Mind, and to the fact
that the pain in a neglected tooth was only a manifestation of cowardly
unbelief. The doctor scented mischief in the glib phrases. He held his
peace heroically, though, albeit now and then he longed to shake his
babbling patient as the terrier shakes the rat.

Brenton also he saw constantly. Indeed, he made a point of it, urging
the young rector to drop into the laboratory in his few off-hours, or
waylaying him in the midst of a round of pastoral calls and dragging
him out for a tramp across the ice-white fields. The river, after a
time or two, he avoided. He did not like the metaphors which the sight
of it called into Brenton's conversation. Indeed, it was far better for
any man to go scrabbling up an icy slope, breathless and upon all
fours, than to stand in a bleak up-valley wind and meditate upon the
sliding ice cakes in an iron-gray stream. Health and a feeling for the
picturesque by no means always walk hand in hand; and it was health the
doctor sought for Brenton, during those winter walks, a mental health
that could best be evoked from hard bodily exercise, rather than from
co