mself must be the sole cause of
the wretched bungle Fate was making of his well-intentioned life. Was
he so malevolent, or just futile? And which was the worse of the two
alternatives?

Anyway, the fact was that he felt himself an outcast, a negligible bit
of driftwood upon the tide of opportunity. His profession had found him
a useless unbeliever. In the end, it would cast him out completely, a
tattered remnant of a soul, riddled with doubts. His wife would be
quite too well-mannered to do anything so radical as to cast him out;
but she was finding him devoid of interest for her, was holding herself
aloof from him, shutting him away from any real spiritual intercourse
with her, and reducing him to the bread-and-butter level of a
table-mate and nothing more. In the end, even, it might-- Then Brenton
shook his head, as he faced the fact that, in the end, it could not
possibly be much worse than it was getting to be now. Of course, there
was publicity to be avoided; but, on the other hand, publicity would
bring a freedom from the strain of smiling jauntily at life, as though
nothing really were amiss.

For Brenton realized with a disconcerting clearness that something was
amiss, much, much amiss; realized, moreover, that he had known it
vaguely all along. The trouble, albeit still nameless, had been there
all the time, from the first day that he, smarting from the impact of
the maternal slipper, had smarted yet more keenly beneath the lash of
Catie's young disdain. From that time onward, whether she was Catie,
Catia, or Kathryn, her attitude had been the same, always disdainful,
always a little uncomprehending of his point of view. She had used
himself and his profession as a sort of social ladder whereby to
clamber upward. Always she had disdained the material of which the
ladder was constructed. Now that she was successfully landed upon the
desired level and needed its support no longer, would she kick it aside
entirely, with one flick of her slippered foot? As for their marriage:
what had it really been? A delicately hand-wrought bond? A machine-made
manacle? Indeed, the latter, and unbreakable.

Brenton pulled himself up short, horrified at the abyss upon whose
verge he found himself. He, the priest, vowed, despite his honest
doubts, to the preaching of God's holy word and commandment, to be
applying questions such as that to the marriage ties between himself
and Catie! For, quite unconsciously, the swift revulsion