ever would have dawned. She doubted. If ever there had been a
case where a wife had muddled things by her total lack of
comprehension, here it was. A blind intolerance would have been nothing
by comparison.

Suddenly she threw back her shoulders and lifted up her head. It was
morally and socially impossible to be heaping all the blame, even of a
mental crisis, on the wife. She, as a woman, owed the other woman more
sufferance than that. And Brenton was disappointingly weak. No strong
man would have fallen down in such a muddle, by reason of a tempest in
his spiritual teapot. Besides, if he had steadied to his strain, he
might perhaps have held his wife also steady, might even have prevented
her allegiance to her new creed. Olive's innate sense of justice
demanded division of the blame.

Yet, as the girl pronounced her judgments on both Brenton and his wife,
she was conscious of an immense wave of pity which spent itself
entirely upon Brenton. Brenton was weak, was futile, disappointing;
nevertheless, it was plain that he was suffering keenly. And, just
because the nature of his suffering was so alien to all her own life's
standards, it impressed itself on Olive as the grim, silent endurance
of Reed Opdyke had never done. Reed was Reed, a solid fact past all
gainsaying; his point of view had become one of the necessities of her
daily life. Always she could predict with just how great a degree of
manliness he would bear himself. As for Brenton--

To her extreme surprise, Olive's mind stopped short, and refused to
continue the comparison.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The curate, after the manner of his kind, was having tea with a
feminine member of his congregation. This time, the honour had fallen
upon Olive, who had received it with temperate resignation rather than
exuberant joy. Divested of his bunny hood, the curate was a weedy young
man with painfully good intentions and a receding chin. Furthermore, he
confessed to liking caraway seed in his tea cakes. In other words, the
trail of his nursery was still upon him. Accordingly, to atone for the
skim-milk quality of his conversation, Olive habitually refused him
cream in his tea, and squeezed in lemon juice until he cried aloud for
mercy.

On this particular afternoon, quite as a matter of course, the talk had
turned on Brenton. Indeed, it seemed to Olive, nowadays, that the talk
invariably did turn on Brenton. All summer long, his matrimonial
incongruities, to