ause
of all these things, he suddenly decided that it would be the part of
good fellowship to pay a visit to his former rector and present
colleague, Brenton.

To be sure, Dolph had never had the habit of calling upon Brenton. From
the first, his liking for the man had been a temperate one, a liking
mitigated by his own regrets concerning the nature of Brenton's sense
of humour. Moreover, he shied a little bit at Brenton's priestly
calling, shied a little bit more at the idea of coming into closer
quarters with Brenton's wife. Now, from all accounts, the wife was
somewhat in abeyance; and the sudden reversal of Brenton's collar
buttons had turned him from the picture of a priest to at least the
semblance of a man.

In regard to Brenton, Dolph Dennison saw no need to mince matters. His
clear young eyes had made out the one loose thread that sagged and
knotted across and across the texture of Brenton's mind. He saw it and,
lacking knowledge of its source in Brenton's erratic father, he
condemned it with the cocksure harshness of exceeding youth. Without
it, Brenton would have been all man. With it, Dolph believed, he was
predestined to futility. Indeed, what hope was there for a man who
would get himself all waxy over such played-out doctrines as
predestination, and then sit by, impotently calm, and watch his wife go
off upon the Christian Science tangent, without a word to stop her and
tie her down to reason? It was like finding cold, bare bones embedded
in one's breakfast porridge. None the less, one did owe some social
decencies to one's colleagues of the faculty. Therefore, despite his
new-formed porridge metaphor, Dolph trudged away in the direction of
the Brentons' home.

The new home was a smaller one than Saint Peter's rectory. It stood
back a little from the street, under a trio of giant hemlocks which
shaded the front verandah and the long stretch of gravelled walk. The
shady walk was damp now, with the moisture of the early spring, and the
wet little stones ground only softly underneath Dolph's heels, so
softly that their murmur was quite inaudible inside the house, although
a window, wide open to the front verandah, gave to Dolph, as he crossed
the lawn, a full knowledge of the discussion going on within. It was a
one-sided sort of a discussion, to all appearing. Moreover, from the
pitch and the velocity of the voice, Dolph judged the discussion to be
largely on the part of the Brentons' most recent cook.