own
room. A half-hour later, kneeling beside her bed, she lost herself in
supplication on behalf of those who bow the knee to Baal.

CHAPTER SEVEN

In the fulness of time, Scott married Catie. To put the case more
accurately, albeit in less lovely phrase, Scott was married by Catie.
From start to finish, Catie was the active force in whatever wooing
achieved itself, the active force which swept down on and annexed a
passive principle.

From the start, their courtship lacked most of the hallmarks of that
tender process. There were few endearments, fewer still of the
half-told, half-guessed confidences which, by their very fragmentary
nature only serve to add emphasis to a comprehension that can construct
a living, vital intimacy out of such slight materials. Indeed, there
was no especial effort at spiritual comprehension between them.
Instead, their unsentimental wooing was a sort of amatory bargain day
for Catie, who must have the best sort of husband to be found on the
domestic market. For Scott, on the other hand, it was the bored
acquiescence of a man too full of other dreams and hopes and even
concrete plannings to regard the choosing of a wife as more important
than the selection of his next-morning's steak. His mother had
impressed upon him that Catie would be the best wife possible for him.
The professors in the divinity school had laid some stress upon the
advantage of their clergy's marrying young. Therefore Scott Brenton
dutifully took to himself a wife, without the slightest previous notion
of what domestic intercourse was bound to mean.

Notwithstanding the education given him by Reed Opdyke and his pseudo
sirens, young Scott Brenton was singularly ignorant of the elements
that go into the making of almost any woman, singularly ignorant
regarding all the practical details of wedded life. Of course, he knew
his mother well; but she seemed to him a little bit archaic. Besides,
he knew her only as a thing apart from all other human relations, as an
isolated personality whose one point of contact was with himself. The
society of a woman who parted her hair straight down the middle of her
head and who quoted Job at breakfast was not a perfect preparation for
modern domestic life.

As for Catie, or Catia, as she now called herself, she was modern
enough, distressingly so sometimes. Nevertheless, analyzed, she would
not have seemed to Scott at all domestic. She was too much wrapped up
in her own pers