ommon friends, without making him half frantic because he could not go
out and happen, too. She even, and therein lay her final greatness,
blinked at Reed's occasional profanity as concerned his accident,
whereas the average woman would have wept maudlinly.

"Your vocabulary is a picturesque one, Reed," she told him, upon one
occasion. "I ought to be shocked; but I've known you too long to be
shocked at anything you do. Besides, in the end of all things, I
imagine I should follow your own deplorable methods of speech. Swearing
may not be decent socially; but it's a healthy pastime. Only look out
you don't do it in the midst of a pastoral call."

"By the way," Reed looked up suddenly; "I hear that one is imminent."

Olive lifted her brows.

"Who?"

"Brenton."

"Haven't you seen him yet?"

Reed shook his head.

"No. It's been pretty decent of him, too, to hold off a little. Most
parsons would have rushed in, hot foot, to administer extreme unction
and be sure I was in a proper mood concerning Providence. Brenton has
had the decency to wait a little. It was almighty decent, too. I knew
him in my palmy days, when life was young. It's young for him
still--Hold on, Olive; I'm not going to maunder!--and I had a natural
dread of having him come piling in here to crow about himself and
cackle over me."

Olive's laugh was obviously forced. Even the most irresponsible of
gossips is not always altogether hardened.

"I love your metaphors, Reed," she told him. "To be sure, it never had
occurred to me that Saint Peter's cock and Saint Peter's rector were
identical terms."

Reed digressed.

"What's Brenton's wife turned into?" he inquired.

Olive cast an apologetic glance at Mrs. Opdyke, knitting by the other
window. Then she dropped her hands, palms up, into her lap. The gesture
was so expressive as not to need the one word of her answer.

"Impossible."

"I'm not surprised."

"You had seen her?"

"Yes, at our commencement. She was a country daisy, if you choose: but
a nig-nose one, not a placid ox-eye."

This time, Olive felt called on to remonstrate.

"Reed, you are becoming intolerable. A man flat on his back ought to be
pondering upon the convolutions of his soul, not cultivating flowers of
rhetoric."

"Soul be hanged! I keep insisting that mine isn't in any more need of
attention than it was when I was up and doing, and it's a long way
greater bore. Besides, I am prouder of my rhetoric than of my spiri