d. My mother helped it on, by
never mentioning him, up to the very day she died."

"Hm!" Whittenden said thoughtfully. "Perhaps she knows him better now."

Brenton glanced at him curiously.

"You still believe it?"

"Of course. No; no use arguing from the point of view of the biologist
and chemist, Brenton. It won't do you any good, nor me any harm. It's
in me; I don't know whence or wherefore, so save your breath and use it
on other things. I think your ancestry is all accounted for. As to
environment: what does your wife say about it?"

"The environment?" Brenton asked, a little bit perversely.

"No; the highly individualistic platform you are erecting for yourself?
Are you to leave room there for her?"

"Hardly. She wouldn't mount it, if I did."

"Doesn't share the doubts?"

Brenton shook his head. As yet, he was loath to put into words the fact
of his wife's adoption of her new creed. Appearances and his own
forebodings to the contrary, it might be but a passing phase of her
experience. The label of it, though, once affixed, would be well-nigh
impossible of removal.

"Katharine has never come so very much inside my professional life," he
paltered.

Whittenden pricked up his ears, partly at the statement, partly at the
unfamiliar name. He had felt sure that he had heard "I, Scott, take
thee, Catia." In his more mellow New York life, such transforming
evolution was less common. However, names were a detail. It was the
fact he challenged.

"Your wife? But how can she stay outside it, Brenton?"

"Oh, she's not outside it, in a sense. Before the boy came, she was in
all the guilds and parish teas and that. Really," Brenton spoke with a
blind optimism; "she was very popular. But, in the vital things one
thinks and feels--Whittenden, I don't imagine any woman ever really can
share those things with us men. We are created different. We can't go
inside each other's shells."

And in that final utterance, it seemed to Whittenden, Scott Brenton
voiced the saddest phase of all his present unbelief.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

"Still, Reed, I rather grudge the time," Whittenden said to his host
when, dinner over, that same night, he flung himself into a chair at
Opdyke's side. "For all practical purposes, it was a wasted afternoon.
I'd much rather have been here with you."

"You'd have been quite _de trop_, old man. Olive Keltridge was here,
two hours, and filled me up with all the gossip of the town. Besid