use no stronger term for the domestic ecclesiastical
situation, had furnished talk for half the tea tables in town.
Moreover, it was only when a man was present that any woman lifted up
her voice in Katharine's defence. Left to themselves, they knew
perfectly well that all the scholarly stoops and resonant voices and
luminous gray eyes in all creation were not responsible for their
universal sympathy for Brenton. The woman was a toad, a selfish and
ambitious toad, hopping, hopping, hopping up across the surface of the
human pyramid before her. However, in the presence of an occasional
tea-drinking husband, one or the other of them embraced convention and
talked feelingly of Mrs. Brenton's virtues. As a rule, though, she
confessed to herself later on that she had been insistently harping
upon a non-existent entity.

Of late, though, a new element had crept into the talk. Without a
definite word of any sort having been spoken, there was a widening
circle of belief that Brenton's days at Saint Peter's were coming to an
end; that he had stumbled over some obstacle in his professional
pathway; in short, that he had come an ecclesiastical cropper. Just the
form taken by that cropper, just when his relations with Saint Peter's
would cease, just why and wherefore, just what would be the next page
of Brenton's history: all this was still an enigma past all finding
out. For that very reason, it added untold zest to all the cups of tea.
Indeed, it had quite ousted the subject of Reed Opdyke from the public
mind. Reed, in his own time, had been the one great theme. As the
months ran on, though, he presented very little variety to the general
eye, and one's subject must show variety at any cost. Therefore Opdyke
was abandoned, and Brenton substituted in his place.

Questioned, Olive would have found it hard to tell why the inveterate
harping upon Brenton vexed her so. She had been frankly irate, earlier,
when the talk had turned on Opdyke; more than once, she had freed her
mind and departed on her heels. However, that had been very different;
very, very different. Opdyke was an individual; his predicament was a
purely personal matter, concerning himself alone. He did not talk of
it, himself. Therefore it seemed to Olive that there was no especial
reason that all the women in town, some of them total strangers, should
be babbling unceasingly about it, with every degree of curiosity and of
mawkish sentiment.

But Brenton, partly b