I'm not
producing any brief for Opdyke. In fact, he doesn't need one; we both
of us know already what he stands for. But I do hate to see a girl like
you go off her head about such a man as Brenton, a man with a Christian
Science wife and a thrilling voice and speaking eyes: all deadly assets
for a misunderstood ex-preacher. No; I do not like Brenton. He's not my
sort. Neither, for the fact of it, is he your sort."

Olive compressed her lips.

"I may help to make him so," she said.

"Best let him make himself; he's had too many formative fingers in his
pie, already. Besides," Dolph's lips curled into an irrepressible
smile; "how do you know it would be for his advantage?"

For one instant, Olive struggled with her pique. Then she cast it off,
and looked up at Dolph with her old smile.

"You hit hard, Dolph," she told him; "but I'm not sure you aren't in
the right of it, after all. I like Mr. Brenton. I am sorry for him;
perhaps it has muddled my values, as you call it, to be on the inside
circle of his advisers. Still, there is something to be said upon the
other side. You can't comprehend a man like Mr. Brenton, if you try."

"Why not? Not that I've tried over much, though," Dolph added, in hasty
confession.

"It wouldn't have done you any good, if you had tried," Olive assured
him flatly. "You haven't a single point in common. By ancestry and
training, you're as unlike as a Zulu and an Eskimo. You began at about
the point where Mr. Brenton, if he's lucky, will leave off. Your
great-great-grandparents settled once for all the questions that he's
agonizing over now. Naturally, you don't remember their struggles, and
so you can't see why his should take it out of him, any more than you
can see why a personable man like him ever could have married--"

"What your father aptly terms the She-Gargoyle?" Dolph inquired. "No; I
can't. But then the question arises promptly, how can you?"

Olive smiled a little sadly. Loath though she was to acknowledge it to
Dolph, of late she had been finding out that comprehension does not
always make for full approval.

"As you say, Dolph," she told him; "it's the woman of me. After our own
fashion, we every one of us are natural nurses; we know when our
menfolk are in pain."

"Not always, Olive." Dolph spoke sadly.

"Yes, Dolph, we do. Hard as it is, though, sometimes we have to admit
we have no cure for that especial pain. Still, you can be quite sure
that it isn't easy for u