t that those other
girls beside her elbow were effete and colourless? Scott struggled to
repress his doubts, while he watched the gay assurance with which Catie
answered to Reed Opdyke's chaff. Scott was perfectly well aware that
Opdyke would not have chaffed some of those other girls upon such short
acquaintance, and the surety made him restless. He took it out in
wishing that Catie had not adorned her girlish neck with a gilded chain
which could have restrained a bulldog, or a convict.

Then he pulled himself up short. Catie was Catie, and his guest. She
would have fought for him on any issue, and downed any number of foes
in the fighting. To Mrs. Brenton, she was as dear as any daughter, dear
as the daughter that she meant one day to be. Besides, who was he, a
self-help student temporarily excused from waiting upon table and
attired in a misfit evening coat hired from a ghetto tailor: who was he
to criticise the flowers and frills of Catie? If she had had the
chances which had come to him, if she could have gone to Smith, for
instance, or Bryn Mawr, she would have come out of the mill a finished
little product, clever, adaptable, and not a gawky, under-nourished,
over-strenuous bumpkin like himself. In the depths of his
self-abasement, Scott Brenton did not hesitate to ply himself with ugly
adjectives. Indeed, they seemed to him to be doing something towards
the removal of his doubts concerning Catie's pinchbeck chain.

Later, as it chanced, Reed Opdyke and Scott Brenton found themselves
going up the street together.

"It's all hours, I suppose," Opdyke said rather indistinctly through a
mammoth yawn. "Still, Brenton, what if it is? Come along to Mory's."

"Too late," Scott objected, with a guilty recollection of his mother
who would have wrestled in prayer, all night long, could she have seen
her son's steps turn towards Mory's and at the bacchanalian hour of
half-past ten.

But Opdyke's hand was on his watch.

"Not a bit. Besides, it's our last chance, you know."

"Till next year," Scott corrected, though he yielded to the hand upon
his arm.

Opdyke shook his head.

"No next year about it, Brenton. That's all off."

"What now?" Scott asked him in some surprise, for it had been an
understood thing that Opdyke took his graduate science courses in the
university that was giving him his bachelor's degree.

"The ancestral crank has slipped a cog," Opdyke returned profanely.
"Being interpreted, my reverend