"Yes." Brenton spoke slowly, while there flashed before him in swift alignment all the details for which his profession stood: place and popularity and influence, the best of human and social ties, the fulfilled ambitions, the closest sort of contacts with his kind. All these he saw, as rounded out to their fullest measure. Beside them was himself, outwardly active, spiritually as stark and still as was the broken body of his friend before him. In that instant, it was given to Brenton to measure himself beside his possibilities, and the measure was not wholly reassuring. "Yes," he repeated slowly; "but what is going to be the final good gained by my hanging on, in case I never steady down?" Reed compressed his lips. Then, out of his own experience, he spoke. "In that case, at least you'll have had the satisfaction of finding out that, science and theology to the contrary notwithstanding, in the final end it's solely up to you." CHAPTER EIGHTEEN "But, really, she wasn't always so impossible," Olive argued above the coffee, that night. "All things are possible to an open mind," her father rejoined placidly. Olive changed her phrase for one more downright. "Then, if you must have it, she wasn't always so totally vulgar as she is now." "Time always brings development," Doctor Keltridge reminded her benignly, while he thrashed about in his cup with a spoon, much as he might have wielded a glass rod in a delinquent mixture. Then, his spoon poised in mid air, he asked, with a sudden show of curiosity, "On what do you base your theory, Olive?" Olive's reply was feminine, and very convincing to herself. "Because, if she had been, she never would have been asked out to dinner." "Duty," Doctor Keltridge suggested. "Well, not twice at the same place, then." "She doesn't eat with her knife," the doctor responded hopefully. "Therefore she must be evolving just a very little." "How do you know?" "Because she used to--evidently. That type always does." Olive laughed. "Father, I don't believe you ever have really admired Mrs. Brenton," she said. "No." The doctor spoke with slow decision. "There is no especial reason that I should. She is a totally brainless little cus--" "Father!" The doctor shot one expressive glance at his horrified daughter. Then, with exceeding deliberation, he continued his interrupted word. "--tomer, and her only place in the moral universe is to act as a leech on Brenton's nervous system. The worst of it is, when her beneficent work is ended, he'll find out that he is powerless to shake her off. It's enough, the watching them, I mean, to make one believe in a tentative marriage system, at least within the rural districts. The bumpkin comes up to marriageable age, and takes the first--" "Father!" Olive remonstrated once more. "Mr. Brenton isn't a bumpkin. He never was." "My dear," the doctor set down his empty cup; "who mentioned Brenton, anyway? I was merely talking about Brenton's wife."