Olive went a step backward in the conversation. "She may not literally eat with her knife," she said; "but, at least, she does it metaphorically, and then, at the end, she licks it. Yes, that's very vulgar; but it is true, and there's nobody but you to hear it. Listen. I haven't told you the worst yet." And Olive recounted to her father Kathryn Brenton's catechism concerning Opdyke, her manifest and merciless curiosity, so thinly veiled behind her avowed desire to administer consolation. When she had finished, the doctor shook his wise gray head. "Some women are merely pussy cats, Olive, and some of them are panthers," he said gravely. "I am glad you told me. I'll put the Opdykes on their guard. Reed has seemed to be gaining lately; more depends on his nerves than those New York butchers of his are quite aware. I do know it, because I've taken care of his mother ahead of him; and there are some cases when an old-fashioned doctor with common sense and a closet full of family traditions is worth a dozen modern surgeons. Reed has been doing a little better lately; you and Dolph Dennison, with all your nonsense, are steadying him wonderfully. But that she-gargoyle! Olive, she'd have Reed in his coffin, inside of half an hour. I'll see that she's kept out on the steps. If she wants to kill her husband, I can't help it. She's got her grip on him. I'll be hanged, though, if she gets that nose of hers inside Reed Opdyke's room." "I wonder," Olive rested her elbows on the table, and spoke down at her interlaced fingers; "wonder why it is we both of us dislike her so." "I've been her doctor," Doctor Keltridge observed, as if that one fact were sufficient explanation. "But she must have lucid intervals." "Precious few," the doctor growled. "What's worse, they are getting fewer, every week. If I were in Brenton's place, I'd take to drink, and use that as an excuse for beating her. He's denied that luxury, though, by what she calls his cloth. To hear her talk, you'd think we laymen dressed in tissue-paper napkins." Olive disregarded the digression. "And yet, she isn't really bad to him." "Depends on what you call being really bad," the doctor growled again. "Of course, she doesn't put senna in his tea, nor take tucks in his Sunday trousers; but she does nip off the tips of all his best growths with that temper of hers, or else freeze them with her lack of comprehension. She's a pachyderm and she's a pig; and, if she keeps on, she'll drag her husband to her level. Brenton's got yeast in him, Olive, fine, lively yeast. There is no telling what he would rise to, if only we could succeed in abolishing her." "If only she wouldn't allude to him in public as His Reverence!" Olive sighed. "It is almost as bad as her coy flirtation with him, during sermon time. If I were in his place, I'd brain her." The doctor pushed his chair back from the table. "You couldn't," he said concisely. "It's not according to the laws of nature."