He started for his laboratory. A moment later, he came back again, his coat under his arm, his hair rampant and his tie already gloriously askew. "She can 'Reverence' him all she wants to," he said, casting the words at Olive as if they had been an iron projectile; "but she doesn't care one grain for him. In fact, she only cares for the materials shut up inside her skin. She's a monstrosity of selfishness; that's what she is, no more fit to be a rector's wife, wife of a man like Brenton, than a tin can of corned beef with a crack in it. She's poisonous, Olive, poisonous! Ptomaines aren't in it, by comparison. At least, they're sudden; and she drags it out to all infinity. Poor Brenton!" And, with a gulp of sympathetic ire, the doctor vanished, this time to be seen no more. Whatever were the doctor's forms of speech, his facts were sound. Not in vain had he been Scott Brenton's senior warden, all these months; not in vain Kathryn's medical adviser and unwilling confidant, during the recent weeks of her approach to motherhood. He had learned to know the fineness of the man, the reverent housing he gave to his ideals, the care he lavished on their betterment; and just so surely he also knew the sordid selfishness of the woman, her lack of any ideals beyond the petty ones concerning food and raiment and mere personal advancement, her ruthless disregard of all that related to her husband's individual or professional welfare. Scott Brenton spoke even of his doubts with a reverent reticence. Kathryn Brenton vaunted her supposed beliefs in phrases which, even to the bluff old doctor's ears, amounted to the extreme of blasphemy. The rector, even in the richness of his humour, treated as somehow fine and sacred matters of every-day routine. The rector's lady took the very materials that went into her husband's Sunday sermons, and used them as themes for joking of a species which passed the limits of the doctor's comprehension. To Scott, the very religion that he sought to question, was a pure white lily reverently to be placed beneath his microscope. To Kathryn, it was a red, red rose to be worn flauntingly upon the apex of her Sunday hat. On week days, she was developing a cheap irreverence which never could be in danger of turning into anything more vital. It needs some brains and no small amount of reverence in any man, before he can become an honest agnostic; in both brains and reverence, Kathryn was supremely lacking.