How far this lack of reverence resulted from her husband's vacillating viewpoint, the doctor could not fathom. More than a little, he surmised. Had Brenton never wavered in his theology, Kathryn would have clung like a limpet to the bed-rock of her congenital Baptist faith. And yet, the doctor could not hold Brenton altogether responsible for Kathryn's development. The germs of mental cheapness were in Kathryn's nature, as were the germs of more or less illogical doubtings just as surely inherent in Scott Brenton's brain. He had increased the tendency, not created it. Neither could the doctor quite make up his mind whether the two of them were conscious of the growing gulf between them. To begin with, he could not decide whether, on their wedding day, there ever had been any real spiritual tangency between them. Reed said not; but Reed had been young, at the time of his earlier acquaintance with them, and so incapable of forming any stable judgment. Knowing Brenton, it seemed incredible to the doctor that he could have been so supinely idiotic as to have allowed himself, against his will, to be gobbled up by Kathryn--for it was thus that Doctor Eustace Keltridge diagnosed their entrance into matrimony. However, the doctor lacked some knowledge of the determining factors in the case. He had no notion how Kathryn had spread her net before the idealistic young student who was too intent upon his personal problems, as concerned his choice of a profession and his duty to his mother, to heed the matrimonial pitfalls laid at his unwary feet. However, that there was a gulf, and that an ever-widening one, between them was a fact to which the keen-sighted doctor could not blind himself. He was seeing much of the Brentons, during these winter weeks. Kathryn telephoned to him, almost daily, to consult him about her many ills, real or imaginary, about every ill, in short, to which feminine flesh was heir, from nervous palpitations of the heart down, or up, to housemaid's knee. The doctor longed to give her a downright piece of his mind. Instead, he gave her unmedicated sugar pills and as courteous attention as he could pull together. His old-time instinctive dislike of Kathryn was gathering point and focus, in these days, by reason of her increasing references to Claims, and the All-Mind, and to the fact that the pain in a neglected tooth was only a manifestation of cowardly unbelief. The doctor scented mischief in the glib phrases. He held his peace heroically, though, albeit now and then he longed to shake his babbling patient as the terrier shakes the rat.