"No one. Only--" Then Brenton curbed his rising excitement. Just as of old, he felt the overmastering wish to talk things out with Whittenden; but his maturity shrank from the idea, as the untrained boy had never done. "Anyway," he went on quietly; "I made my choice. I still believe it was the best choice open to me at the time. The only trouble is that I outgrew it." "Or it outgrew you," Whittenden suggested coolly. The dark tide surged up across Scott Brenton's lean cheeks. "Perhaps," he assented curtly. "Still, Whittenden, it doesn't seem that way to me. I feel myself tied down at every point." "What ties you?" "Creeds." Then Brenton laughed a little harshly. "Doubts, rather." Whittenden looked him in the eyes. "What is it that you're doubting, Brenton?" he inquired. "Everything. All the old landmarks of the ages," Brenton told him restively. Whittenden smiled. "You had parted with some of them, when I last said good bye to you," he reminded Brenton. "You had quenched the sulphurous flames, and explained the more surprising of the miracles. You even had a doubt about creation's having been achieved in one hundred and seventy hours. What else has gone upon your conscientious scruples?" "Most things, including a good share of the Thirty-Nine Articles," Brenton made curt answer. "Moreover, I have rewritten my early chapter in the Book of Genesis, until it says _Like unto God, knowing_, not _Good and Evil_, but _the Law_." "Hm-m-m!" Whittenden said slowly. "That isn't quite as original as you may think for, Brenton. A good many of us others have employed that form of the phrase before. Still, there's no use in taking it for a sort of cudgel, to knock down the people who still cling to the dear old phrases. And they are good phrases, too. They deserve to be revered for their antiquity, and for the hold they have kept upon all mankind; still I don't, myself, see why you need to take them any more literally than you do some of those old resonant lines of Homer. It's the spirit of the thing we're after, not the barren phrases." "Then what's the good of all your creed?" Brenton demanded shortly. "Our creed," Brenton corrected him quite gently; more gently, even, than he had spoken to Reed Opdyke on the night before. Indeed, Scott Brenton seemed to him vastly more in need of gentleness than did Opdyke. His trouble was as deep-seated; moreover, it was complicated by a curious ingrained weakness which, Whittenden judged, it would be hard for him to down. In Opdyke's place, Brenton would have turned his face to the wall and made a long, long moan. In Brenton's position, Opdyke would have kept his flags flying gayly, as long as there was a tatter of them left. Now, Brenton's accent showed that he resented the correction. "Ours, if you will; at least, for the present. But, after all, what is the good?" Whittenden's reply came promptly. "A common platform, where we can stand side by side, while we are doing our individual work."