"Why not?" he queried. "You don't expect our public schools to abandon the Aeneid and Homer, because they don't consider the old mythologies accurate history. You don't expect to give up the best of Hafiz and Omar, because you also come in contact with the worst of them. We'd be poorer, all our lives, by just so much. In the same way, why can't you take the best of our theologies as fact and love it, and, at the same time, keep a certain respect for the rest of them that you don't believe, the sort of respect you give an aged ancestor, a respect for what they have been to the world at large, not for what they are now to you? Belief, in the last analysis, is nothing but well-applied common sense." It was a long time before either of the men spoke again. In the end, Whittenden broke the silence. "Brenton, I'd have given a good deal to have known your parents," he said. "To weigh me up?" Brenton smiled. "You saw my mother: a strong, self-reliant, self-willed character, threaded through and through with Calvinism. She was totally unselfish, yet totally self-centred. In the same way, she was always on a battleground between the claims of her own rampant freewill and her sanctified belief in predestination. It's not an easy thing to analyze her." "And your father?" Brenton coloured hotly. "I was only ten days old, when he died, Whittenden; but the tradition has come down to me. If he hadn't been so weak, so totally self-indulgent, he'd have been a genius. Even in the worst of his self-indulgence, he had ten times my mother's logic. If he had had one tenth of her will power, he'd have counted. As it was, though,--utter annihilation. He died, and left no record. My mother helped it on, by never mentioning him, up to the very day she died." "Hm!" Whittenden said thoughtfully. "Perhaps she knows him better now." Brenton glanced at him curiously. "You still believe it?" "Of course. No; no use arguing from the point of view of the biologist and chemist, Brenton. It won't do you any good, nor me any harm. It's in me; I don't know whence or wherefore, so save your breath and use it on other things. I think your ancestry is all accounted for. As to environment: what does your wife say about it?" "The environment?" Brenton asked, a little bit perversely. "No; the highly individualistic platform you are erecting for yourself? Are you to leave room there for her?" "Hardly. She wouldn't mount it, if I did." "Doesn't share the doubts?" Brenton shook his head. As yet, he was loath to put into words the fact of his wife's adoption of her new creed. Appearances and his own forebodings to the contrary, it might be but a passing phase of her experience. The label of it, though, once affixed, would be well-nigh impossible of removal. "Katharine has never come so very much inside my professional life," he paltered.