"It wouldn't have done you any good, if you had tried," Olive assured him flatly. "You haven't a single point in common. By ancestry and training, you're as unlike as a Zulu and an Eskimo. You began at about the point where Mr. Brenton, if he's lucky, will leave off. Your great-great-grandparents settled once for all the questions that he's agonizing over now. Naturally, you don't remember their struggles, and so you can't see why his should take it out of him, any more than you can see why a personable man like him ever could have married--" "What your father aptly terms the She-Gargoyle?" Dolph inquired. "No; I can't. But then the question arises promptly, how can you?" Olive smiled a little sadly. Loath though she was to acknowledge it to Dolph, of late she had been finding out that comprehension does not always make for full approval. "As you say, Dolph," she told him; "it's the woman of me. After our own fashion, we every one of us are natural nurses; we know when our menfolk are in pain." "Not always, Olive." Dolph spoke sadly. "Yes, Dolph, we do. Hard as it is, though, sometimes we have to admit we have no cure for that especial pain. Still, you can be quite sure that it isn't easy for us to turn away and leave it, unhealed and aching." Then she threw off the little allegory, and once more spoke with spirit. "Dolph, we're created in mental couples, I suspect. Much as I care for Reed, it was you who had the insight to plan how he could make his life over into something besides the bare existence we all were dreading. In the same way, I may be the one to take in the tragedy of Mr. Brenton's indeterminate existence, and make it just a little lighter, if only by my understanding. Anyway, I mean to try." She turned in across the lawn, leaving Dolph to stare after her retreating figure with no small anxiety. "Blast the understanding!" he said profanely. "And then, blast the preacher!" The poor preacher, however, for preacher still he was, in spite of the reversal of his collar fastenings, was feeling himself already blasted. He had been spending a long hour in the doctor's laboratory; and the doctor, for the once, had turned his back upon his pans and trays of cultures, and lavished his entire attention on his visitor. "It's just here, Brenton," he said quietly, after an hour of argument; "you can do one of two things: you can keep to your text and teach those girls straight chemistry; or--" Brenton faced him squarely, squarely capped the sentence with a single word. "Resign." "Yes." "You mean you think I am a failure in my teaching?" "No. Your teaching is all right. You are a born chemist and a born teacher. It's your infernal preaching I object to," the doctor told him unexpectedly. "My preaching?"