"What about him?" Opdyke questioned carelessly, as he picked up a match. "That he has talents of his own, and a conscience that belongs to his mother. I believe in mothers, Reed; yours is a wonderful woman. But, in this case, I doubt the wonder, and I deplore the way she keeps her thumb on Brenton." "You think she does?" "I know it. Her confounded theories of sanctity are putting a binding around all his brain, a tight binding that is going to shrink and cause a pucker. Brenton has a first-class scientific mind, granted it gets the training. Left to himself and the divinity school, he'll turn into a perfect ass as preacher." Opdyke shook his head. "Nothing so possible as that, I'm afraid," he contradicted. "He'll just settle down on his heels, and shuffle along in----" He hesitated for a finish of his phrase. The professor supplied it, and ruthlessly. "Mental carpet slippers. Precisely. And I could give him boots and spurs." "Why don't you do it, then?" Opdyke asked him bluntly. In the interest of the subject, the old professor forgot that he was talking to one of his students and about another. "Because he's got the very devil of a conscience, and won't let me. There is a widowed mother in the background, and a perfect retinue of preaching ancestors, whole dozens of them and all Baptists, and they have conspired to poison the boy's mind with the notion that it's up to him to preach, too. It would be all right, if he had anything to say; but he hasn't. He's tongue-tied and unmagnetic at the best; what's more, he has learned too many things to let him flaunt abroad the old beliefs as battle standards. He's gone too far, and not far enough. His life is bound to be a miserable sort of compromise, a species of battledore and shuttlecock arrangement between the limits of the deep sea and the devil." And then the professor pulled himself up short. "Know him?" he queried curtly, as he lit his match. Opdyke nodded. "As one does know people one never meets out anywhere," he said. "What do you mean by that?" The question was still curt. "He waits at my joint." "Of course. And?" Opdyke laughed. "How do you know there is an _and_, Professor?" he asked easily. "Because I know you, and because I've heard of 'Reed's parson.' You're your father's own son, Reed. You never could get a starveling like Scott Brenton out of sight of your conscience. How much have you seen of him?" "Not much." And Opdyke gave a few details. The professor nodded thoughtfully. Then,-- "See more," he ordered; "any amount more. You have time enough, you lazy young sinner, and I'll be answerable for all the consequences." Opdyke yielded to his curiosity. "What kind of consequences?" "The inevitable kind that follow all you youngsters. Listen, boy. Brenton is a mixture of genius, and prig, and ignorant young hermit; or, rather, he has the elements all inside him, ready to be mixed. You'll have to do the mixing."