"Your vocabulary is a picturesque one, Reed," she told him, upon one occasion. "I ought to be shocked; but I've known you too long to be shocked at anything you do. Besides, in the end of all things, I imagine I should follow your own deplorable methods of speech. Swearing may not be decent socially; but it's a healthy pastime. Only look out you don't do it in the midst of a pastoral call." "By the way," Reed looked up suddenly; "I hear that one is imminent." Olive lifted her brows. "Who?" "Brenton." "Haven't you seen him yet?" Reed shook his head. "No. It's been pretty decent of him, too, to hold off a little. Most parsons would have rushed in, hot foot, to administer extreme unction and be sure I was in a proper mood concerning Providence. Brenton has had the decency to wait a little. It was almighty decent, too. I knew him in my palmy days, when life was young. It's young for him still--Hold on, Olive; I'm not going to maunder!--and I had a natural dread of having him come piling in here to crow about himself and cackle over me." Olive's laugh was obviously forced. Even the most irresponsible of gossips is not always altogether hardened. "I love your metaphors, Reed," she told him. "To be sure, it never had occurred to me that Saint Peter's cock and Saint Peter's rector were identical terms." Reed digressed. "What's Brenton's wife turned into?" he inquired. Olive cast an apologetic glance at Mrs. Opdyke, knitting by the other window. Then she dropped her hands, palms up, into her lap. The gesture was so expressive as not to need the one word of her answer. "Impossible." "I'm not surprised." "You had seen her?" "Yes, at our commencement. She was a country daisy, if you choose: but a nig-nose one, not a placid ox-eye." This time, Olive felt called on to remonstrate. "Reed, you are becoming intolerable. A man flat on his back ought to be pondering upon the convolutions of his soul, not cultivating flowers of rhetoric." "Soul be hanged! I keep insisting that mine isn't in any more need of attention than it was when I was up and doing, and it's a long way greater bore. Besides, I am prouder of my rhetoric than of my spiritual convolutions. But about Brenton's wife? She seemed to me then the typical shrewd Yankee who would adapt herself to any sort of circumstances and get the best end of any sort of bargain." Olive nodded. "You've about hit it, Reed. But then, I'm not fair to her." "Not your sort, eh?" But Reed, as he looked at Olive and remembered Catia, felt no real need to put the question. "It's not that so much--well--no--I can't seem to understand her." Then Olive's eyes met his directly, and she stopped her rambling with a little laugh. "You needn't presume on your position, Reed. It's not decent to make me tell what I think of Mrs. Brenton, when you know you are driving me into a corner where I either have to lie, or else abuse her to a perfectly strange man."