"Chaos is a good, strong word, Brenton," he said, after a minute. "Exactly what is it that you mean?"
Brenton stated his meaning, without mincing matters in the least.
"I mean that I have no more business to be preaching in Saint Peter's than I would have to be holding forth upon the eternal fires of the most azure Calvinism."
"But you made your choice deliberately."
Brenton turned on him with some impatience.
"What if I did? What is the choice of a boy of twenty, anyway? Of a cocksure, ambitious boy just breaking out of leading strings? I did choose—and yet, not so freely as I seemed to do. There was my mother in the background."
"Of course," Whittenden assented quietly. "Who else, better?"
"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.