"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.
Whittenden pricked up his ears, partly at the statement, partly at the unfamiliar name. He had felt sure that he had heard "I, Scott, take thee, Catia." In his more mellow New York life, such transforming evolution was less common. However, names were a detail. It was the fact he challenged.
"Your wife? But how can she stay outside it, Brenton?"
"Oh, she's not outside it, in a sense. Before the boy came, she was in all the guilds and parish teas and that. Really," Brenton spoke with a blind optimism; "she was very popular. But, in the vital things one thinks and feels—Whittenden, I don't imagine any woman ever really can share those things with us men. We are created different. We can't go inside each other's shells."
And in that final utterance, it seemed to Whittenden, Scott Brenton voiced the saddest phase of all his present unbelief.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO