He tried to conceal a slight sense of hurt beneath his laugh at the concrete image called into being by her words.
"Like ivy poison, when you rub it, and it spreads? Perhaps." Then suddenly his eyes went grave. "The curious fact about it all, Miss Keltridge, is that our beliefs never take half the hold on us that our doubts do. My inherited notions of original sin and a violent conversion never by any chance could have upset my worldly advancement. This last phase of my querying—to phrase it mildly—is going to overturn my—" And, for the first time in her knowledge of him, Olive heard his laugh ring bitter; "my whole scheme of domestic economics."
Bitter as was his laugh, though, Brenton's face was only sad. To Olive, watching him and suddenly grown aware of his weakness, it was plain that life was taking it out of him rather badly, plain that the man before her was hungering for comprehension, comfort. What did he get of that sort, at home?
Once again, at her own question, Olive felt the chasm widening between them, felt it and instinctively detested it. Still, she could not keep her mind from lingering an instant on the wonder whether, if Brenton's wife had been sensitive, unselfish, alert to supply, in so far as lay within her, the sympathy of which he plainly was in need, the present crisis ever would have dawned. She doubted. If ever there had been a case where a wife had muddled things by her total lack of comprehension, here it was. A blind intolerance would have been nothing by comparison.
Suddenly she threw back her shoulders and lifted up her head. It was morally and socially impossible to be heaping all the blame, even of a mental crisis, on the wife. She, as a woman, owed the other woman more sufferance than that. And Brenton was disappointingly weak. No strong man would have fallen down in such a muddle, by reason of a tempest in his spiritual teapot. Besides, if he had steadied to his strain, he might perhaps have held his wife also steady, might even have prevented her allegiance to her new creed. Olive's innate sense of justice demanded division of the blame.
Yet, as the girl pronounced her judgments on both Brenton and his wife, she was conscious of an immense wave of pity which spent itself entirely upon Brenton. Brenton was weak, was futile, disappointing; nevertheless, it was plain that he was suffering keenly. And, just because the nature of his suffering was so alien to all her own life's standards, it impressed itself on Olive as the grim, silent endurance of Reed Opdyke had never done. Reed was Reed, a solid fact past all gainsaying; his point of view had become one of the necessities of her daily life. Always she could predict with just how great a degree of manliness he would bear himself. As for Brenton—
To her extreme surprise, Olive's mind stopped short, and refused to continue the comparison.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The curate, after the manner of his kind, was having tea with a feminine member of his congregation. This time, the honour had fallen upon Olive, who had received it with temperate resignation rather than exuberant joy. Divested of his bunny hood, the curate was a weedy young man with painfully good intentions and a receding chin. Furthermore, he confessed to liking caraway seed in his tea cakes. In other words, the trail of his nursery was still upon him. Accordingly, to atone for the skim-milk quality of his conversation, Olive habitually refused him cream in his tea, and squeezed in lemon juice until he cried aloud for mercy.