The Brentons

by Anna Chapin Ray

Upon the older and more stable fraction of the parish, however, Catia lavished an interested affection which would have seemed well-nigh maternal, had it not been for the care she took to emphasize the gulf in age which yawned between herself and certain of the individuals who made up its list. She studied the list with no slight degree of care. By the end of their first month in the new parish, she knew to a nicety how the line of local social precedence ordered itself, where, at any point in the procession, town must yield to gown, or the reverse. She knew the lineage and history of all the wardens and their wives, and then of all the vestry-men; she even cultivated a nodding acquaintance with their family skeletons, and learned to recognize the seals upon the doors that, as a rule, hid them from public view. She knew the hobbies of the average prosperous member at large of the flock ecclesiastical, and made a series of elaborate calculations regarding the intersecting social orbits of those same members. As for the other, lesser members of the congregation, she had an especial kind of smile, half of sweetness, half of deprecation, that she bestowed upon each one of them in turn; but she never made the slightest effort to separate them, one from another, in her mind, or to return any of their calls. To Catia's astute brain, the duty of a rector's lady consisted in helping her husband up, not on.

It was at about this epoch, too, that Catia ceased to be Catia and became Kathryn. In some respects, the most remarkable thing about the change was the suddenness with which it was announced to Scott.

A dozen of them had been dining at the Keltridges', one night, six months or so after Brenton had come to take charge of the congregation of Saint Peter's. It was essentially a church-warden kind of dinner, with all the other wardens and their wives to meet the rector and his lady, the kind of dinner that one gives and goes to, out of stern necessity, when, all the time, one longs for something just a little less made up by rule of thumb. The one exception to the prevailing ecclesiastical flavour, that night, was in the person of a local novelist who, albeit suave and very bald, wrote novels of the raucous, woolly West. Moreover, like all other novelists, he rejoiced in talking shop. Accordingly, with the utmost expedition, he dragged the talk around to the law regarding the choice of names.

"Of course," he expounded, for the benefit of whom it might concern; "the first thing I always do, when I go to work, is to name my characters. It's the hardest thing in the world to do—properly. You can stick any sort of name to any sort of character, I know; but that's not naming them. Not at all. The name must be a label; it must fit like a glove, and yet the character must be fitted to it. And most of the names I find are so trite."

"Likewise the characters," Dolph Dennison assured him, sotto voce.

Dolph, by way of his older brother, who was vestryman, might be termed sub-ecclesiastical. However, in any case, he would have been sure of a seat at the Keltridge dinner, even if all the other guests had been archbishops. It needs at least one such irresponsible youngster to act as appetizer for the solid things before him.

Only Olive heard his comment. As a matter of course, Dolph's place was next to Olive. Long since, discerning hostesses had discovered that therein lay the only path to peace. Otherwise, Dolph either sulked palpably; or else ignored his other neighbour and shouted all his talk across the table into Olive's ears. Not that either Dolph or Olive had any notion of being at all in love with each other. It was merely that things struck them the same way at the same instant, and that Dolph, being young and a good deal spoiled, could see no reason against a prompt exchange of comments on the fact. Therefore, for the peace of the other people at the table, it had become a universal local law that, no matter who took Olive Keltridge out, Dolph Dennison should be placed at her other side.

Olive, then, heard Dolph's comment and, what was infinitely worse, she feared the novelist had heard it, too. Therefore, to save the feelings of the bald little man, she flung herself into the talk.

"I see exactly what you mean," she told him. "Your idea is that, when you have conceived a character that is wholly original—"

"Ahem!" Dolph strangled suddenly.