"Sorry, Reed," she told him; "but there's a tea on at the Prathers'. Earlier, I'm taking Dolph Dennison canoeing."
"Olive!" Reed's accent was remonstrant. "How can you stand that little duffer?"
Olive rose to the defence.
"He's not such a duffer. Of course, he's young and callow; but he's good fun."
"Yes; but an instructor, and only rhetoric, at that." Reed's voice showed his scorn.
"You're jealous, Reed. You think he will do better metaphors than you; but you needn't worry. Dolph doesn't talk shop. Besides, he may get to be a real professor, if he keeps at work; and," Olive's glance, merry and not uncomfortably pitiful, rested upon the long-limbed figure lying so flat beside her; "even you must admit it, Reed, that rhetoric is a much safer means of livelihood than engineering. Good bye, boy, and keep out of mischief till I get here, next time."
As it chanced, it was that afternoon that Brenton came to see him, for the first time since Reed's return. Whatever Brenton's thought about the matter, it must be confessed that Opdyke, albeit healthy-minded and as philosophical as a surgical case can ever be, had felt a good deal of dread of their meeting. In the old days, he had been the strong one and the masterful, Brenton the weak. The present reversal of the situation went upon his nerves.
He had remembered Brenton clearly, all these intervening years. More than once, in the intervals of his strenuous life, he had found himself wondering what the gaunt young countryman had become. In the time of it, Reed had had no notion how thoroughly he had liked the fellow, how thoroughly he had believed in his latent possibilities. Looking back upon them now, judging them by the broader standards of his own wider knowledge of the things that really count, Reed had felt his old-time interest grow and quicken. It had caused him no especial surprise, then, when a letter from his father had brought him news of the rector of Saint Peter's. Neither had it caused him any more surprise when his father's later letters recorded bit by bit the intimacy slowly growing up between the scholarly young rector and his father's critical self. Instead, Reed took a certain comfort in reflecting that he had foreseen it all along. However, he had felt an undeniable curiosity to see the shabby, under-nourished Scott Brenton, a thing of shambling feet and knobbly joints, transmogrified into the well-groomed, easy-mannered type of rector which had become traditional at Saint Peter's.
Nevertheless, now that he was at home once more and, to all seeming, candidate for churchly ministrations, Reed found he drew back a little from their meeting. At the start, even though his bodily strength allowed it, his nervous energy shrank from the ordeal of seeing people. It seemed to him that there would be so many things he ought to explain to them to make his position clear. Of course, with his family and the Keltridges and even the despised Dolph Dennison, it was different, although even the irresponsible Dolph had floundered and struck bottom on a conversational reef or two, and it had taken all Reed's grip to haul him off and steer him into deep waters and consequent safety.
Left to himself and thinking the matter over at his leisure, Reed admitted, with an impersonal candour, that it was very easy for his guests to err in tact. A man in his predicament was bound to be a trifle flooring; it did not affect the question in the least that he was in no wise responsible for the predicament. It had resulted, quite simply, from his natural instincts, not from any conscious thirsting for fame and for consequent Carnegie medals. However, the average visitor could not be expected to be aware of that; and therefore he would be more than likely to feel it incumbent upon him to say gracious things in a tremulous falsetto voice. In the present case, the question concerned itself with the problem whether or not Scott Brenton would prove to be the average visitor.