"Don't be archaic, Brenton," the doctor bade him. "One doesn't give squills nowadays. However—"
Brenton flung up his head impatiently. The doctor liked the gesture, liked the little angry glint in the gray eyes.
"You mean then," he persisted slowly, and Brenton, listening, was aware that he was talking as one man to another, not as the senior warden of Saint Peter's to its rector; "that you are saying things on Sunday that you're denying, all the week?"
Brenton nodded curtly.
"That's about the size of it."
Well as he had come to know the doctor, the next query took him by surprise.
"What have you been eating?" Doctor Keltridge demanded briefly.
"Eating!" Scott Brenton's voice was as blank as were his eyes.
"Yes, eating," the doctor iterated. "Doubts are generally more or less digestive in their origin. Caviar would have made a total agnostic of Saint John himself, and Saint Luke would have been the first one to tell him so, and order a blue pill." As he spoke, he gazed at Brenton critically. "You're running down, man, for a fact. Is this thing worrying you?" he asked kindly.
"Well, yes, a little," Brenton confessed. "It's bound to, doctor. I'm not agnostic in the least; I believe that any creed has got to be interpreted with more than a grain of salt, according to one's especial nature and its secretions. However, it's beginning to go against my ideas to discover that there's more salt than belief within me when I get up to recite my Credo."