The Brentons

However archaic and conventional it may sound, it is the literal fact that young Scott Brenton was led into the ministry by the prayer of his widowed mother. Furthermore, the pr...

To all seeming, there always had been a Catie in Scott Brenton's life, always had been a Catie for him to seek in seasons of domestic stress or discipline. Indeed, his first mem...

At the mature age of four, Scott Brenton's favourite pastime had been what he termed "playing Grandpa Wheeler." The game accomplished itself by means of a chair by way of pulpit...

The phrase, and the smile which invariably accompanied it, were the main stock in trade of the monthly nurse. Upon these two items, she had based her popularity which now had en...

In an elective system which, at that time, was still left quite unmodified, Scott had happened upon the chemistry class by way of filling up his courses for his sophomore year....

As a matter of course, Catie came to Scott's commencement. Had she answered sincerely to any questions put to her, she would have confessed to a two-fold purpose: the showing of...

In the fulness of time, Scott married Catie. To put the case more accurately, albeit in less lovely phrase, Scott was married by Catie. From start to finish, Catie was the activ...

Brenton, who still clung to his bachelor habit of reading the newspaper between swallows of coffee and snatches of toast and jam, looked up at the arraignment which lay in Catia...

The tapping, however, was no indication of any filial impatience. It was merely to remind her parent that something was still expected of him, before he drifted off again into a...

It was not until a good two weeks later that Olive Keltridge came into any actual contact with the new rector. At the Dennison dinner, she had been too busy in dodging the conve...

Saint Peter's Parish was unique in all New England. The trails of old and new in its experience crossed and crisscrossed at every point, causing a long succession of eccentricit...

It was Catia, then, or, rather, Kathryn, who kept a weather eye upon the social powers of the parish. Brenton was too busy doing other things. Somebody, though, she argued, must...

That Reed Opdyke was very badly broken, no one, seeing him, could deny. Exactly what was the nature of the break, no one but Reed Opdyke and the surgeons knew. The surgeons were...

It was a month or two before he asked that question of Doctor Eustace Keltridge; but, in the end, it was bound to come. Whatever a man in Brenton's position might think inside h...

With the question, Dolph Dennison flung himself into step at Olive Keltridge's side, one morning in late January. Two inches of snow crackling under foot and a coating of hoarfr...

If Reed Opdyke had gained any inkling of the wide swath of woe and consequent spiritual doubtings that he was cutting among the closest of his personal friends, he would have fa...

Olive found Kathryn Brenton in the extreme of disarray. The littered room was as unlovely as the careless costume, and Kathryn's personal grooming matched them both. It really w...

"Time always brings development," Doctor Keltridge reminded her benignly, while he thrashed about in his cup with a spoon, much as he might have wielded a glass rod in a delinqu...

In the fulness of time, the Brenton baby came, a sturdy little youngster who, from the start, kicked lustily and lifted up his voice out of a pair of brazen lungs that made the...

The new curate, meanwhile, was having, in vulgar parlance, the time of his whole life. He was young, ritualistic, and he had a tendency towards being lungish. Therefore his devo...

It was not until well on in the next day that the two men spoke of Brenton. Indeed, all their talk, next morning, was plainest platitude. Instinctively each of them realized tha...

"Still, Reed, I rather grudge the time," Whittenden said to his host when, dinner over, that same night, he flung himself into a chair at Opdyke's side. "For all practical purpo...

"Yes, he sent for me, about nine o'clock." Doctor Keltridge, sitting in the window seat beside Opdyke, swung his heels like a boy, in gleeful recollection. "Of course, it was _s...

With a rustle born of plenteous starch, a quiver of nodding roses on her hat and an ultra-evident aroma of violet preceding her coming, Katharine swept across the floor and halt...

Brenton, who had been sitting with his eyes fastened to the rug before him, looked up at the doctor. Looking, his gray eyes were heavy, their light temporarily extinct. Indeed,...

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 temper...

Saint Peter's Parish was fifteen miles and a consequent half-hour of time from the nearest fount of Christian Science teaching. Hence it resulted that only rarely had Katharine...

Conservative old Saint Peter's had taken the upheaval badly, not so much the theoretic questions at stake regarding the soundness of their rector's doctrine, as the loss of thei...

"He isn't always such an ass," Dolph said, as he crossed his legs, preparatory to a long discussion. "It's only when he sets out to be bold and bad that he's so intolerable."

"The thing is amounting to an obsession," Doctor Keltridge told Professor Opdyke testily, two months later. "I never saw a case of such ineradicable dubiousness concerning all t...

"I don't, thank heaven!" Dolph assured him piously. "I did hear my sister-in-law explaining to a visitor that Mrs. Brenton was very busy in Boston. How she knew it; or whether s...

All the world admitted that the summer was a trying one, that year. All the world, with half a dozen exceptions, turned migratory, in the hope of finding better weather farther...