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Updated: June 4, 2025
Catie, though, went out of the merest curiosity, and her invariable "I told you so" added the final, the most poignant sting to all of Scott's worst disappointments. At the mature age of six or seven, Catie Harrison showed quite plainly that no mere longing for a possible ideal would ever lure her from the path of practical expediency.
To Scott, she pointed out Catie as the girl best worth his attention and his comradeship, the while, with the other hand, she still held up before him the picture she had so long ago created, the picture of himself, child of the preaching race of Wheelers, proclaiming the gospel to all men and some heathen. Side by side she placed them: the world-given wife, the heaven-offered career.
From that time onward, whether she was Catie, Catia, or Kathryn, her attitude had been the same, always disdainful, always a little uncomprehending of his point of view. She had used himself and his profession as a sort of social ladder whereby to clamber upward. Always she had disdained the material of which the ladder was constructed.
Catie said, with some enthusiasm, when at last she had grasped in its entirety, not Scott's idea, but the outward form in which it clothed itself. "You'll wear a surplice, then, and a purple stripe around your neck, and sing the prayers, like the man I saw in Boston. He had candles, too, burning at the back, beside a great brass cross." Scott shook his head in swift negation.
Moreover, as he had been in no conscious sense the cause of either tragedy, so in no sense could he be the conscious cure. The forces culminating in his present trouble had been set in motion long, long before the hour when Catie had poked her curly head in at the gate.
With Catie, on the other hand, her course was altogether different, altogether simpler.
Brenton, meanwhile, looked on them with contented eyes, smiling a little now and then at the downright fashion in which the thirteen-year-old Catie made known her matrimonial plans. Mrs. Brenton liked Catie well enough, but not too well.
She merely sat there, silent, in the place whence she had ousted him, and gloated on her victory, sure that in time his masculine impatience would lead him to break in upon the pause. She knew her man. "What's your name?" Scott asked her curtly, after an interval of digging one heel and then the other into the turf beside the step. "Catie." "Catie what?" "Catie Harrison." "Huuh!"
For the first time in all his life, Scott Brenton was seriously in love. He gave to this new vision a fervent passion such as Catie had been powerless to arouse; like all young lovers, he desired a little time to revel in secret over the mere fact that he knew he was in love. Of his mother's consent to the change of plan, Scott Brenton felt no doubt.
But Catie had rebelled. "Fudge!" she had said crisply. "What's the sense of having a useful thing like that, that you can't use?" At the mature age of four, Scott Brenton's favourite pastime had been what he termed "playing Grandpa Wheeler."
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