--I.
It was not often that Arthur Fenton permitted himself to be ill-
tempered at home. He had too keen an appreciation of good taste to
allow his dark humors to vent themselves upon the heads of those with
whom he lived.
"A man is to be excused for being cross abroad," he was wont to
observe, "but only a brute is peevish at home."
On the morning following his conversation with Damaris Wainwright,
however, he was decidedly out of sorts, and proved but ill company for
his wife at the breakfast table. She ventured some simple remark in
relation to a plan which Mr. Candish had for the re-decoration of the
Church of the Nativity, and her husband retorted with an open sneer.
"Oh, don't talk about Mr. Candish to me," he said. "He is that obsolete
thing, a clergyman."
"I supposed," Edith responded good-naturedly, "that a question of
artistic decoration would interest you, even if it was connected with a
church."
"I hate anything connected with a religion," Fenton observed savagely.
"A religion is simply an artificial scheme of life, to be followed at
the expense of all harmony with nature."
It was evident to Edith that her husband was nervous and irritable, and
with wifely protective instinct she attributed his condition to
overwork. She did not take up the challenge which he in a manner flung
down. She seldom argued with him now; she cast about in her mind for a
safe topic of conversation, and, by ill-luck, hit upon the one least
calculated to restore Arthur to good humor and a sane temper.
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