wheels for another year or so. Which all meant that Cautley was working a
little too hard and running down himself. He had begun to specialize in
gynecology and it increased his scepticism.

Then suddenly, one evening, when he least looked for it, least wanted it,
he saw his divinity incarnate. Rhoda had appealed to him as the supreme
expression of Nature's will to live. That was the instantaneous and
visible effect of her. Rhoda was the red flower on the tree of life.

At St. Sidwell's, that great forcing-house, they might grow some
vegetables to perfection; whether it was orchids or pumpkins he neither
knew nor cared; but he defied them to produce anything like that. He was
sorry for the vegetables, the orchids and the pumpkins; and he was sorry
for Miss Quincey, who was neither a pumpkin nor an orchid, but only a
harmless little withered leaf. Not a pleasant leaf, the sort that goes
dancing along, all crisp and curly, in the arms of the rollicking wind;
but the sort that the same wind kicks into a corner, to lie there till it
rots and comes in handy as leaf mould for the forcing-house. Rhoda's
friend was not like Rhoda; yet because the leaf may distantly suggest the
rose, he liked to sit and talk to her and think about the most beautiful
woman in the world. To any other man conversation with Miss Quincey would
have been impossible; for Miss Quincey in normal health was uninteresting
when she was not absurd. But to Cautley at all times she was simply
heart-rending.

For this young man with the irritable nerves and blasphemous temper had
after all a divine patience at the service of women, even the foolish and
hysterical; because like their Maker he knew whereof they were made. This
very minute the queer meta-physical thought had come to him that somehow,
in the infinite entanglement of things, such women as Miss Quincey were