compliments at the end of the day. She loved the race for its own sake,
this young athlete; and though she took the crowns and the compliments
very much as a matter of course, she had come to look on life as nothing
but an endless round of Olympic games. And just as she forgot each
successive event in the excitement of the next, she also had forgotten
the losers and those who were tumbled in the dust. Until she had seen
Miss Quincey.

Miss Quincey--so they had let her come to this among them all? They had
left her so bare of happiness that the first man (it happened to be her
doctor) who spoke two kind words to her became necessary to her
existence. No, that was hardly the way to put it; it was underrating
Bastian Cautley. He was the sort of man that any woman--But who would
have thought it of Miss Quincey? And the really sad thing was that she
did not think it of herself; it showed how empty of humanity her life had
been. It was odd how these things happened. Miss Quincey was neither
brilliant nor efficient, but she had made the most of herself; at least
she had lived a life of grinding intellectual toil; the whole woman had
seemed absorbed in her miserable arithmetical function. And yet at fifty
(she looked fifty) she had contrived to develop that particular form of
foolishness which it was Miss Cursiter's business to exterminate. There
were some of them who talked as if the thing was done; as if competitive
examinations had superseded the primitive rivalry of sex.

Bastian Cautley was right. You may go on building as high as you please,
but you will never alter the original ground-plan of human nature. And
how she had scoffed at his "man's view"; how indignantly she had repulsed
his suggestion that there was a side to the subject that her friends the
idealists were much too ideal to see.