ables 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
perpetually being sacrificed to such women as Rhoda Vivian. It struck him
that Nature had made up for any little extra outlay in one direction by
cruel pinching in another. It was part of her rigid economy. She was not
going to have any bills running up against her at the other end of the
universe. Nature had indulged in Rhoda Vivian and she was making Miss
Quincey pay.

He wondered if that notion had struck Rhoda Vivian too, and if she were
trying to make up for it. He had noticed that Miss Quincey had the power
(if you could predicate power of such a person), a power denied to him,
of drawing out the woman-hood of the most beautiful woman in the world;
some infinite tenderness in Rhoda answered to the infinite absurdity in
her. He was not sure that her attitude to Miss Quincey was not the most
beautiful thing about her. He had begun by thinking about the colour of
Rhoda's eyes. He could not for the life of him remember whether they were
blue or green, till something (Miss Quincey's eyes perhaps) reminded him
that they were grey, pure grey, without a taint of green or a shadow of
blue in them. That was what his mind was running on