Beyond that he refused to commit himself to any theory of the universe.  He even made himself unpleasant.  A clerical patient would approach him with conciliatory breadth, and say:  “I envy you, Cautley; I envy your marvellous experience.  Your opportunities are greater than mine.  And sometimes, do you know, I think you see deeper into the work of the Maker.”  And Cautley would shrug his shoulders and smile in the good man’s face, and say, “The Maker!  I can only tell you I’m tired of mending the work of the Maker.”  Yet the more he doubted the harder he worked; though his world spun round and round, shrieking like a clock running down, and he had persuaded himself that all he could do was to wind up the crazy 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 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.