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 as he looked into the distance and Miss Quincey imagined that his bumpy intellectual forehead was bulging with great thoughts.  And now Miss Quincey supplied a convenient pivot for the wild gyrations of his wrath.  He got up and with his hands behind his back he seemed to be lashing himself into a fury with his coat-tail.

“The whole thing is one-sided and artificial and absurd.  Bad enough for men, but fatal for women.  Any system that unfits them for their proper functions—­”

“And do we know—­have we decided—­yet—­what they are?” Miss Quincey was anxious to sustain her part in the dialogue with credit.

He stared, not at the distance but at her.

“Why, surely,” he said more gently, “to be women first—­to be wives and mothers.”

She drew her cape a little closer round her and turned from him with half-shut eyes.  She seemed at once to be protecting herself against his theory and blinding her sight to her own perishing and thwarted woman-hood.

“All Nature is against it,” he said.

“Nature?” she repeated feebly.

“Yes, Nature; and she’ll go her own way in spite of all the systems that ever were.  Don’t you know—–­you are a teacher, so you ought to know—­that overstrain of the higher faculties is sometimes followed by astonishing demonstrations on the part of Nature?”

Miss Quincey replied that no cases of the kind had come under her notice.

“Well—­your profession ought to go hand-in-hand with mine.  If you only saw the half of what we see—­But you only see the process; we get the results.  By the way I must go and look at some of them.”

His words echoed madly in a feverish little brain, “Ought to go—­hand-in-hand—­hand-in-hand with mine.”

“Nature can be very cruel,” said she.

Something in her tone recalled him from his flight.  He stood looking down at her, thoughtful and pitiful.  “And Nature can be very kind; kinder than we are.  You are a case in point.  Nature is trying to make you well against your will.  A little more rest—­a little more exercise—­a little more air—­”

She smiled.  Yes, a little more of all the things she wanted and had never had.  That was what her smile said in its soft and deprecating bitterness.