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.