"Quick, we're going to miss dinner!"
Two students said as they brushed past Pomona, hurrying after someone. Neither of them noticed her.
Only then did she realize she had come near the Great Hall. The house point counter stood two steps away from her.
She stood before it. Compared with last time, Ravenclaw's and Hufflepuff's hourglasses had gained quite a few points, though they still lagged far behind Gryffindor and Slytherin.
If two horses were racing and the gap between them was small, they would run with all their might to determine the winner. But if the gap was too wide, the horse behind would stop trying.
Because the greenhouses stood outside the castle, far from the other classrooms, students who realized they were late would run if they thought they could still make it. If they knew they could not, they would instead become "calm." They were late anyway, so why hurry?
Training racehorses also took time. If one was too eager for results and constantly lashed the horse with spurs and whips, the horse would instead grow afraid of running and might even throw off the jockey "abusing" it.
In the 1820s and 1830s, amid all the surging movements, an economic form known as the cooperative emerged in Britain.
Humans, like many animals, lived in groups. But unlike wildebeests and sheep on the grasslands, when lions or hyenas preyed on the weak members of a herd, cattle and sheep would simply stand by.
People could "cooperate." When their living conditions became too harsh, they would work together to weather the crisis. It was both a mechanism of self-protection and a necessity born of shared interests. Shared interests changed with the times. In ancient times, people jointly controlled floods, because no one person could possibly complete such a vast