“‘Well, I’ll tell him next time, see if I don’t. What did you do it for, anyway?’ “‘A bit of fun ... ’ he muttered again, and, his smouldering eyes resting resentfully upon her, he added something about Ruth. “Ruth brought her gaze slowly down from the clouds to bend it upon her cousin. Their eyes met in that furnace of passion and hatred with which I was to become so familiar. “‘Ay, Ruth told you,’ stormed Ruth’s mother. ‘An old tale. You let Ruth alone and she’ll let you alone, and we’ll all be better pleased. Now be off with you, Rawdon, and you, Ruth, come in to your tea.’ “Her excitement had grown as it beat in vain against the rock of Ruth’s indifference. “Ruth,” said Malory after a long pause, and paused again. “She is a problem by which I am still baffled. I do not know how to speak of her, lest you should misunderstand me. That first impression of which I have already told you never wore off. Do not think that I was in love with her. I was not. I am not that sort of man. But I was always conscious of her, and I cannot imagine the man who, seeing her, would not be conscious of her. “She on her part, was, I am certain, unaware of the effect she produced. Before I had been very long on the farm I had come to the conclusion that she was a slow, gentle, rather stupid girl, obedient to her parents in all things, less from the virtue of obedience than from her natural apathy. She and I were thrown a good deal together by reason of my work. I tried to draw her into conversation, but no sooner had I enticed her, however laboriously, into the regions of speculation than she dragged me back into the regions of fact. ‘Ruth,’ I would say, ‘does a woman cling more to her children or to her husband?’ and she would stare at me and reply, ‘What things you do say, Mr. Malory! and if you’ll excuse me I have the dairy to wash down yet.’ “I am a lover of experiments by nature, and having no aptitude for science it is necessarily with human elements that I conjure in my crucible. You said I held a microscope over emotions. I say, rather, that I hold my subject, my human being, like a piece of cut glass in the sunlight, and let the colours play varyingly through the facets.