“He nodded, put his hand on the top bar of the adjoining gate, and vaulted it, walking off rapidly across the fields in the direction of his own farm. “‘And let me tell you,’ said Ruth, as though she were continuing an uninterrupted conversation, “he’ll be back around that gipsy place to-night as sure as geese at Michaelmas. He’s as false as can be, is Rawdon.” “‘Then I think you were weak with him,’ I said. ‘Are you afraid of him?’ “‘It’s like this,’ said Ruth, with that great uneasy heave of the uneducated when confronted with the explanation of a problem beyond the scope of their vocabulary, ‘we never get straight. Rawdon and I. He cringes to me, and then I bully him; or else he bullies me, and then I cringe to him. But quarrel as we may, we always come together again. It’s no good,’ she said with a note of despair in her expressive voice like the melancholy of a violin, ‘we can’t get away from one another. We always come together again.’ “I was sad; I foresaw that those two would drift into marriage from pure physical need, though there might well be more hatred than love between them. “In the meantime I tried, not always very successfully, to keep Ruth away from him; she liked being with me, I know, and I think she even welcomed a barrier between herself and her all-too compelling cousin, and so it came about that our Sunday afternoons were, as I have told you, usually spent together. There were times when she broke away from me, when the physical craving became, I suppose, too strong for her, and she would go back to Rawdon. But for the most part she would come after dinner on Sundays, silent and reserved, to see if I was disposed for a walk. She would come in her daily untidiness, with the colour blowing in her cheeks, as beautiful and as wild as a flower. I used to feel sorry for Westmacott and his hot blood. “On these afternoons I tried my experiments on Ruth, and I sometimes wonder whether she ever caught me at the game, for she would give me a scared, distrustful glance, and turn her head away. She was curiously lazy for so hard a worker, and in sudden indolence she would refuse to move, but would lie on the ground idle and half asleep, and would do nothing but eat the sweets I gave her. I never saw a book in her hand. Once,” said Malory, throwing a bit of wood at the goats, “I thought I would convert her to Art. I brought out some treasured books, and showed her the pictures; she was neither bewildered, nor bored, nor impressed, nor puzzled; she simply thought the masterpieces unspeakably funny. She laughed.... I was absurdly offended at first, then I began to come round to her point of view, and now I am not at all sure that I don’t agree. She opened out for me a new attitude.