“Nor was this all. Creeping over me came again the humiliating sensation which I had more than once experienced in the presence of Ruth and Westmacott, the sensation that they were alien to me, bound together by some tie more mysterious than mere cousinship, a tie which, I believed, held them joined in spite of the hatred that existed between them. I won’t go into this now. It is a mystery which lies at the very root of their strange relationship. I do not suppose that Ruth was conscious of it—she was, after all, an essentially unanalytical and primitive creature—but it drove her now to a manifestation as typical of her in particular as it was of all women in general. “She set herself deliberately to increase my misery and discomfort by every trick within her power. She must have been aware of what I was enduring, and you would have thought, however indifferent to me in the emotional sense, that she would have tried, in ordinary human pity and charity, to help me to escape as soon as possible from my wretched position, and to make that position less wretched while it still lasted. You would have thought this. Any man would have thought it. But apparently women are different. “She took, then, my misery and played with it, setting herself to intensify it by every ruse at her disposal. She contrived, with diabolical subtlety, to separate us into two groups, one consisting of herself, her husband, and her children, the other consisting of me, isolated and alone. To this day I do not know whether she wanted to punish me for my former temerity, or whether she was simply obeying some obscure feminine instinct. In any case, she succeeded. I had never felt myself such an intruder. Even the resemblance between husband and wife, the curious, intangible resemblance of race and family in their dark looks, rose up and jeered at me. ‘We understand one another,’ something seemed to say, ‘and we are laughing together at your expense.’ “I realised then that the calm with which she had received me, and had drawn my cider, the matter-of-fact way in which she had told me it was of her own brewing, were all part of her scheme, as was her present conversation, standing by the table, and her occasional demonstrations of affection towards her boys. You will remember perhaps that I once told you of a walk she and I had taken to Penshurst. Well, I dimly felt that her behaviour on that occasion and upon this were first-cousins. I don’t know why I felt this; I only record it for you without comment.