He knew that Alice wanted him, and he knew that he wanted Alice. He did not know why he wanted Alice any more than he knew why Alice wanted him. "Wot is she?--a liddle stick of a creature. And I like big women." There was something in the depths of him that cried for her, something which had never moved or cried in him before. In spite of her lack of beauty and beguilement, in spite of her hostility to all his darling schemes, there was something in him to which Alice actually and utterly belonged. He did not understand it, he could not analyse it, he scarcely indeed realised it--all he felt was the huge upheaval, the conflict that it brought, all the shouting and the struggling of the desperate and motiveless craving that he felt for her--a hunger in him calling through days and nights, in spite of her insignificance, her aloofness, her silences, her antagonism. "I reckon as how I must be in love." That was the conclusion he came to after much heavy pondering. He had never been truly in love before. He had wanted women for various reasons, either for their charm and beauty, or because, as in Naomi's case, of their practical use to him. Alice had no beauty, and a charm too subtle for him to realise, though as a matter of fact the whole man was plastic to it--as for practical usefulness, she was poor, delicate, unaccustomed to country life, and hostile to all his most vital ambitions. She would not bring him wealth or credit, she was not likely to bear him healthy children--and yet he loved her. Sometimes, roaming through murky dusks, he realised in the dim occasional flashes which illuminate the non-thinking man, that he was up against the turning-point of his fight with Boarzell. If he married Alice it would be the token of what had always seemed more unimaginable than his defeat--his voluntary surrender. Sometimes he told himself fiercely that he could fight Boarzell with Alice hanging, so to speak, over his arm; but in his heart he knew that he could not. He could not have both Alice and Boarzell. Yet, in spite of all this, one day at Cheat Land he nearly fell at her feet and asked her to be his ruin. It was a March twilight, cold and rustling, and tart with the scents of newly turned furrows. Reuben sat with Alice in the kitchen, and every now and then Jury's wretched house-place would shake as the young gale swept up rainless from the east and poured itself into cracks and chimneys. Alice was sewing as usual--it struck Reuben that she was very quick and useful with her fingers, whatever might be her drawbacks in other ways. Sometimes she had offered to read poetry to him, and had once bored him horribly with In Memoriam, but as he had taken no trouble to hide his feelings she had to his great relief announced her intention of casting no more pearls before swine.