"Partly because it was my masterpiece,--it would be false modesty to deny that I know it,--and I had some notion of digging a pit for the critics. But the main reason was to confound my Uncle Peter." "I didn't know you had an uncle." "I haven't in the flesh. 'Uncle Peter' is generic--a polite lumping together of my chronic fault-finders within the family and without. You know him. Both masculine and feminine, he's eternally an old woman. Everybody knows Uncle Peter, the first to censure and the last to praise. Now, as I've been his especial tidbit and awful example for years, I had to school myself to the thought of snatching the daily morsel of gossip from his mouth. The murder out, Uncle Peter's grief is pitiful. How much sharper than a serpent's tooth is a prophecy of evil unfulfilled! It's not that he considers I've gone to work, incorrigible vagabond that I am; it's the fact that my intolerable idling has produced money which sets his teeth on edge--money, the golden calf of Uncle Peter's narrow idolatrous soul." Ruth had no liking for his moments of acid mockery. "Don't let Uncle Peter overshadow your friends," she warned. "I'll not," promised the man. "And you--by what witchery of friendship did you find me out?" He shifted his seat, seeking her eyes. "Ruth, was it love?" She did not answer immediately. "Be my wife, Ruth," he said. "It was not love," she replied simply. It was one of the oddities of his temperament that at this moment he saw himself objectively. What a subdued neutral tinted thing was life! By all the canons of romance it was now his cue for perfervid speech. "What then?" he asked quietly. "Liking--a real liking." "Will it grow warmer?" "I cannot tell." "I will teach you to love me," he declared, his artistic self nudging him meanwhile that he had dropped into the worn formula of the ages. Ruth did not deny him the attempt, and he undertook a lesson on the spot, pointing out that they saw life through similar eyes; that art, music, literature spoke with a common voice; that if true marriage were perfect companionship, the auguries were not uncertain in their happy omen; so on till he wearied her with argument. "All those things refine love," she put in at last, a little wistfully; "they are not its essence. A man may be a barbarian and yet lovable." He desisted at that, and presently went away. Out of doors her words clothed themselves with a personal application. Shelby--lovable barbarian!--was entering the gate. Of what immediately followed neither man retained a clear recollection. It was a clash of temperaments hopelessly at odds, in which the spoken word weighed little beside the mute antipathy jaundicing the mind. Yet the word played no small part in the sequel. Graves assured Shelby that he should spare no effort to compass his defeat; while Shelby in his turn suggested that the zest of the campaign would be doubled if Graves were only his ridiculous opponent.