Reuben was going through a new experience. For the first time in his life he had fallen under the dominion of a personality. From his boyhood he had been enslaved by an idea, but people, in anything except their relation to that idea, had never influenced him. Now for the first time he had a life outside Boarzell, an interest, a set of thoughts, which were not only apart from Boarzell but antagonistic to it.

Hitherto he had always considered the opposite of his ambition to be the absence of it. Either one lived to subdue the hostile earth, or one lived with no object at all. It was a new experience to find someone whose life was full of hopes, ideals, and ambitions, all utterly[Pg 217] unconnected with a farm, and it was even more strange than new that he should care to talk about them. Not that he ever found himself being tempted from his own—the most vital part of his relations with Alice Jury lay in their warfare. He fought her as he fought Boarzell, though without that sense of a waiting treachery which tinctured his battles with the Moor; their intercourse was full of conflict, of fiery, sacred hostilities. They travelled on different roads, and knew that they could never walk together, yet each wanted to count the other\'s milestones.

Sometimes Reuben would ask himself if he was in love with her, but as the physical element which he had always and alone called love was absent, he came to the conclusion that he was not. If he had thought he loved her he would have avoided her, but there was no danger in this parliament of their minds. Her attitude towards life, though it obsessed him, no more convinced him than his convinced her. They would rail and wrangle together by the hour.

"Life is worth while," said Alice, "in itself, not because of what i............