strong, ruthless but just.

This heroine ruled an island which (in the '80s) was rich with
shell--pearl-shell; and she fought pearl thievers and marauding
beachcombers, fought them with weapons and with woman's guile. No
man knew whence she had come nor why. That there would eventually
be a lover Ruth knew; and she waited his appearance upon the scene,
waited with an impatience which was both personal and literary. If
the creator drew a hero anything like himself, she would accept it
as a sign that he did care a little.

Ruth did not resent the use of her mind and body in this tale of
adventure. She gloried in it: he needed her. When the hero finally
did appear, Ruth became filled with gentle self-mockery. He was no
Hoddy, but a tremendous man, with hairy arms and bearded face and
drink-shattered intellect. Day by day she followed the spiritual
and physical contest between this man and woman. One day a pall of
blackness encompassed the sick mind of the giant; and when he came
to his senses, they properly functioned: and he saw his wife by his
bedside!

An astonishing idea entered Ruth's head one day--when the novel was
complete in the rough--an astonishing idea because it had not
developed long ago. A thing which had mystified her since
childhood, a smouldering wonder why it should be, and until now she
had never felt the urge to investigate. She tucked the mission
Bible under her arm, and crooking a finger at Rollo, went forth to
the west beach where the sou'-west surge piled up muddily, burdened
with broken spars, crates, boxes, and weeds. During the wet monsoon
the west beach was always littered. Where the stuff came from was
always a mystery.

The Enschede Bible--the one out of which she read--had been
strangely mutilated. Sections and pages had been pasted together,
and all through both Testaments a word had been blotted out. The
open books she knew by heart; aye, they had been ground into her,
morning and night. One of her duties, after she had been taught to
read, had been to read aloud after breakfast and before going to
bed. The same old lines and verses, over and over, until there had
come times when shrieking would have relieved her. How she had
hated it!... All these mumblings which were never explained, which
carried no more sense to her brain than they would have carried to
Old Morgan's swearing parrot. Like the parrot, she could memorize
the lines, but she could not understand them. Never had her f