The desire to write was stirring in Martin once more. Stories and
poems were springing into spontaneous creation in his brain, and he
made notes of them against the future time when he would give them
expression. But he did not write. This was his little vacation;
he had resolved to devote it to rest and love, and in both matters
he prospered. He was soon spilling over with vitality, and each
day he saw Ruth, at the moment of meeting, she experienced the old
shock of his strength and health.

"Be careful," her mother warned her once again. "I am afraid you
are seeing too much of Martin Eden."

But Ruth laughed from security. She was sure of herself, and in a
few days he would be off to sea. Then, by the time he returned,
she would be away on her visit East. There was a magic, however,
in the strength and health of Martin. He, too, had been told of
her contemplated Eastern trip, and he felt the need for haste. Yet
he did not know how to make love to a girl like Ruth. Then, too,
he was handicapped by the possession of a great fund of experience
with girls and women who had been absolutely different from her.
They had known about love and life and flirtation, while she knew
nothing about such things. Her prodigious innocence appalled him,
freezing on his lips all ardors of speech, and convincing him, in
spite of himself, of his own unworthiness. Also he was handicapped
in another way. He had himself never been in love before. He had
liked women in that turgid past of his, and been fascinated by some
of them, but he had not known what it was to love them. He had
whistled in a masterful, careless way, and they had come to him.
They had been diversions, incidents, part of the game men play, but
a small part at most. And now, and for the first time, he was a
suppliant, tender and timid and doubting. He did not know the way
of love, nor its speech, while he was frightened at his loved one's
clear innocence.

In the course of getting acquainted with a varied world, whirling
on through the ever changing phases of it, he had learned a rule of
conduct which was to the effect that when one played a strange
game, he should let the other fellow play first. This had stood
him in good stead a thousand times and trained him as an observer
as well. He knew how to watch the thing that was strange, and to
wait for a weakness, for a place of entrance, to divulge itself.
It was like sparring for an opening in fist-fighting. And when
such an opening came, he knew by long experience to play for it and
to play hard.

So he waited with Ruth and watched, desiring to speak his love but
not daring. He was afraid of shocking her, and he was not sure of
himself. Had he but known it, he was following the right course
with her. Love came into the world before articulate speech, and
in its own early youth it had learned ways and means that it had
never forgotten. It was in this old, primitive way that Martin
wooed Ruth. He did not know he was doing it at first, though later
he divined it. The touch of his hand on hers was vastly more
potent than any word he could utter, the impact of his strength on
her imagination was more alluring than the printed poems and spoken
passions of a thousand generations of lovers. Whatever his tongue
could express would have appealed, in part, to her judgment; but
the touch of hand, the fleeting contact, made its way directly to
her instinct. Her judgment was as young as she, but her instincts
were as old as the race and older. They had been young when love
was young, and they were wiser than convention and opinion and all
the new-born things. So her judgment did not act. There was no
call upon it, and she did not realize the strength of the appeal
Martin made from moment to moment to her love-nature. That he
loved her, on the other hand, was as clear as day, and she
consciously delighted in beholding his love-manifestations - the
glowing eyes with their tender lights, the trembling hands, and the
never failing swarthy flush that flooded darkly under his sunburn.
She even went farther, in a timid way inciting him, but doing it so
delicately that he never suspected, and doing it half-consciously,
so that she scarcely suspected herself. She thrilled with these
proofs of her power that proclaimed her a woman, and she took an
Eve-like delight in tormenting him and playing upon him.

Tongue-tied by inexperience and by excess of ardor, wooing
unwittingly and awkwardly, Martin continued his approach by
contact. The touch of his hand was pleasant to her, and something
deliciously more than pleasant. Martin did not know it, but he did
know that it was not distasteful to her. Not that they touched
hands often, save at meeting and parting; but that in handling the
bicycles, in strapping on the books of verse they carried into the
hills, and in conning the pages of books side by side, there were
opportunities for hand to stray against hand. And there were
opportunities, too, for her hair to brush his cheek, and for
shoulder to touch shoulder, as they leaned together over the beauty
of the books. She smiled to herself at vagrant impulses which
arose from nowhere and suggested that she rumple his hair; while he
desired greatly, when they tired of reading, to rest his head in
her lap and dream with closed eyes about the future that was to be
theirs. On Sunday picnics at Shellmound Park and Schuetzen Park,
in the past, he had rested his head on many laps, and, usually, he
had slept soundly and selfishly while the girls shaded his face
from the sun and looked down and loved him and wondered at his
lordly carelessness of their love. To rest his head in a girl's
lap had been the easiest thing in the world until now, and now he
found Ruth's lap inaccessible and impossible. Yet it was right
here, in his reticence, that the strength of his wooing lay. It
was because of this reticence that he never alarmed her. Herself
fastidious and timid, she never awakened to the perilous trend of
their intercourse. Subtly and unaware she grew toward him and
closer to him, while he, sensing the growing closeness, longed to
dare but was afraid.

Once he dared, one afternoon, when he found her in the darkened
living room with a blinding headache.

"Nothing can do it any good," she had answered his inquiries. "And
besides, I don't take headache powders. Doctor Hall won't permit
me."

"I can cure it, I think, and without drugs," was Martin's answer.
"I am not sure, of course, but I'd like to try. It's simply
massage. I learned the trick first from the Japanese. They are a
race of masseurs, you know. Then I learned it all over again with
variations from the Hawaiians. They call it LOMI-LOMI. It can
accomplish most of the things drugs accomplish and a few things
that drugs can't."

Scarcely had his hands touched her head when she sighed deeply.

"That is so good," she said.

She spoke once again, half an hour later, when she asked, "Aren't
you tired?"

The question was perfunctory, and she knew what the answer would
be. Then she lost herself in drowsy contemplation of the soothing
balm of his strength: Life poured from the ends of his fingers,
driving the pain before it, or so it seemed to her, until with the
easement of pain, she fell asleep and he stole away.

She called him up by telephone that evening to thank him.

"I slept until dinner," she said. "You cured me completely, Mr.
Eden, and I don't know how to thank you."

He was warm, and bungling of speech, and very happy, as he replied
to her, and there was dancing in his mind, throughout the telephone
conversation, the memory of Browning and of sickly Elizabeth
Barrett. What had been done could be done again, and he, Martin
Eden, could do it and would do it for Ruth Morse. He went back to
his room and to the volume of Spencer's "Sociology" lying open on
the bed. But he could not read. Love tormented him and overrode
his will, so that, despite all determination, he found himself at
the little ink-stained table. The sonnet he composed that night
was the first of a love-cycle of fifty sonnets which was completed
within two months. He had the "Love-sonnets from the Portuguese"
in mind as he wrote, and he wrote under the best conditions for
great work, at a climacteric of living, in the throes of his own
sweet love-madness.

The many hours he was not with Ruth he devoted to the "Love-cycle,"
to reading at home, or to the public reading-rooms, where he got
more closely in touch with the magazines of the day and the nature
of their policy and content. The hours he spent with Ruth were
maddening alike in promise and in inconclusiveness. It was a week
after he cured her headache that a moonlight sail on Lake Merritt
was proposed by Norman and seconded by Arthur and Olney. Martin
was the only one capable of handling a boat, and he was pressed
into service. Ruth sat near him in the stern, while the three
young fellows lounged amidships, deep in a wordy wrangle over
"frat" affairs.

The moon had not yet risen, and Ruth, gazing into the starry vault
of the sky and exchanging no speech with Martin, experienced a
sudden feeling of loneliness. She glanced at him. A puff of wind
was heeling the boat over till the deck was awash, and he, one hand
on tiller and the other on main-sheet, was luffing slightly, at the
same time peering ahead to make out the near-lying north shore. He
was unaware of her gaze, and she watched him intently, speculating
fancifully about the strange warp of soul that led him, a young man
with signal powers, to fritter away his time on the writing of
stories and poems foredoomed to mediocrity and failure.

Her eyes wandered along the strong throat, dimly seen in the
starlight, and over the firm-poised head, and the old desire to lay
her hands upon his neck came back to her. The strength she
abhorred attracted her. Her feeling of loneliness became more
pronounced, and she felt tired. Her position on the heeling boat
irked her, and she remembered the headache he had cured and the
soothing rest that resided in him. He was sitting beside her,
quite beside her, and the boat seemed to tilt her toward him. Then
arose in her the impulse to lean against him, to rest herself
against his strength - a vague, half-formed impulse, which, even as
she considered it, mastered her and made her lean toward him. Or
was it the heeling of the boat? She did not know. She never knew.
She knew only that she was leaning against him and that the
easement and soothing rest were very good. Perhaps it had been the
boat's fault, but she made no effort to retrieve it. She leaned
lightly against his shoulder, but she leaned, and she continued to
lean when he shifted his position to make it more comfortable for
her.

It was a madness, but she refused to consider the madness. She was
no longer herself but a woman, with a woman's clinging need; and
though she leaned ever so lightly, the need seemed satisfied. She
was no longer tired. Martin did not speak. Had he, the spell
would have been broken. But his reticence of love prolonged it.
He was dazed and dizzy. He could not understand what was
happening. It was too wonderful to be anything but a delirium. He
conquered a mad desire to let go sheet and tiller and to clasp her
in his arms. His intuition told him it was the wrong thing to do,
and he was glad that sheet and tiller kept his hands occupied and
fended off temptation. But he luffed the boat less delicately,
spilling the wind shamelessly from the sail so as to prolong the
tack to the north shore. The shore would compel him to go about,
and the contact would be broken. He sailed with skill, stopping
way on the boat without exciting the notice of the wranglers, and
mentally forgiving his hardest voyages in that they had made this
marvellous night possible, giving him mastery over sea and boat and
wind so that he could sail with her beside him, her dear weight
against him on his shoulder.

When the first light of the rising moon touched the sail,
illuminating the boat with pearly radiance, Ruth moved away from
him. And, even as she moved, she felt him move away. The impulse
to avoid detection was mutual. The episode was tacitly and
secretly intimate. She sat apart from him with burning cheeks,
while the full force of it came home to her. She had been guilty
of something she would not have her brothers see, nor Olney see.
Why had she done it? She had never done anything like it in her
life, and yet she had been moonlight-sailing with young men before.
She had never desired to do anything like it. She was overcome
with shame and with the mystery of her own burgeoning womanhood.
She stole a glance at Martin, who was busy putting the boat about
on the other tack, and she could have hated him for having made her
do an immodest and shameful thing. And he, of all men! Perhaps
her mother was right, and she was seeing too much of him. It would
never happen again, she resolved, and she would see less of him in
the future. She entertained a wild idea of explaining to him the
first time they were alone together, of lying to him, of mentioning
casually the attack of faintness that had overpowered her just
before the moon came up. Then she remembered how they had drawn
mutually away before the revealing moon, and she knew he would know
it for a lie.

In the days that swiftly followed she was no longer herself but a
strange, puzzling creature, wilful over judgment and scornful of
self-analysis, refusing to peer into the future or to think about
herself and whither she was drifting. She was in a fever of
tingling mystery, alternately frightened and charmed, and in
constant bewilderment. She had one idea firmly fixed, however,
which insured her security. She would not let Martin speak his
love. As long as she did this, all would be well. In a few days
he would be off to sea. And even if he did speak, all would be
well. It could not be otherwise, for she did not love him. Of
course, it would be a painful half hour for him, and an
embarrassing half hour for her, because it would be her first
proposal. She thrilled deliciously at the thought. She was really
a woman, with a man ripe to ask for her in marriage. It was a lure
to all that was fundamental in her sex. The fabric of her life, of
all that constituted her, quivered and grew tremulous. The thought
fluttered in her mind like a flame-attracted moth. She went so far
as to imagine Martin proposing, herself putting the words into his
mouth; and she rehearsed her refusal, tempering it with kindness
and exhorting him to true and noble manhood. And especially he
must stop smoking cigarettes. She would make a point of that. But
no, she must not let him speak at all. She could stop him, and she
had told her mother that she would. All flushed and burning, she
regretfully dismissed the conjured situation. Her first proposal
would have to be deferred to a more propitious time and a more
eligible suitor.