Mrs. Morse did not require a mother's intuition to read the
advertisement in Ruth's face when she returned home. The flush
that would not leave the cheeks told the simple story, and more
eloquently did the eyes, large and bright, reflecting an
unmistakable inward glory.

"What has happened?" Mrs. Morse asked, having bided her time till
Ruth had gone to bed.

"You know?" Ruth queried, with trembling lips.

For reply, her mother's arm went around her, and a hand was softly
caressing her hair.

"He did not speak," she blurted out. "I did not intend that it
should happen, and I would never have let him speak - only he
didn't speak."

"But if he did not speak, then nothing could have happened, could
it?"

"But it did, just the same."

"In the name of goodness, child, what are you babbling about?" Mrs.
Morse was bewildered. "I don't think know what happened, after
all. What did happen?"

Ruth looked at her mother in surprise.

"I thought you knew. Why, we're engaged, Martin and I."

Mrs. Morse laughed with incredulous vexation.

"No, he didn't speak," Ruth explained. "He just loved me, that was
all. I was as surprised as you are. He didn't say a word. He
just put his arm around me. And - and I was not myself. And he
kissed me, and I kissed him. I couldn't help it. I just had to.
And then I knew I loved him."

She paused, waiting with expectancy the benediction of her mother's
kiss, but Mrs. Morse was coldly silent.

"It is a dreadful accident, I know," Ruth recommenced with a
sinking voice. "And I don't know how you will ever forgive me.
But I couldn't help it. I did not dream that I loved him until
that moment. And you must tell father for me."

"Would it not be better not to tell your father? Let me see Martin
Eden, and talk with him, and explain. He will understand and
release you."

"No! no!" Ruth cried, starting up. "I do not want to be released.
I love him, and love is very sweet. I am going to marry him - of
course, if you will let me."

"We have other plans for you, Ruth, dear, your father and I - oh,
no, no; no man picked out for you, or anything like that. Our
plans go no farther than your marrying some man in your own station
in life, a good and honorable gentleman, whom you will select
yourself, when you love him."

"But I love Martin already," was the plaintive protest.

"We would not influence your choice in any way; but you are our
daughter, and we could not bear to see you make a marriage such as
this. He has nothing but roughness and coarseness to offer you in
exchange for all that is refined and delicate in you. He is no
match for you in any way. He could not support you. We have no
foolish ideas about wealth, but comfort is another matter, and our
daughter should at least marry a man who can give her that - and
not a penniless adventurer, a sailor, a cowboy, a smuggler, and
Heaven knows what else, who, in addition to everything, is hare-
brained and irresponsible."

Ruth was silent. Every word she recognized as true.

"He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what
geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.
A man thinking of marriage should be preparing for marriage. But
not he. As I have said, and I know you agree with me, he is
irresponsible. And why should he not be? It is the way of
sailors. He has never learned to be economical or temperate. The
spendthrift years have marked him. It is not his fault, of course,
but that does not alter his nature. And have you thought of the
years of licentiousness he inevitably has lived? Have you thought
of that, daughter? You know what marriage means."

Ruth shuddered and clung close to her mother.

"I have thought." Ruth waited a long time for the thought to frame
itself. "And it is terrible. It sickens me to think of it. I
told you it was a dreadful accident, my loving him; but I can't
help myself. Could you help loving father? Then it is the same
with me. There is something in me, in him - I never knew it was
there until to-day - but it is there, and it makes me love him. I
never thought to love him, but, you see, I do," she concluded, a
certain faint triumph in her voice.

They talked long, and to little purpose, in conclusion agreeing to
wait an indeterminate time without doing anything.

The same conclusion was reached, a little later that night, between
Mrs. Morse and her husband, after she had made due confession of
the miscarriage of her plans.

"It could hardly have come otherwise," was Mr. Morse's judgment.
"This sailor-fellow has been the only man she was in touch with.
Sooner or later she was going to awaken anyway; and she did awaken,
and lo! here was this sailor-fellow, the only accessible man at the
moment, and of course she promptly loved him, or thought she did,
which amounts to the same thing."

Mrs. Morse took it upon herself to work slowly and indirectly upon
Ruth, rather than to combat her. There would be plenty of time for
this, for Martin was not in position to marry.

"Let her see all she wants of him," was Mr. Morse's advice. "The
more she knows him, the less she'll love him, I wager. And give
her plenty of contrast. Make a point of having young people at the
house. Young women and young men, all sorts of young men, clever
men, men who have done something or who are doing things, men of
her own class, gentlemen. She can gauge him by them. They will
show him up for what he is. And after all, he is a mere boy of
twenty-one. Ruth is no more than a child. It is calf love with
the pair of them, and they will grow out of it."

So the matter rested. Within the family it was accepted that Ruth
and Martin were engaged, but no announcement was made. The family
did not think it would ever be necessary. Also, it was tacitly
understood that it was to be a long engagement. They did not ask
Martin to go to work, nor to cease writing. They did not intend to
encourage him to mend himself. And he aided and abetted them in
their unfriendly designs, for going to work was farthest from his
thoughts.

"I wonder if you'll like what I have done!" he said to Ruth several
days later. "I've decided that boarding with my sister is too
expensive, and I am going to board myself. I've rented a little
room out in North Oakland, retired neighborhood and all the rest,
you know, and I've bought an oil-burner on which to cook."

Ruth was overjoyed. The oil-burner especially pleased her.

"That was the way Mr. Butler began his start," she said.

Martin frowned inwardly at the citation of that worthy gentleman,
and went on: "I put stamps on all my manuscripts and started them
off to the editors again. Then to-day I moved in, and to-morrow I
start to work."

"A position!" she cried, betraying the gladness of her surprise in
all her body, nestling closer to him, pressing his hand, smiling.
"And you never told me! What is it?"

He shook his head.

"I meant that I was going to work at my writing." Her face fell,
and he went on hastily. "Don't misjudge me. I am not going in
this time with any iridescent ideas. It is to be a cold, prosaic,
matter-of-fact business proposition. It is better than going to
sea again, and I shall earn more money than any position in Oakland
can bring an unskilled man."

"You see, this vacation I have taken has given me perspective. I
haven't been working the life out of my body, and I haven't been
writing, at least not for publication. All I've done has been to
love you and to think. I've read some, too, but it has been part
of my thinking, and I have read principally magazines. I have
generalized about myself, and the world, my place in it, and my
chance to win to a place that will be fit for you. Also, I've been
reading Spencer's 'Philosophy of Style,' and found out a lot of
what was the matter with me - or my writing, rather; and for that
matter with most of the writing that is published every month in
the magazines."

"But the upshot of it all - of my thinking and reading and loving -
is that I am going to move to Grub Street. I shall leave
masterpieces alone and do hack-work - jokes, paragraphs, feature
articles, humorous verse, and society verse - all the rot for which
there seems so much demand. Then there are the newspaper
syndicates, and the newspaper short-story syndicates, and the
syndicates for the Sunday supplements. I can go ahead and hammer
out the stuff they want, and earn the equivalent of a good salary
by it. There are free-lances, you know, who earn as much as four
or five hundred a month. I don't care to become as they; but I'll
earn a good living, and have plenty of time to myself, which I
wouldn't have in any position."

"Then, I'll have my spare time for study and for real work. In
between the grind I'll try my hand at masterpieces, and I'll study
and prepare myself for the writing of masterpieces. Why, I am
amazed at the distance I have come already. When I first tried to
write, I had nothing to write about except a few paltry experiences
which I neither understood nor appreciated. But I had no thoughts.
I really didn't. I didn't even have the words with which to think.
My experiences were so many meaningless pictures. But as I began
to add to my knowledge, and to my vocabulary, I saw something more
in my experiences than mere pictures. I retained the pictures and
I found their interpretation. That was when I began to do good
work, when I wrote 'Adventure,' 'Joy,' 'The Pot,' 'The Wine of
Life,' 'The Jostling Street,' the 'Love-cycle,' and the 'Sea
Lyrics.' I shall write more like them, and better; but I shall do
it in my spare time. My feet are on the solid earth, now. Hack-
work and income first, masterpieces afterward. Just to show you, I
wrote half a dozen jokes last night for the comic weeklies; and
just as I was going to bed, the thought struck me to try my hand at
a triolet - a humorous one; and inside an hour I had written four.
They ought to be worth a dollar apiece. Four dollars right there
for a few afterthoughts on the way to bed."

"Of course it's all valueless, just so much dull and sordid
plodding; but it is no more dull and sordid than keeping books at
sixty dollars a month, adding up endless columns of meaningless
figures until one dies. And furthermore, the hack-work keeps me in
touch with things literary and gives me time to try bigger things."

"But what good are these bigger-things, these masterpieces?" Ruth
demanded. "You can't sell them."

"Oh, yes, I can," he began; but she interrupted.

"All those you named, and which you say yourself are good - you
have not sold any of them. We can't get married on masterpieces
that won't sell."

"Then we'll get married on triolets that will sell," he asserted
stoutly, putting his arm around her and drawing a very unresponsive
sweetheart toward him.

"Listen to this," he went on in attempted gayety. "It's not art,
but it's a dollar.


"He came in
When I was out,
To borrow some tin
Was why he came in,
And he went without;
So I was in
And he was out."


The merry lilt with which he had invested the jingle was at
variance with the dejection that came into his face as he finished.
He had drawn no smile from Ruth. She was looking at him in an
earnest and troubled way.

"It may be a dollar," she said, "but it is a jester's dollar, the
fee of a clown. Don't you see, Martin, the whole thing is
lowering. I want the man I love and honor to be something finer
and higher than a perpetrator of jokes and doggerel."

"You want him to be like - say Mr. Butler?" he suggested.

"I know you don't like Mr. Butler," she began.

"Mr. Butler's all right," he interrupted. "It's only his
indigestion I find fault with. But to save me I can't see any
difference between writing jokes or comic verse and running a type-
writer, taking dictation, or keeping sets of books. It is all a
means to an end. Your theory is for me to begin with keeping books
in order to become a successful lawyer or man of business. Mine is
to begin with hack-work and develop into an able author."

"There is a difference," she insisted.

"What is it?"

"Why, your good work, what you yourself call good, you can't sell.
You have tried, you know that, - but the editors won't buy it."

"Give me time, dear," he pleaded. "The hack-work is only
makeshift, and I don't take it seriously. Give me two years. I
shall succeed in that time, and the editors will be glad to buy my
good work. I know what I am saying; I have faith in myself. I
know what I have in me; I know what literature is, now; I know the
average rot that is poured out by a lot of little men; and I know
that at the end of two years I shall be on the highroad to success.
As for business, I shall never succeed at it. I am not in sympathy
with it. It strikes me as dull, and stupid, and mercenary, and
tricky. Anyway I am not adapted for it. I'd never get beyond a
clerkship, and how could you and I be happy on the paltry earnings
of a clerk? I want the best of everything in the world for you,
and the only time when I won't want it will be when there is
something better. And I'm going to get it, going to get all of it.
The income of a successful author makes Mr. Butler look cheap. A
'best-seller' will earn anywhere between fifty and a hundred
thousand dollars - sometimes more and sometimes less; but, as a
rule, pretty close to those figures."

She remained silent; her disappointment was apparent.

"Well?" he asked.

"I had hoped and planned otherwise. I had thought, and I still
think, that the best thing for you would be to study shorthand -
you already know type-writing - and go into father's office. You
have a good mind, and I am confident you would succeed as a
lawyer."