As Martin Eden went down the steps, his hand dropped into his coat
pocket. It came out with a brown rice paper and a pinch of Mexican
tobacco, which were deftly rolled together into a cigarette. He
drew the first whiff of smoke deep into his lungs and expelled it
in a long and lingering exhalation. "By God!" he said aloud, in a
voice of awe and wonder. "By God!" he repeated. And yet again he
murmured, "By God!" Then his hand went to his collar, which he
ripped out of the shirt and stuffed into his pocket. A cold
drizzle was falling, but he bared his head to it and unbuttoned his
vest, swinging along in splendid unconcern. He was only dimly
aware that it was raining. He was in an ecstasy, dreaming dreams
and reconstructing the scenes just past.

He had met the woman at last - the woman that he had thought little
about, not being given to thinking about women, but whom he had
expected, in a remote way, he would sometime meet. He had sat next
to her at table. He had felt her hand in his, he had looked into
her eyes and caught a vision of a beautiful spirit; - but no more
beautiful than the eyes through which it shone, nor than the flesh
that gave it expression and form. He did not think of her flesh as
flesh, - which was new to him; for of the women he had known that
was the only way he thought. Her flesh was somehow different. He
did not conceive of her body as a body, subject to the ills and
frailties of bodies. Her body was more than the garb of her
spirit. It was an emanation of her spirit, a pure and gracious
crystallization of her divine essence. This feeling of the divine
startled him. It shocked him from his dreams to sober thought. No
word, no clew, no hint, of the divine had ever reached him before.
He had never believed in the divine. He had always been
irreligious, scoffing good-naturedly at the sky-pilots and their
immortality of the soul. There was no life beyond, he had
contended; it was here and now, then darkness everlasting. But
what he had seen in her eyes was soul - immortal soul that could
never die. No man he had known, nor any woman, had given him the
message of immortality. But she had. She had whispered it to him
the first moment she looked at him. Her face shimmered before his
eyes as he walked along, - pale and serious, sweet and sensitive,
smiling with pity and tenderness as only a spirit could smile, and
pure as he had never dreamed purity could be. Her purity smote him
like a blow. It startled him. He had known good and bad; but
purity, as an attribute of existence, had never entered his mind.
And now, in her, he conceived purity to be the superlative of
goodness and of cleanness, the sum of which constituted eternal
life.

And promptly urged his ambition to grasp at eternal life. He was
not fit to carry water for her - he knew that; it was a miracle of
luck and a fantastic stroke that had enabled him to see her and be
with her and talk with her that night. It was accidental. There
was no merit in it. He did not deserve such fortune. His mood was
essentially religious. He was humble and meek, filled with self-
disparagement and abasement. In such frame of mind sinners come to
the penitent form. He was convicted of sin. But as the meek and
lowly at the penitent form catch splendid glimpses of their future
lordly existence, so did he catch similar glimpses of the state he
would gain to by possessing her. But this possession of her was
dim and nebulous and totally different from possession as he had
known it. Ambition soared on mad wings, and he saw himself
climbing the heights with her, sharing thoughts with her,
pleasuring in beautiful and noble things with her. It was a soul-
possession he dreamed, refined beyond any grossness, a free
comradeship of spirit that he could not put into definite thought.
He did not think it. For that matter, he did not think at all.
Sensation usurped reason, and he was quivering and palpitant with
emotions he had never known, drifting deliciously on a sea of
sensibility where feeling itself was exalted and spiritualized and
carried beyond the summits of life.

He staggered along like a drunken man, murmuring fervently aloud:
"By God! By God!"

A policeman on a street corner eyed him suspiciously, then noted
his sailor roll.

"Where did you get it?" the policeman demanded.

Martin Eden came back to earth. His was a fluid organism, swiftly
adjustable, capable of flowing into and filling all sorts of nooks
and crannies. With the policeman's hail he was immediately his
ordinary self, grasping the situation clearly.

"It's a beaut, ain't it?" he laughed back. "I didn't know I was
talkin' out loud."

"You'll be singing next," was the policeman's diagnosis.

"No, I won't. Gimme a match an' I'll catch the next car home."

He lighted his cigarette, said good night, and went on. "Now
wouldn't that rattle you?" he ejaculated under his breath. "That
copper thought I was drunk." He smiled to himself and meditated.
"I guess I was," he added; "but I didn't think a woman's face'd do
it."

He caught a Telegraph Avenue car that was going to Berkeley. It
was crowded with youths and young men who were singing songs and
ever and again barking out college yells. He studied them
curiously. They were university boys. They went to the same
university that she did, were in her class socially, could know
her, could see her every day if they wanted to. He wondered that
they did not want to, that they had been out having a good time
instead of being with her that evening, talking with her, sitting
around her in a worshipful and adoring circle. His thoughts
wandered on. He noticed one with narrow-slitted eyes and a loose-
lipped mouth. That fellow was vicious, he decided. On shipboard
he would be a sneak, a whiner, a tattler. He, Martin Eden, was a
better man than that fellow. The thought cheered him. It seemed
to draw him nearer to Her. He began comparing himself with the
students. He grew conscious of the muscled mechanism of his body
and felt confident that he was physically their master. But their
heads were filled with knowledge that enabled them to talk her
talk, - the thought depressed him. But what was a brain for? he
demanded passionately. What they had done, he could do. They had
been studying about life from the books while he had been busy
living life. His brain was just as full of knowledge as theirs,
though it was a different kind of knowledge. How many of them
could tie a lanyard knot, or take a wheel or a lookout? His life
spread out before him in a series of pictures of danger and daring,
hardship and toil. He remembered his failures and scrapes in the
process of learning. He was that much to the good, anyway. Later
on they would have to begin living life and going through the mill
as he had gone. Very well. While they were busy with that, he
could be learning the other side of life from the books.

As the car crossed the zone of scattered dwellings that separated
Oakland from Berkeley, he kept a lookout for a familiar, two-story
building along the front of which ran the proud sign,
HIGGINBOTHAM'S CASH STORE. Martin Eden got off at this corner. He
stared up for a moment at the sign. It carried a message to him
beyond its mere wording. A personality of smallness and egotism
and petty underhandedness seemed to emanate from the letters
themselves. Bernard Higginbotham had married his sister, and he
knew him well. He let himself in with a latch-key and climbed the
stairs to the second floor. Here lived his brother-in-law. The
grocery was below. There was a smell of stale vegetables in the
air. As he groped his way across the hall he stumbled over a toy-
cart, left there by one of his numerous nephews and nieces, and
brought up against a door with a resounding bang. "The pincher,"
was his thought; "too miserly to burn two cents' worth of gas and
save his boarders' necks."

He fumbled for the knob and entered a lighted room, where sat his
sister and Bernard Higginbotham. She was patching a pair of his
trousers, while his lean body was distributed over two chairs, his
feet dangling in dilapidated carpet-slippers over the edge of the
second chair. He glanced across the top of the paper he was
reading, showing a pair of dark, insincere, sharp-staring eyes.
Martin Eden never looked at him without experiencing a sense of
repulsion. What his sister had seen in the man was beyond him.
The other affected him as so much vermin, and always aroused in him
an impulse to crush him under his foot. "Some day I'll beat the
face off of him," was the way he often consoled himself for
enduring the man's existence. The eyes, weasel-like and cruel,
were looking at him complainingly.

"Well," Martin demanded. "Out with it."

"I had that door painted only last week," Mr. Higginbotham half
whined, half bullied; "and you know what union wages are. You
should be more careful."

Martin had intended to reply, but he was struck by the hopelessness
of it. He gazed across the monstrous sordidness of soul to a
chromo on the wall. It surprised him. He had always liked it, but
it seemed that now he was seeing it for the first time. It was
cheap, that was what it was, like everything else in this house.
His mind went back to the house he had just left, and he saw,
first, the paintings, and next, Her, looking at him with melting
sweetness as she shook his hand at leaving. He forgot where he was
and Bernard Higginbotham's existence, till that gentleman
demanded:-

"Seen a ghost?"

Martin came back and looked at the beady eyes, sneering, truculent,
cowardly, and there leaped into his vision, as on a screen, the
same eyes when their owner was making a sale in the store below -
subservient eyes, smug, and oily, and flattering.

"Yes," Martin answered. "I seen a ghost. Good night. Good night,
Gertrude."

He started to leave the room, tripping over a loose seam in the
slatternly carpet.

"Don't bang the door," Mr. Higginbotham cautioned him.

He felt the blood crawl in his veins, but controlled himself and
closed the door softly behind him.

Mr. Higginbotham looked at his wife exultantly.

"He's ben drinkin'," he proclaimed in a hoarse whisper. "I told
you he would."

She nodded her head resignedly.

"His eyes was pretty shiny," she confessed; "and he didn't have no
collar, though he went away with one. But mebbe he didn't have
more'n a couple of glasses."

"He couldn't stand up straight," asserted her husband. "I watched
him. He couldn't walk across the floor without stumblin'. You
heard 'm yourself almost fall down in the hall."

"I think it was over Alice's cart," she said. "He couldn't see it
in the dark."

Mr. Higginbotham's voice and wrath began to rise. All day he
effaced himself in the store, reserving for the evening, with his
family, the privilege of being himself.

"I tell you that precious brother of yours was drunk."

His voice was cold, sharp, and final, his lips stamping the
enunciation of each word like the die of a machine. His wife
sighed and remained silent. She was a large, stout woman, always
dressed slatternly and always tired from the burdens of her flesh,
her work, and her husband.

"He's got it in him, I tell you, from his father," Mr. Higginbotham
went on accusingly. "An' he'll croak in the gutter the same way.
You know that."

She nodded, sighed, and went on stitching. They were agreed that
Martin had come home drunk. They did not have it in their souls to
know beauty, or they would have known that those shining eyes and
that glowing face betokened youth's first vision of love.

"Settin' a fine example to the children," Mr. Higginbotham snorted,
suddenly, in the silence for which his wife was responsible and
which he resented. Sometimes he almost wished she would oppose him
more. "If he does it again, he's got to get out. Understand! I
won't put up with his shinanigan - debotchin' innocent children
with his boozing." Mr. Higginbotham liked the word, which was a
new one in his vocabulary, recently gleaned from a newspaper
column. "That's what it is, debotchin' - there ain't no other name
for it."

Still his wife sighed, shook her head sorrowfully, and stitched on.
Mr. Higginbotham resumed the newspaper.

"Has he paid last week's board?" he shot across the top of the
newspaper.

She nodded, then added, "He still has some money."

"When is he goin' to sea again?"

"When his pay-day's spent, I guess," she answered. "He was over to
San Francisco yesterday looking for a ship. But he's got money,
yet, an' he's particular about the kind of ship he signs for."

"It's not for a deck-swab like him to put on airs," Mr.
Higginbotham snorted. "Particular! Him!"

"He said something about a schooner that's gettin' ready to go off
to some outlandish place to look for buried treasure, that he'd
sail on her if his money held out."

"If he only wanted to steady down, I'd give him a job drivin' the
wagon," her husband said, but with no trace of benevolence in his
voice. "Tom's quit."

His wife looked alarm and interrogation.

"Quit to-night. Is goin' to work for Carruthers. They paid 'm
more'n I could afford."

"I told you you'd lose 'm," she cried out. "He was worth more'n
you was giving him."

"Now look here, old woman," Higginbotham bullied, "for the
thousandth time I've told you to keep your nose out of the
business. I won't tell you again."

"I don't care," she sniffled. "Tom was a good boy." Her husband
glared at her. This was unqualified defiance.

"If that brother of yours was worth his salt, he could take the
wagon," he snorted.

"He pays his board, just the same," was the retort. "An' he's my
brother, an' so long as he don't owe you money you've got no right
to be jumping on him all the time. I've got some feelings, if I
have been married to you for seven years."

"Did you tell 'm you'd charge him for gas if he goes on readin' in
bed?" he demanded.

Mrs. Higginbotham made no reply. Her revolt faded away, her spirit
wilting down into her tired flesh. Her husband was triumphant. He
had her. His eyes snapped vindictively, while his ears joyed in
the sniffles she emitted. He extracted great happiness from
squelching her, and she squelched easily these days, though it had
been different in the first years of their married life, before the
brood of children and his incessant nagging had sapped her energy.

"Well, you tell 'm to-morrow, that's all," he said. "An' I just
want to tell you, before I forget it, that you'd better send for
Marian to-morrow to take care of the children. With Tom quit, I'll
have to be out on the wagon, an' you can make up your mind to it to
be down below waitin' on the counter."

"But to-morrow's wash day," she objected weakly.

"Get up early, then, an' do it first. I won't start out till ten
o'clock."

He crinkled the paper viciously and resumed his reading.