On a beautiful fall day, a day of similar Indian summer to that
which had seen their love declared the year before, Martin read his
"Love-cycle" to Ruth. It was in the afternoon, and, as before,
they had ridden out to their favorite knoll in the hills. Now and
again she had interrupted his reading with exclamations of
pleasure, and now, as he laid the last sheet of manuscript with its
fellows, he waited her judgment.

She delayed to speak, and at last she spoke haltingly, hesitating
to frame in words the harshness of her thought.

"I think they are beautiful, very beautiful," she said; "but you
can't sell them, can you? You see what I mean," she said, almost
pleaded. "This writing of yours is not practical. Something is
the matter - maybe it is with the market - that prevents you from
earning a living by it. And please, dear, don't misunderstand me.
I am flattered, and made proud, and all that - I could not be a
true woman were it otherwise - that you should write these poems to
me. But they do not make our marriage possible. Don't you see,
Martin? Don't think me mercenary. It is love, the thought of our
future, with which I am burdened. A whole year has gone by since
we learned we loved each other, and our wedding day is no nearer.
Don't think me immodest in thus talking about our wedding, for
really I have my heart, all that I am, at stake. Why don't you try
to get work on a newspaper, if you are so bound up in your writing?
Why not become a reporter? - for a while, at least?"

"It would spoil my style," was his answer, in a low, monotonous
voice. "You have no idea how I've worked for style."

"But those storiettes," she argued. "You called them hack-work.
You wrote many of them. Didn't they spoil your style?"

"No, the cases are different. The storiettes were ground out,
jaded, at the end of a long day of application to style. But a
reporter's work is all hack from morning till night, is the one
paramount thing of life. And it is a whirlwind life, the life of
the moment, with neither past nor future, and certainly without
thought of any style but reportorial style, and that certainly is
not literature. To become a reporter now, just as my style is
taking form, crystallizing, would be to commit literary suicide.
As it is, every storiette, every word of every storiette, was a
violation of myself, of my self-respect, of my respect for beauty.
I tell you it was sickening. I was guilty of sin. And I was
secretly glad when the markets failed, even if my clothes did go
into pawn. But the joy of writing the 'Love-cycle'! The creative
joy in its noblest form! That was compensation for everything."

Martin did not know that Ruth was unsympathetic concerning the
creative joy. She used the phrase - it was on her lips he had
first heard it. She had read about it, studied about it, in the
university in the course of earning her Bachelorship of Arts; but
she was not original, not creative, and all manifestations of
culture on her part were but harpings of the harpings of others.

"May not the editor have been right in his revision of your 'Sea
Lyrics'?" she questioned. "Remember, an editor must have proved
qualifications or else he would not be an editor."

"That's in line with the persistence of the established," he
rejoined, his heat against the editor-folk getting the better of
him. "What is, is not only right, but is the best possible. The
existence of anything is sufficient vindication of its fitness to
exist - to exist, mark you, as the average person unconsciously
believes, not merely in present conditions, but in all conditions.
It is their ignorance, of course, that makes them believe such rot
- their ignorance, which is nothing more nor less than the
henidical mental process described by Weininger. They think they
think, and such thinkless creatures are the arbiters of the lives
of the few who really think."

He paused, overcome by the consciousness that he had been talking
over Ruth's head.

"I'm sure I don't know who this Weininger is," she retorted. "And
you are so dreadfully general that I fail to follow you. What I
was speaking of was the qualification of editors - "

"And I'll tell you," he interrupted. "The chief qualification of
ninety-nine per cent of all editors is failure. They have failed
as writers. Don't think they prefer the drudgery of the desk and
the slavery to their circulation and to the business manager to the
joy of writing. They have tried to write, and they have failed.
And right there is the cursed paradox of it. Every portal to
success in literature is guarded by those watch-dogs, the failures
in literature. The editors, sub-editors, associate editors, most
of them, and the manuscript-readers for the magazines and book-
publishers, most of them, nearly all of them, are men who wanted to
write and who have failed. And yet they, of all creatures under
the sun the most unfit, are the very creatures who decide what
shall and what shall not find its way into print - they, who have
proved themselves not original, who have demonstrated that they
lack the divine fire, sit in judgment upon originality and genius.
And after them come the reviewers, just so many more failures.
Don't tell me that they have not dreamed the dream and attempted to
write poetry or fiction; for they have, and they have failed. Why,
the average review is more nauseating than cod-liver oil. But you
know my opinion on the reviewers and the alleged critics. There
are great critics, but they are as rare as comets. If I fail as a
writer, I shall have proved for the career of editorship. There's
bread and butter and jam, at any rate."

Ruth's mind was quick, and her disapproval of her lover's views was
buttressed by the contradiction she found in his contention.

"But, Martin, if that be so, if all the doors are closed as you
have shown so conclusively, how is it possible that any of the
great writers ever arrived?"

"They arrived by achieving the impossible," he answered. "They did
such blazing, glorious work as to burn to ashes those that opposed
them. They arrived by course of miracle, by winning a thousand-to-
one wager against them. They arrived because they were Carlyle's
battle-scarred giants who will not be kept down. And that is what
I must do; I must achieve the impossible."

"But if you fail? You must consider me as well, Martin."

"If I fail?" He regarded her for a moment as though the thought
she had uttered was unthinkable. Then intelligence illumined his
eyes. "If I fail, I shall become an editor, and you will be an
editor's wife."

She frowned at his facetiousness - a pretty, adorable frown that
made him put his arm around her and kiss it away.

"There, that's enough," she urged, by an effort of will withdrawing
herself from the fascination of his strength. "I have talked with
father and mother. I never before asserted myself so against them.
I demanded to be heard. I was very undutiful. They are against
you, you know; but I assured them over and over of my abiding love
for you, and at last father agreed that if you wanted to, you could
begin right away in his office. And then, of his own accord, he
said he would pay you enough at the start so that we could get
married and have a little cottage somewhere. Which I think was
very fine of him - don't you?"

Martin, with the dull pain of despair at his heart, mechanically
reaching for the tobacco and paper (which he no longer carried) to
roll a cigarette, muttered something inarticulate, and Ruth went
on.

"Frankly, though, and don't let it hurt you - I tell you, to show
you precisely how you stand with him - he doesn't like your radical
views, and he thinks you are lazy. Of course I know you are not.
I know you work hard."

How hard, even she did not know, was the thought in Martin's mind.

"Well, then," he said, "how about my views? Do you think they are
so radical?"

He held her eyes and waited the answer.

"I think them, well, very disconcerting," she replied.

The question was answered for him, and so oppressed was he by the
grayness of life that he forgot the tentative proposition she had
made for him to go to work. And she, having gone as far as she
dared, was willing to wait the answer till she should bring the
question up again.

She had not long to wait. Martin had a question of his own to
propound to her. He wanted to ascertain the measure of her faith
in him, and within the week each was answered. Martin precipitated
it by reading to her his "The Shame of the Sun."

"Why don't you become a reporter?" she asked when he had finished.
"You love writing so, and I am sure you would succeed. You could
rise in journalism and make a name for yourself. There are a
number of great special correspondents. Their salaries are large,
and their field is the world. They are sent everywhere, to the
heart of Africa, like Stanley, or to interview the Pope, or to
explore unknown Thibet."

"Then you don't like my essay?" he rejoined. "You believe that I
have some show in journalism but none in literature?"

"No, no; I do like it. It reads well. But I am afraid it's over
the heads of your readers. At least it is over mine. It sounds
beautiful, but I don't understand it. Your scientific slang is
beyond me. You are an extremist, you know, dear, and what may be
intelligible to you may not be intelligible to the rest of us."

"I imagine it's the philosophic slang that bothers you," was all he
could say.

He was flaming from the fresh reading of the ripest thought he had
expressed, and her verdict stunned him.

"No matter how poorly it is done," he persisted, "don't you see
anything in it? - in the thought of it, I mean?"

She shook her head.

"No, it is so different from anything I have read. I read
Maeterlinck and understand him - "

"His mysticism, you understand that?" Martin flashed out.

"Yes, but this of yours, which is supposed to be an attack upon
him, I don't understand. Of course, if originality counts - "

He stopped her with an impatient gesture that was not followed by
speech. He became suddenly aware that she was speaking and that
she had been speaking for some time.

"After all, your writing has been a toy to you," she was saying.
"Surely you have played with it long enough. It is time to take up
life seriously - OUR life, Martin. Hitherto you have lived solely
your own."

"You want me to go to work?" he asked.

"Yes. Father has offered - "

"I understand all that," he broke in; "but what I want to know is
whether or not you have lost faith in me?"

She pressed his hand mutely, her eyes dim.

"In your writing, dear," she admitted in a half-whisper.

"You've read lots of my stuff," he went on brutally. "What do you
think of it? Is it utterly hopeless? How does it compare with
other men's work?"

"But they sell theirs, and you - don't."

"That doesn't answer my question. Do you think that literature is
not at all my vocation?"

"Then I will answer." She steeled herself to do it. "I don't
think you were made to write. Forgive me, dear. You compel me to
say it; and you know I know more about literature than you do."

"Yes, you are a Bachelor of Arts," he said meditatively; "and you
ought to know."

"But there is more to be said," he continued, after a pause painful
to both. "I know what I have in me. No one knows that so well as
I. I know I shall succeed. I will not be kept down. I am afire
with what I have to say in verse, and fiction, and essay. I do not
ask you to have faith in that, though. I do not ask you to have
faith in me, nor in my writing. What I do ask of you is to love me
and have faith in love."

"A year ago I believed for two years. One of those years is yet to
run. And I do believe, upon my honor and my soul, that before that
year is run I shall have succeeded. You remember what you told me
long ago, that I must serve my apprenticeship to writing. Well, I
have served it. I have crammed it and telescoped it. With you at
the end awaiting me, I have never shirked. Do you know, I have
forgotten what it is to fall peacefully asleep. A few million
years ago I knew what it was to sleep my fill and to awake
naturally from very glut of sleep. I am awakened always now by an
alarm clock. If I fall asleep early or late, I set the alarm
accordingly; and this, and the putting out of the lamp, are my last
conscious actions."

"When I begin to feel drowsy, I change the heavy book I am reading
for a lighter one. And when I doze over that, I beat my head with
my knuckles in order to drive sleep away. Somewhere I read of a
man who was afraid to sleep. Kipling wrote the story. This man
arranged a spur so that when unconsciousness came, his naked body
pressed against the iron teeth. Well, I've done the same. I look
at the time, and I resolve that not until midnight, or not until
one o'clock, or two o'clock, or three o'clock, shall the spur be
removed. And so it rowels me awake until the appointed time. That
spur has been my bed-mate for months. I have grown so desperate
that five and a half hours of sleep is an extravagance. I sleep
four hours now. I am starved for sleep. There are times when I am
light-headed from want of sleep, times when death, with its rest
and sleep, is a positive lure to me, times when I am haunted by
Longfellow's lines:


"'The sea is still and deep;
All things within its bosom sleep;
A single step and all is o'er,
A plunge, a bubble, and no more.'


"Of course, this is sheer nonsense. It comes from nervousness,
from an overwrought mind. But the point is: Why have I done this?
For you. To shorten my apprenticeship. To compel Success to
hasten. And my apprenticeship is now served. I know my equipment.
I swear that I learn more each month than the average college man
learns in a year. I know it, I tell you. But were my need for you
to understand not so desperate I should not tell you. It is not
boasting. I measure the results by the books. Your brothers, to-
day, are ignorant barbarians compared with me and the knowledge I
have wrung from the books in the hours they were sleeping. Long
ago I wanted to be famous. I care very little for fame now. What
I want is you; I am more hungry for you than for food, or clothing,
or recognition. I have a dream of laying my head on your breast
and sleeping an aeon or so, and the dream will come true ere
another year is gone."

His power beat against her, wave upon wave; and in the moment his
will opposed hers most she felt herself most strongly drawn toward
him. The strength that had always poured out from him to her was
now flowering in his impassioned voice, his flashing eyes, and the
vigor of life and intellect surging in him. And in that moment,
and for the moment, she was aware of a rift that showed in her
certitude - a rift through which she caught sight of the real
Martin Eden, splendid and invincible; and as animal-trainers have
their moments of doubt, so she, for the instant, seemed to doubt
her power to tame this wild spirit of a man.

"And another thing," he swept on. "You love me. But why do you
love me? The thing in me that compels me to write is the very
thing that draws your love. You love me because I am somehow
different from the men you have known and might have loved. I was
not made for the desk and counting-house, for petty business
squabbling, and legal jangling. Make me do such things, make me
like those other men, doing the work they do, breathing the air
they breathe, developing the point of view they have developed, and
you have destroyed the difference, destroyed me, destroyed the
thing you love. My desire to write is the most vital thing in me.
Had I been a mere clod, neither would I have desired to write, nor
would you have desired me for a husband."

"But you forget," she interrupted, the quick surface of her mind
glimpsing a parallel. "There have been eccentric inventors,
starving their families while they sought such chimeras as
perpetual motion. Doubtless their wives loved them, and suffered
with them and for them, not because of but in spite of their
infatuation for perpetual motion."

"True," was the reply. "But there have been inventors who were not
eccentric and who starved while they sought to invent practical
things; and sometimes, it is recorded, they succeeded. Certainly I
do not seek any impossibilities - "

"You have called it 'achieving the impossible,'" she interpolated.

"I spoke figuratively. I seek to do what men have done before me -
to write and to live by my writing."

Her silence spurred him on.

"To you, then, my goal is as much a chimera as perpetual motion?"
he demanded.

He read her answer in the pressure of her hand on his - the pitying
mother-hand for the hurt child. And to her, just then, he was the
hurt child, the infatuated man striving to achieve the impossible.

Toward the close of their talk she warned him again of the
antagonism of her father and mother.

"But you love me?" he asked.

"I do! I do!" she cried.

"And I love you, not them, and nothing they do can hurt me."
Triumph sounded in his voice. "For I have faith in your love, not
fear of their enmity. All things may go astray in this world, but
not love. Love cannot go wrong unless it be a weakling that faints
and stumbles by the way."