The first thing Martin did next morning was to go counter both to
Brissenden's advice and command. "The Shame of the Sun" he wrapped
and mailed to THE ACROPOLIS. He believed he could find magazine
publication for it, and he felt that recognition by the magazines
would commend him to the book-publishing houses. "Ephemera" he
likewise wrapped and mailed to a magazine. Despite Brissenden's
prejudice against the magazines, which was a pronounced mania with
him, Martin decided that the great poem should see print. He did
not intend, however, to publish it without the other's permission.
His plan was to get it accepted by one of the high magazines, and,
thus armed, again to wrestle with Brissenden for consent.

Martin began, that morning, a story which he had sketched out a
number of weeks before and which ever since had been worrying him
with its insistent clamor to be created. Apparently it was to be a
rattling sea story, a tale of twentieth-century adventure and
romance, handling real characters, in a real world, under real
conditions. But beneath the swing and go of the story was to be
something else - something that the superficial reader would never
discern and which, on the other hand, would not diminish in any way
the interest and enjoyment for such a reader. It was this, and not
the mere story, that impelled Martin to write it. For that matter,
it was always the great, universal motif that suggested plots to
him. After having found such a motif, he cast about for the
particular persons and particular location in time and space
wherewith and wherein to utter the universal thing. "Overdue" was
the title he had decided for it, and its length he believed would
not be more than sixty thousand words - a bagatelle for him with
his splendid vigor of production. On this first day he took hold
of it with conscious delight in the mastery of his tools. He no
longer worried for fear that the sharp, cutting edges should slip
and mar his work. The long months of intense application and study
had brought their reward. He could now devote himself with sure
hand to the larger phases of the thing he shaped; and as he worked,
hour after hour, he felt, as never before, the sure and cosmic
grasp with which he held life and the affairs of life. "Overdue"
would tell a story that would be true of its particular characters
and its particular events; but it would tell, too, he was
confident, great vital things that would be true of all time, and
all sea, and all life - thanks to Herbert Spencer, he thought,
leaning back for a moment from the table. Ay, thanks to Herbert
Spencer and to the master-key of life, evolution, which Spencer had
placed in his hands.

He was conscious that it was great stuff he was writing. "It will
go! It will go!" was the refrain that kept, sounding in his ears.
Of course it would go. At last he was turning out the thing at
which the magazines would jump. The whole story worked out before
him in lightning flashes. He broke off from it long enough to
write a paragraph in his note-book. This would be the last
paragraph in "Overdue"; but so thoroughly was the whole book
already composed in his brain that he could write, weeks before he
had arrived at the end, the end itself. He compared the tale, as
yet unwritten, with the tales of the sea-writers, and he felt it to
be immeasurably superior. "There's only one man who could touch
it," he murmured aloud, "and that's Conrad. And it ought to make
even him sit up and shake hands with me, and say, 'Well done,
Martin, my boy.'"

He toiled on all day, recollecting, at the last moment, that he was
to have dinner at the Morses'. Thanks to Brissenden, his black
suit was out of pawn and he was again eligible for dinner parties.
Down town he stopped off long enough to run into the library and
search for Saleeby's books. He drew out 'The Cycle of Life," and
on the car turned to the essay Norton had mentioned on Spencer. As
Martin read, he grew angry. His face flushed, his jaw set, and
unconsciously his hand clenched, unclenched, and clenched again as
if he were taking fresh grips upon some hateful thing out of which
he was squeezing the life. When he left the car, he strode along
the sidewalk as a wrathful man will stride, and he rang the Morse
bell with such viciousness that it roused him to consciousness of
his condition, so that he entered in good nature, smiling with
amusement at himself. No sooner, however, was he inside than a
great depression descended upon him. He fell from the height where
he had been up-borne all day on the wings of inspiration.
"Bourgeois," "trader's den" - Brissenden's epithets repeated
themselves in his mind. But what of that? he demanded angrily. He
was marrying Ruth, not her family.

It seemed to him that he had never seen Ruth more beautiful, more
spiritual and ethereal and at the same time more healthy. There
was color in her cheeks, and her eyes drew him again and again -
the eyes in which he had first read immortality. He had forgotten
immortality of late, and the trend of his scientific reading had
been away from it; but here, in Ruth's eyes, he read an argument
without words that transcended all worded arguments. He saw that
in her eyes before which all discussion fled away, for he saw love
there. And in his own eyes was love; and love was unanswerable.
Such was his passionate doctrine.

The half hour he had with her, before they went in to dinner, left
him supremely happy and supremely satisfied with life.
Nevertheless, at table, the inevitable reaction and exhaustion
consequent upon the hard day seized hold of him. He was aware that
his eyes were tired and that he was irritable. He remembered it
was at this table, at which he now sneered and was so often bored,
that he had first eaten with civilized beings in what he had
imagined was an atmosphere of high culture and refinement. He
caught a glimpse of that pathetic figure of him, so long ago, a
self-conscious savage, sprouting sweat at every pore in an agony of
apprehension, puzzled by the bewildering minutiae of eating-
implements, tortured by the ogre of a servant, striving at a leap
to live at such dizzy social altitude, and deciding in the end to
be frankly himself, pretending no knowledge and no polish he did
not possess.

He glanced at Ruth for reassurance, much in the same manner that a
passenger, with sudden panic thought of possible shipwreck, will
strive to locate the life preservers. Well, that much had come out
of it - love and Ruth. All the rest had failed to stand the test
of the books. But Ruth and love had stood the test; for them he
found a biological sanction. Love was the most exalted expression
of life. Nature had been busy designing him, as she had been busy
with all normal men, for the purpose of loving. She had spent ten
thousand centuries - ay, a hundred thousand and a million centuries
- upon the task, and he was the best she could do. She had made
love the strongest thing in him, increased its power a myriad per
cent with her gift of imagination, and sent him forth into the
ephemera to thrill and melt and mate. His hand sought Ruth's hand
beside him hidden by the table, and a warm pressure was given and
received. She looked at him a swift instant, and her eyes were
radiant and melting. So were his in the thrill that pervaded him;
nor did he realize how much that was radiant and melting in her
eyes had been aroused by what she had seen in his.

Across the table from him, cater-cornered, at Mr. Morse's right,
sat Judge Blount, a local superior court judge. Martin had met him
a number of times and had failed to like him. He and Ruth's father
were discussing labor union politics, the local situation, and
socialism, and Mr. Morse was endeavoring to twit Martin on the
latter topic. At last Judge Blount looked across the table with
benignant and fatherly pity. Martin smiled to himself.

"You'll grow out of it, young man," he said soothingly. "Time is
the best cure for such youthful distempers." He turned to Mr.
Morse. "I do not believe discussion is good in such cases. It
makes the patient obstinate."

"That is true," the other assented gravely. "But it is well to
warn the patient occasionally of his condition."

Martin laughed merrily, but it was with an effort. The day had
been too long, the day's effort too intense, and he was deep in the
throes of the reaction.

"Undoubtedly you are both excellent doctors," he said; "but if you
care a whit for the opinion of the patient, let him tell you that
you are poor diagnosticians. In fact, you are both suffering from
the disease you think you find in me. As for me, I am immune. The
socialist philosophy that riots half-baked in your veins has passed
me by."

"Clever, clever," murmured the judge. "An excellent ruse in
controversy, to reverse positions."

"Out of your mouth." Martin's eyes were sparkling, but he kept
control of himself. "You see, Judge, I've heard your campaign
speeches. By some henidical process - henidical, by the way is a
favorite word of mine which nobody understands - by some henidical
process you persuade yourself that you believe in the competitive
system and the survival of the strong, and at the same time you
indorse with might and main all sorts of measures to shear the
strength from the strong."

"My young man - "

"Remember, I've heard your campaign speeches," Martin warned.
"It's on record, your position on interstate commerce regulation,
on regulation of the railway trust and Standard Oil, on the
conservation of the forests, on a thousand and one restrictive
measures that are nothing else than socialistic."

"Do you mean to tell me that you do not believe in regulating these
various outrageous exercises of power?"

"That's not the point. I mean to tell you that you are a poor
diagnostician. I mean to tell you that I am not suffering from the
microbe of socialism. I mean to tell you that it is you who are
suffering from the emasculating ravages of that same microbe. As
for me, I am an inveterate opponent of socialism just as I am an
inveterate opponent of your own mongrel democracy that is nothing
else than pseudo-socialism masquerading under a garb of words that
will not stand the test of the dictionary."

"I am a reactionary - so complete a reactionary that my position is
incomprehensible to you who live in a veiled lie of social
organization and whose sight is not keen enough to pierce the veil.
You make believe that you believe in the survival of the strong and
the rule of the strong. I believe. That is the difference. When
I was a trifle younger, - a few months younger, - I believed the
same thing. You see, the ideas of you and yours had impressed me.
But merchants and traders are cowardly rulers at best; they grunt
and grub all their days in the trough of money-getting, and I have
swung back to aristocracy, if you please. I am the only
individualist in this room. I look to the state for nothing. I
look only to the strong man, the man on horseback, to save the
state from its own rotten futility."

"Nietzsche was right. I won't take the time to tell you who
Nietzsche was, but he was right. The world belongs to the strong -
to the strong who are noble as well and who do not wallow in the
swine-trough of trade and exchange. The world belongs to the true
nobleman, to the great blond beasts, to the noncompromisers, to the
'yes-sayers.' And they will eat you up, you socialists - who are
afraid of socialism and who think yourselves individualists. Your
slave-morality of the meek and lowly will never save you. - Oh,
it's all Greek, I know, and I won't bother you any more with it.
But remember one thing. There aren't half a dozen individualists
in Oakland, but Martin Eden is one of them."

He signified that he was done with the discussion, and turned to
Ruth.

"I'm wrought up to-day," he said in an undertone. "All I want to
do is to love, not talk."

He ignored Mr. Morse, who said:-

"I am unconvinced. All socialists are Jesuits. That is the way to
tell them."

"We'll make a good Republican out of you yet," said Judge Blount.

"The man on horseback will arrive before that time," Martin
retorted with good humor, and returned to Ruth.

But Mr. Morse was not content. He did not like the laziness and
the disinclination for sober, legitimate work of this prospective
son-in-law of his, for whose ideas he had no respect and of whose
nature he had no understanding. So he turned the conversation to
Herbert Spencer. Judge Blount ably seconded him, and Martin, whose
ears had pricked at the first mention of the philosopher's name,
listened to the judge enunciate a grave and complacent diatribe
against Spencer. From time to time Mr. Morse glanced at Martin, as
much as to say, "There, my boy, you see."

"Chattering daws," Martin muttered under his breath, and went on
talking with Ruth and Arthur.

But the long day and the "real dirt" of the night before were
telling upon him; and, besides, still in his burnt mind was what
had made him angry when he read it on the car.

"What is the matter?" Ruth asked suddenly alarmed by the effort he
was making to contain himself.

"There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is its
prophet," Judge Blount was saying at that moment.

Martin turned upon him.

"A cheap judgment," he remarked quietly. "I heard it first in the
City Hall Park, on the lips of a workingman who ought to have known
better. I have heard it often since, and each time the clap-trap
of it nauseates me. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. To hear
that great and noble man's name upon your lips is like finding a
dew-drop in a cesspool. You are disgusting."

It was like a thunderbolt. Judge Blount glared at him with
apoplectic countenance, and silence reigned. Mr. Morse was
secretly pleased. He could see that his daughter was shocked. It
was what he wanted to do - to bring out the innate ruffianism of
this man he did not like.

Ruth's hand sought Martin's beseechingly under the table, but his
blood was up. He was inflamed by the intellectual pretence and
fraud of those who sat in the high places. A Superior Court Judge!
It was only several years before that he had looked up from the
mire at such glorious entities and deemed them gods.

Judge Blount recovered himself and attempted to go on, addressing
himself to Martin with an assumption of politeness that the latter
understood was for the benefit of the ladies. Even this added to
his anger. Was there no honesty in the world?

"You can't discuss Spencer with me," he cried. "You do not know
any more about Spencer than do his own countrymen. But it is no
fault of yours, I grant. It is just a phase of the contemptible
ignorance of the times. I ran across a sample of it on my way here
this evening. I was reading an essay by Saleeby on Spencer. You
should read it. It is accessible to all men. You can buy it in
any book-store or draw it from the public library. You would feel
ashamed of your paucity of abuse and ignorance of that noble man
compared with what Saleeby has collected on the subject. It is a
record of shame that would shame your shame."

"'The philosopher of the half-educated,' he was called by an
academic Philosopher who was not worthy to pollute the atmosphere
he breathed. I don't think you have read ten pages of Spencer, but
there have been critics, assumably more intelligent than you, who
have read no more than you of Spencer, who publicly challenged his
followers to adduce one single idea from all his writings - from
Herbert Spencer's writings, the man who has impressed the stamp of
his genius over the whole field of scientific research and modern
thought; the father of psychology; the man who revolutionized
pedagogy, so that to-day the child of the French peasant is taught
the three R's according to principles laid down by him. And the
little gnats of men sting his memory when they get their very bread
and butter from the technical application of his ideas. What
little of worth resides in their brains is largely due to him. It
is certain that had he never lived, most of what is correct in
their parrot-learned knowledge would be absent."

"And yet a man like Principal Fairbanks of Oxford - a man who sits
in an even higher place than you, Judge Blount - has said that
Spencer will be dismissed by posterity as a poet and dreamer rather
than a thinker. Yappers and blatherskites, the whole brood of
them! '"First Principles" is not wholly destitute of a certain
literary power,' said one of them. And others of them have said
that he was an industrious plodder rather than an original thinker.
Yappers and blatherskites! Yappers and blatherskites!"

Martin ceased abruptly, in a dead silence. Everybody in Ruth's
family looked up to Judge Blount as a man of power and achievement,
and they were horrified at Martin's outbreak. The remainder of the
dinner passed like a funeral, the judge and Mr. Morse confining
their talk to each other, and the rest of the conversation being
extremely desultory. Then afterward, when Ruth and Martin were
alone, there was a scene.

"You are unbearable," she wept.

But his anger still smouldered, and he kept muttering, "The beasts!
The beasts!"

When she averred he had insulted the judge, he retorted:-

"By telling the truth about him?"

"I don't care whether it was true or not," she insisted. "There
are certain bounds of decency, and you had no license to insult
anybody."

"Then where did Judge Blount get the license to assault truth?"
Martin demanded. "Surely to assault truth is a more serious
misdemeanor than to insult a pygmy personality such as the judge's.
He did worse than that. He blackened the name of a great, noble
man who is dead. Oh, the beasts! The beasts!"

His complex anger flamed afresh, and Ruth was in terror of him.
Never had she seen him so angry, and it was all mystified and
unreasonable to her comprehension. And yet, through her very
terror ran the fibres of fascination that had drawn and that still
drew her to him - that had compelled her to lean towards him, and,
in that mad, culminating moment, lay her hands upon his neck. She
was hurt and outraged by what had taken place, and yet she lay in
his arms and quivered while he went on muttering, "The beasts! The
beasts!" And she still lay there when he said: "I'll not bother
your table again, dear. They do not like me, and it is wrong of me
to thrust my objectionable presence upon them. Besides, they are
just as objectionable to me. Faugh! They are sickening. And to
think of it, I dreamed in my innocence that the persons who sat in
the high places, who lived in fine houses and had educations and
bank accounts, were worth while!