Martin Eden, with blood still crawling from contact with his
brother-in-law, felt his way along the unlighted back hall and
entered his room, a tiny cubbyhole with space for a bed, a wash-
stand, and one chair. Mr. Higginbotham was too thrifty to keep a
servant when his wife could do the work. Besides, the servant's
room enabled them to take in two boarders instead of one. Martin
placed the Swinburne and Browning on the chair, took off his coat,
and sat down on the bed. A screeching of asthmatic springs greeted
the weight of his body, but he did not notice them. He started to
take off his shoes, but fell to staring at the white plaster wall
opposite him, broken by long streaks of dirty brown where rain had
leaked through the roof. On this befouled background visions began
to flow and burn. He forgot his shoes and stared long, till his
lips began to move and he murmured, "Ruth."

"Ruth." He had not thought a simple sound could be so beautiful.
It delighted his ear, and he grew intoxicated with the repetition
of it. "Ruth." It was a talisman, a magic word to conjure with.
Each time he murmured it, her face shimmered before him, suffusing
the foul wall with a golden radiance. This radiance did not stop
at the wall. It extended on into infinity, and through its golden
depths his soul went questing after hers. The best that was in him
was out in splendid flood. The very thought of her ennobled and
purified him, made him better, and made him want to be better.
This was new to him. He had never known women who had made him
better. They had always had the counter effect of making him
beastly. He did not know that many of them had done their best,
bad as it was. Never having been conscious of himself, he did not
know that he had that in his being that drew love from women and
which had been the cause of their reaching out for his youth.
Though they had often bothered him, he had never bothered about
them; and he would never have dreamed that there were women who had
been better because of him. Always in sublime carelessness had he
lived, till now, and now it seemed to him that they had always
reached out and dragged at him with vile hands. This was not just
to them, nor to himself. But he, who for the first time was
becoming conscious of himself, was in no condition to judge, and he
burned with shame as he stared at the vision of his infamy.

He got up abruptly and tried to see himself in the dirty looking-
glass over the wash-stand. He passed a towel over it and looked
again, long and carefully. It was the first time he had ever
really seen himself. His eyes were made for seeing, but up to that
moment they had been filled with the ever changing panorama of the
world, at which he had been too busy gazing, ever to gaze at
himself. He saw the head and face of a young fellow of twenty,
but, being unused to such appraisement, he did not know how to
value it. Above a square-domed forehead he saw a mop of brown
hair, nut-brown, with a wave to it and hints of curls that were a
delight to any woman, making hands tingle to stroke it and fingers
tingle to pass caresses through it. But he passed it by as without
merit, in Her eyes, and dwelt long and thoughtfully on the high,
square forehead, - striving to penetrate it and learn the quality
of its content. What kind of a brain lay behind there? was his
insistent interrogation. What was it capable of? How far would it
take him? Would it take him to her?

He wondered if there was soul in those steel-gray eyes that were
often quite blue of color and that were strong with the briny airs
of the sun-washed deep. He wondered, also, how his eyes looked to
her. He tried to imagine himself she, gazing into those eyes of
his, but failed in the jugglery. He could successfully put himself
inside other men's minds, but they had to be men whose ways of life
he knew. He did not know her way of life. She was wonder and
mystery, and how could he guess one thought of hers? Well, they
were honest eyes, he concluded, and in them was neither smallness
nor meanness. The brown sunburn of his face surprised him. He had
not dreamed he was so black. He rolled up his shirt-sleeve and
compared the white underside if the arm with his face. Yes, he was
a white man, after all. But the arms were sunburned, too. He
twisted his arm, rolled the biceps over with his other hand, and
gazed underneath where he was least touched by the sun. It was
very white. He laughed at his bronzed face in the glass at the
thought that it was once as white as the underside of his arm; nor
did he dream that in the world there were few pale spirits of women
who could boast fairer or smoother skins than he - fairer than
where he had escaped the ravages of the sun.

His might have been a cherub's mouth, had not the full, sensuous
lips a trick, under stress, of drawing firmly across the teeth. At
times, so tightly did they draw, the mouth became stern and harsh,
even ascetic. They were the lips of a fighter and of a lover.
They could taste the sweetness of life with relish, and they could
put the sweetness aside and command life. The chin and jaw, strong
and just hinting of square aggressiveness, helped the lips to
command life. Strength balanced sensuousness and had upon it a
tonic effect, compelling him to love beauty that was healthy and
making him vibrate to sensations that were wholesome. And between
the lips were teeth that had never known nor needed the dentist's
care. They were white and strong and regular, he decided, as he
looked at them. But as he looked, he began to be troubled.
Somewhere, stored away in the recesses of his mind and vaguely
remembered, was the impression that there were people who washed
their teeth every day. They were the people from up above - people
in her class. She must wash her teeth every day, too. What would
she think if she learned that he had never washed his teeth in all
the days of his life? He resolved to get a tooth-brush and form
the habit. He would begin at once, to-morrow. It was not by mere
achievement that he could hope to win to her. He must make a
personal reform in all things, even to tooth-washing and neck-gear,
though a starched collar affected him as a renunciation of freedom.

He held up his hand, rubbing the ball of the thumb over the
calloused palm and gazing at the dirt that was ingrained in the
flesh itself and which no brush could scrub away. How different
was her palm! He thrilled deliciously at the remembrance. Like a
rose-petal, he thought; cool and soft as a snowflake. He had never
thought that a mere woman's hand could be so sweetly soft. He
caught himself imagining the wonder of a caress from such a hand,
and flushed guiltily. It was too gross a thought for her. In ways
it seemed to impugn her high spirituality. She was a pale, slender
spirit, exalted far beyond the flesh; but nevertheless the softness
of her palm persisted in his thoughts. He was used to the harsh
callousness of factory girls and working women. Well he knew why
their hands were rough; but this hand of hers . . . It was soft
because she had never used it to work with. The gulf yawned
between her and him at the awesome thought of a person who did not
have to work for a living. He suddenly saw the aristocracy of the
people who did not labor. It towered before him on the wall, a
figure in brass, arrogant and powerful. He had worked himself; his
first memories seemed connected with work, and all his family had
worked. There was Gertrude. When her hands were not hard from the
endless housework, they were swollen and red like boiled beef, what
of the washing. And there was his sister Marian. She had worked
in the cannery the preceding summer, and her slim, pretty hands
were all scarred with the tomato-knives. Besides, the tips of two
of her fingers had been left in the cutting machine at the paper-
box factory the preceding winter. He remembered the hard palms of
his mother as she lay in her coffin. And his father had worked to
the last fading gasp; the horned growth on his hands must have been
half an inch thick when he died. But Her hands were soft, and her
mother's hands, and her brothers'. This last came to him as a
surprise; it was tremendously indicative of the highness of their
caste, of the enormous distance that stretched between her and him.

He sat back on the bed with a bitter laugh, and finished taking off
his shoes. He was a fool; he had been made drunken by a woman's
face and by a woman's soft, white hands. And then, suddenly,
before his eyes, on the foul plaster-wall appeared a vision. He
stood in front of a gloomy tenement house. It was night-time, in
the East End of London, and before him stood Margey, a little
factory girl of fifteen. He had seen her home after the bean-
feast. She lived in that gloomy tenement, a place not fit for
swine. His hand was going out to hers as he said good night. She
had put her lips up to be kissed, but he wasn't going to kiss her.
Somehow he was afraid of her. And then her hand closed on his and
pressed feverishly. He felt her callouses grind and grate on his,
and a great wave of pity welled over him. He saw her yearning,
hungry eyes, and her ill-fed female form which had been rushed from
childhood into a frightened and ferocious maturity; then he put his
arms about her in large tolerance and stooped and kissed her on the
lips. Her glad little cry rang in his ears, and he felt her
clinging to him like a cat. Poor little starveling! He continued
to stare at the vision of what had happened in the long ago. His
flesh was crawling as it had crawled that night when she clung to
him, and his heart was warm with pity. It was a gray scene, greasy
gray, and the rain drizzled greasily on the pavement stones. And
then a radiant glory shone on the wall, and up through the other
vision, displacing it, glimmered Her pale face under its crown of
golden hair, remote and inaccessible as a star.

He took the Browning and the Swinburne from the chair and kissed
them. Just the same, she told me to call again, he thought. He
took another look at himself in the glass, and said aloud, with
great solemnity:-

"Martin Eden, the first thing to-morrow you go to the free library
an' read up on etiquette. Understand!"

He turned off the gas, and the springs shrieked under his body.

"But you've got to quit cussin', Martin, old boy; you've got to
quit cussin'," he said aloud.

Then he dozed off to sleep and to dream dreams that for madness and
audacity rivalled those of poppy-eaters.