A week of heavy reading had passed since the evening he first met
Ruth Morse, and still he dared not call. Time and again he nerved
himself up to call, but under the doubts that assailed him his
determination died away. He did not know the proper time to call,
nor was there any one to tell him, and he was afraid of committing
himself to an irretrievable blunder. Having shaken himself free
from his old companions and old ways of life, and having no new
companions, nothing remained for him but to read, and the long
hours he devoted to it would have ruined a dozen pairs of ordinary
eyes. But his eyes were strong, and they were backed by a body
superbly strong. Furthermore, his mind was fallow. It had lain
fallow all his life so far as the abstract thought of the books was
concerned, and it was ripe for the sowing. It had never been jaded
by study, and it bit hold of the knowledge in the books with sharp
teeth that would not let go.

It seemed to him, by the end of the week, that he had lived
centuries, so far behind were the old life and outlook. But he was
baffled by lack of preparation. He attempted to read books that
required years of preliminary specialization. One day he would
read a book of antiquated philosophy, and the next day one that was
ultra-modern, so that his head would be whirling with the conflict
and contradiction of ideas. It was the same with the economists.
On the one shelf at the library he found Karl Marx, Ricardo, Adam
Smith, and Mill, and the abstruse formulas of the one gave no clew
that the ideas of another were obsolete. He was bewildered, and
yet he wanted to know. He had become interested, in a day, in
economics, industry, and politics. Passing through the City Hall
Park, he had noticed a group of men, in the centre of which were
half a dozen, with flushed faces and raised voices, earnestly
carrying on a discussion. He joined the listeners, and heard a
new, alien tongue in the mouths of the philosophers of the people.
One was a tramp, another was a labor agitator, a third was a law-
school student, and the remainder was composed of wordy workingmen.
For the first time he heard of socialism, anarchism, and single
tax, and learned that there were warring social philosophies. He
heard hundreds of technical words that were new to him, belonging
to fields of thought that his meagre reading had never touched
upon. Because of this he could not follow the arguments closely,
and he could only guess at and surmise the ideas wrapped up in such
strange expressions. Then there was a black-eyed restaurant waiter
who was a theosophist, a union baker who was an agnostic, an old
man who baffled all of them with the strange philosophy that WHAT
IS IS RIGHT, and another old man who discoursed interminably about
the cosmos and the father-atom and the mother-atom.

Martin Eden's head was in a state of addlement when he went away
after several hours, and he hurried to the library to look up the
definitions of a dozen unusual words. And when he left the
library, he carried under his arm four volumes: Madam Blavatsky's
"Secret Doctrine," "Progress and Poverty," "The Quintessence of
Socialism," and, "Warfare of Religion and Science." Unfortunately,
he began on the "Secret Doctrine." Every line bristled with many-
syllabled words he did not understand. He sat up in bed, and the
dictionary was in front of him more often than the book. He looked
up so many new words that when they recurred, he had forgotten
their meaning and had to look them up again. He devised the plan
of writing the definitions in a note-book, and filled page after
page with them. And still he could not understand. He read until
three in the morning, and his brain was in a turmoil, but not one
essential thought in the text had he grasped. He looked up, and it
seemed that the room was lifting, heeling, and plunging like a ship
upon the sea. Then he hurled the "Secret Doctrine" and many curses
across the room, turned off the gas, and composed himself to sleep.
Nor did he have much better luck with the other three books. It
was not that his brain was weak or incapable; it could think these
thoughts were it not for lack of training in thinking and lack of
the thought-tools with which to think. He guessed this, and for a
while entertained the idea of reading nothing but the dictionary
until he had mastered every word in it.

Poetry, however, was his solace, and he read much of it, finding
his greatest joy in the simpler poets, who were more
understandable. He loved beauty, and there he found beauty.
Poetry, like music, stirred him profoundly, and, though he did not
know it, he was preparing his mind for the heavier work that was to
come. The pages of his mind were blank, and, without effort, much
he read and liked, stanza by stanza, was impressed upon those
pages, so that he was soon able to extract great joy from chanting
aloud or under his breath the music and the beauty of the printed
words he had read. Then he stumbled upon Gayley's "Classic Myths"
and Bulfinch's "Age of Fable," side by side on a library shelf. It
was illumination, a great light in the darkness of his ignorance,
and he read poetry more avidly than ever.

The man at the desk in the library had seen Martin there so often
that he had become quite cordial, always greeting him with a smile
and a nod when he entered. It was because of this that Martin did
a daring thing. Drawing out some books at the desk, and while the
man was stamping the cards, Martin blurted out:-

"Say, there's something I'd like to ask you."

The man smiled and paid attention.

"When you meet a young lady an' she asks you to call, how soon can
you call?"

Martin felt his shirt press and cling to his shoulders, what of the
sweat of the effort.

"Why I'd say any time," the man answered.

"Yes, but this is different," Martin objected. "She - I - well,
you see, it's this way: maybe she won't be there. She goes to the
university."

"Then call again."

"What I said ain't what I meant," Martin confessed falteringly,
while he made up his mind to throw himself wholly upon the other's
mercy. "I'm just a rough sort of a fellow, an' I ain't never seen
anything of society. This girl is all that I ain't, an' I ain't
anything that she is. You don't think I'm playin' the fool, do
you?" he demanded abruptly.

"No, no; not at all, I assure you," the other protested. "Your
request is not exactly in the scope of the reference department,
but I shall be only too pleased to assist you."

Martin looked at him admiringly.

"If I could tear it off that way, I'd be all right," he said.

"I beg pardon?"

"I mean if I could talk easy that way, an' polite, an' all the
rest."

"Oh," said the other, with comprehension.

"What is the best time to call? The afternoon? - not too close to
meal-time? Or the evening? Or Sunday?"

"I'll tell you," the librarian said with a brightening face. "You
call her up on the telephone and find out."

"I'll do it," he said, picking up his books and starting away.

He turned back and asked:-

"When you're speakin' to a young lady - say, for instance, Miss
Lizzie Smith - do you say 'Miss Lizzie'? or 'Miss Smith'?"

"Say 'Miss Smith,'" the librarian stated authoritatively. "Say
'Miss Smith' always - until you come to know her better."

So it was that Martin Eden solved the problem.

"Come down any time; I'll be at home all afternoon," was Ruth's
reply over the telephone to his stammered request as to when he
could return the borrowed books.

She met him at the door herself, and her woman's eyes took in
immediately the creased trousers and the certain slight but
indefinable change in him for the better. Also, she was struck by
his face. It was almost violent, this health of his, and it seemed
to rush out of him and at her in waves of force. She felt the urge
again of the desire to lean toward him for warmth, and marvelled
again at the effect his presence produced upon her. And he, in
turn, knew again the swimming sensation of bliss when he felt the
contact of her hand in greeting. The difference between them lay
in that she was cool and self-possessed while his face flushed to
the roots of the hair. He stumbled with his old awkwardness after
her, and his shoulders swung and lurched perilously.

Once they were seated in the living-room, he began to get on easily
- more easily by far than he had expected. She made it easy for
him; and the gracious spirit with which she did it made him love
her more madly than ever. They talked first of the borrowed books,
of the Swinburne he was devoted to, and of the Browning he did not
understand; and she led the conversation on from subject to
subject, while she pondered the problem of how she could be of help
to him. She had thought of this often since their first meeting.
She wanted to help him. He made a call upon her pity and
tenderness that no one had ever made before, and the pity was not
so much derogatory of him as maternal in her. Her pity could not
be of the common sort, when the man who drew it was so much man as
to shock her with maidenly fears and set her mind and pulse
thrilling with strange thoughts and feelings. The old fascination
of his neck was there, and there was sweetness in the thought of
laying her hands upon it. It seemed still a wanton impulse, but
she had grown more used to it. She did not dream that in such
guise new-born love would epitomize itself. Nor did she dream that
the feeling he excited in her was love. She thought she was merely
interested in him as an unusual type possessing various potential
excellencies, and she even felt philanthropic about it.

She did not know she desired him; but with him it was different.
He knew that he loved her, and he desired her as he had never
before desired anything in his life. He had loved poetry for
beauty's sake; but since he met her the gates to the vast field of
love-poetry had been opened wide. She had given him understanding
even more than Bulfinch and Gayley. There was a line that a week
before he would not have favored with a second thought - "God's own
mad lover dying on a kiss"; but now it was ever insistent in his
mind. He marvelled at the wonder of it and the truth; and as he
gazed upon her he knew that he could die gladly upon a kiss. He
felt himself God's own mad lover, and no accolade of knighthood
could have given him greater pride. And at last he knew the
meaning of life and why he had been born.

As he gazed at her and listened, his thoughts grew daring. He
reviewed all the wild delight of the pressure of her hand in his at
the door, and longed for it again. His gaze wandered often toward
her lips, and he yearned for them hungrily. But there was nothing
gross or earthly about this yearning. It gave him exquisite
delight to watch every movement and play of those lips as they
enunciated the words she spoke; yet they were not ordinary lips
such as all men and women had. Their substance was not mere human
clay. They were lips of pure spirit, and his desire for them
seemed absolutely different from the desire that had led him to
other women's lips. He could kiss her lips, rest his own physical
lips upon them, but it would be with the lofty and awful fervor
with which one would kiss the robe of God. He was not conscious of
this transvaluation of values that had taken place in him, and was
unaware that the light that shone in his eyes when he looked at her
was quite the same light that shines in all men's eyes when the
desire of love is upon them. He did not dream how ardent and
masculine his gaze was, nor that the warm flame of it was affecting
the alchemy of her spirit. Her penetrative virginity exalted and
disguised his own emotions, elevating his thoughts to a star-cool
chastity, and he would have been startled to learn that there was
that shining out of his eyes, like warm waves, that flowed through
her and kindled a kindred warmth. She was subtly perturbed by it,
and more than once, though she knew not why, it disrupted her train
of thought with its delicious intrusion and compelled her to grope
for the remainder of ideas partly uttered. Speech was always easy
with her, and these interruptions would have puzzled her had she
not decided that it was because he was a remarkable type. She was
very sensitive to impressions, and it was not strange, after all,
that this aura of a traveller from another world should so affect
her.

The problem in the background of her consciousness was how to help
him, and she turned the conversation in that direction; but it was
Martin who came to the point first.

"I wonder if I can get some advice from you," he began, and
received an acquiescence of willingness that made his heart bound.
"You remember the other time I was here I said I couldn't talk
about books an' things because I didn't know how? Well, I've ben
doin' a lot of thinkin' ever since. I've ben to the library a
whole lot, but most of the books I've tackled have ben over my
head. Mebbe I'd better begin at the beginnin'. I ain't never had
no advantages. I've worked pretty hard ever since I was a kid, an'
since I've ben to the library, lookin' with new eyes at books - an'
lookin' at new books, too - I've just about concluded that I ain't
ben reading the right kind. You know the books you find in cattle-
camps an' fo'c's'ls ain't the same you've got in this house, for
instance. Well, that's the sort of readin' matter I've ben
accustomed to. And yet - an' I ain't just makin' a brag of it -
I've ben different from the people I've herded with. Not that I'm
any better than the sailors an' cow-punchers I travelled with, - I
was cow-punchin' for a short time, you know, - but I always liked
books, read everything I could lay hands on, an' - well, I guess I
think differently from most of 'em.

"Now, to come to what I'm drivin' at. I was never inside a house
like this. When I come a week ago, an' saw all this, an' you, an'
your mother, an' brothers, an' everything - well, I liked it. I'd
heard about such things an' read about such things in some of the
books, an' when I looked around at your house, why, the books come
true. But the thing I'm after is I liked it. I wanted it. I want
it now. I want to breathe air like you get in this house - air
that is filled with books, and pictures, and beautiful things,
where people talk in low voices an' are clean, an' their thoughts
are clean. The air I always breathed was mixed up with grub an'
house-rent an' scrappin' an booze an' that's all they talked about,
too. Why, when you was crossin' the room to kiss your mother, I
thought it was the most beautiful thing I ever seen. I've seen a
whole lot of life, an' somehow I've seen a whole lot more of it
than most of them that was with me. I like to see, an' I want to
see more, an' I want to see it different.

"But I ain't got to the point yet. Here it is. I want to make my
way to the kind of life you have in this house. There's more in
life than booze, an' hard work, an' knockin' about. Now, how am I
goin' to get it? Where do I take hold an' begin? I'm willin' to
work my passage, you know, an' I can make most men sick when it
comes to hard work. Once I get started, I'll work night an' day.
Mebbe you think it's funny, me askin' you about all this. I know
you're the last person in the world I ought to ask, but I don't
know anybody else I could ask - unless it's Arthur. Mebbe I ought
to ask him. If I was - "

His voice died away. His firmly planned intention had come to a
halt on the verge of the horrible probability that he should have
asked Arthur and that he had made a fool of himself. Ruth did not
speak immediately. She was too absorbed in striving to reconcile
the stumbling, uncouth speech and its simplicity of thought with
what she saw in his face. She had never looked in eyes that
expressed greater power. Here was a man who could do anything, was
the message she read there, and it accorded ill with the weakness
of his spoken thought. And for that matter so complex and quick
was her own mind that she did not have a just appreciation of
simplicity. And yet she had caught an impression of power in the
very groping of this mind. It had seemed to her like a giant
writhing and straining at the bonds that held him down. Her face
was all sympathy when she did speak.

"What you need, you realize yourself, and it is education. You
should go back and finish grammar school, and then go through to
high school and university."

"But that takes money," he interrupted.

"Oh!" she cried. "I had not thought of that. But then you have
relatives, somebody who could assist you?"

He shook his head.

"My father and mother are dead. I've two sisters, one married, an'
the other'll get married soon, I suppose. Then I've a string of
brothers, - I'm the youngest, - but they never helped nobody.
They've just knocked around over the world, lookin' out for number
one. The oldest died in India. Two are in South Africa now, an'
another's on a whaling voyage, an' one's travellin' with a circus -
he does trapeze work. An' I guess I'm just like them. I've taken
care of myself since I was eleven - that's when my mother died.
I've got to study by myself, I guess, an' what I want to know is
where to begin."

"I should say the first thing of all would be to get a grammar.
Your grammar is - " She had intended saying "awful," but she
amended it to "is not particularly good."

He flushed and sweated.

"I know I must talk a lot of slang an' words you don't understand.
But then they're the only words I know - how to speak. I've got
other words in my mind, picked 'em up from books, but I can't
pronounce 'em, so I don't use 'em."

"It isn't what you say, so much as how you say it. You don't mind
my being frank, do you? I don't want to hurt you."

"No, no," he cried, while he secretly blessed her for her kindness.
"Fire away. I've got to know, an' I'd sooner know from you than
anybody else."

"Well, then, you say, 'You was'; it should be, 'You were.' You say
'I seen' for 'I saw.' You use the double negative - "

"What's the double negative?" he demanded; then added humbly, "You
see, I don't even understand your explanations."

"I'm afraid I didn't explain that," she smiled. "A double negative
is - let me see - well, you say, 'never helped nobody.' 'Never' is
a negative. 'Nobody' is another negative. It is a rule that two
negatives make a positive. 'Never helped nobody' means that, not
helping nobody, they must have helped somebody."

"That's pretty clear," he said. "I never thought of it before.
But it don't mean they MUST have helped somebody, does it? Seems
to me that 'never helped nobody' just naturally fails to say
whether or not they helped somebody. I never thought of it before,
and I'll never say it again."

She was pleased and surprised with the quickness and surety of his
mind. As soon as he had got the clew he not only understood but
corrected her error.

"You'll find it all in the grammar," she went on. "There's
something else I noticed in your speech. You say 'don't' when you
shouldn't. 'Don't' is a contraction and stands for two words. Do
you know them?"

He thought a moment, then answered, "'Do not.'"

She nodded her head, and said, "And you use 'don't' when you mean
'does not.'"

He was puzzled over this, and did not get it so quickly.

"Give me an illustration," he asked.

"Well - " She puckered her brows and pursed up her mouth as she
thought, while he looked on and decided that her expression was
most adorable. "'It don't do to be hasty.' Change 'don't' to 'do
not,' and it reads, 'It do not do to be hasty,' which is perfectly
absurd."

He turned it over in his mind and considered.

"Doesn't it jar on your ear?" she suggested.

"Can't say that it does," he replied judicially.

"Why didn't you say, 'Can't say that it do'?" she queried.

"That sounds wrong," he said slowly. "As for the other I can't
make up my mind. I guess my ear ain't had the trainin' yours has."

"There is no such word as 'ain't,'" she said, prettily emphatic.

Martin flushed again.

"And you say 'ben' for 'been,'" she continued; "'come' for 'came';
and the way you chop your endings is something dreadful."

"How do you mean?" He leaned forward, feeling that he ought to get
down on his knees before so marvellous a mind. "How do I chop?"

"You don't complete the endings. 'A-n-d' spells 'and.' You
pronounce it 'an'.' 'I-n-g' spells 'ing.' Sometimes you pronounce
it 'ing' and sometimes you leave off the 'g.' And then you slur by
dropping initial letters and diphthongs. 'T-h-e-m' spells 'them.'
You pronounce it - oh, well, it is not necessary to go over all of
them. What you need is the grammar. I'll get one and show you how
to begin."

As she arose, there shot through his mind something that he had
read in the etiquette books, and he stood up awkwardly, worrying as
to whether he was doing the right thing, and fearing that she might
take it as a sign that he was about to go.

"By the way, Mr. Eden," she called back, as she was leaving the
room. "What is BOOZE? You used it several times, you know."

"Oh, booze," he laughed. "It's slang. It means whiskey an' beer -
anything that will make you drunk."

"And another thing," she laughed back. "Don't use 'you' when you
are impersonal. 'You' is very personal, and your use of it just
now was not precisely what you meant."

"I don't just see that."

"Why, you said just now, to me, 'whiskey and beer - anything that
will make you drunk' - make me drunk, don't you see?"

"Well, it would, wouldn't it?"

"Yes, of course," she smiled. "But it would be nicer not to bring
me into it. Substitute 'one' for 'you' and see how much better it
sounds."

When she returned with the grammar, she drew a chair near his - he
wondered if he should have helped her with the chair - and sat down
beside him. She turned the pages of the grammar, and their heads
were inclined toward each other. He could hardly follow her
outlining of the work he must do, so amazed was he by her
delightful propinquity. But when she began to lay down the
importance of conjugation, he forgot all about her. He had never
heard of conjugation, and was fascinated by the glimpse he was
catching into the tie-ribs of language. He leaned closer to the
page, and her hair touched his cheek. He had fainted but once in
his life, and he thought he was going to faint again. He could
scarcely breathe, and his heart was pounding the blood up into his
throat and suffocating him. Never had she seemed so accessible as
now. For the moment the great gulf that separated them was
bridged. But there was no diminution in the loftiness of his
feeling for her. She had not descended to him. It was he who had
been caught up into the clouds and carried to her. His reverence
for her, in that moment, was of the same order as religious awe and
fervor. It seemed to him that he had intruded upon the holy of
holies, and slowly and carefully he moved his head aside from the
contact which thrilled him like an electric shock and of which she
had not been aware.