Several weeks went by, during which Martin Eden studied his
grammar, reviewed the books on etiquette, and read voraciously the
books that caught his fancy. Of his own class he saw nothing. The
girls of the Lotus Club wondered what had become of him and worried
Jim with questions, and some of the fellows who put on the glove at
Riley's were glad that Martin came no more. He made another
discovery of treasure-trove in the library. As the grammar had
shown him the tie-ribs of language, so that book showed him the
tie-ribs of poetry, and he began to learn metre and construction
and form, beneath the beauty he loved finding the why and wherefore
of that beauty. Another modern book he found treated poetry as a
representative art, treated it exhaustively, with copious
illustrations from the best in literature. Never had he read
fiction with so keen zest as he studied these books. And his fresh
mind, untaxed for twenty years and impelled by maturity of desire,
gripped hold of what he read with a virility unusual to the student
mind.

When he looked back now from his vantage-ground, the old world he
had known, the world of land and sea and ships, of sailor-men and
harpy-women, seemed a very small world; and yet it blended in with
this new world and expanded. His mind made for unity, and he was
surprised when at first he began to see points of contact between
the two worlds. And he was ennobled, as well, by the loftiness of
thought and beauty he found in the books. This led him to believe
more firmly than ever that up above him, in society like Ruth and
her family, all men and women thought these thoughts and lived
them. Down below where he lived was the ignoble, and he wanted to
purge himself of the ignoble that had soiled all his days, and to
rise to that sublimated realm where dwelt the upper classes. All
his childhood and youth had been troubled by a vague unrest; he had
never known what he wanted, but he had wanted something that he had
hunted vainly for until he met Ruth. And now his unrest had become
sharp and painful, and he knew at last, clearly and definitely,
that it was beauty, and intellect, and love that he must have.

During those several weeks he saw Ruth half a dozen times, and each
time was an added inspiration. She helped him with his English,
corrected his pronunciation, and started him on arithmetic. But
their intercourse was not all devoted to elementary study. He had
seen too much of life, and his mind was too matured, to be wholly
content with fractions, cube root, parsing, and analysis; and there
were times when their conversation turned on other themes - the
last poetry he had read, the latest poet she had studied. And when
she read aloud to him her favorite passages, he ascended to the
topmost heaven of delight. Never, in all the women he had heard
speak, had he heard a voice like hers. The least sound of it was a
stimulus to his love, and he thrilled and throbbed with every word
she uttered. It was the quality of it, the repose, and the musical
modulation - the soft, rich, indefinable product of culture and a
gentle soul. As he listened to her, there rang in the ears of his
memory the harsh cries of barbarian women and of hags, and, in
lesser degrees of harshness, the strident voices of working women
and of the girls of his own class. Then the chemistry of vision
would begin to work, and they would troop in review across his
mind, each, by contrast, multiplying Ruth's glories. Then, too,
his bliss was heightened by the knowledge that her mind was
comprehending what she read and was quivering with appreciation of
the beauty of the written thought. She read to him much from "The
Princess," and often he saw her eyes swimming with tears, so finely
was her aesthetic nature strung. At such moments her own emotions
elevated him till he was as a god, and, as he gazed at her and
listened, he seemed gazing on the face of life and reading its
deepest secrets. And then, becoming aware of the heights of
exquisite sensibility he attained, he decided that this was love
and that love was the greatest thing in the world. And in review
would pass along the corridors of memory all previous thrills and
burnings he had known, - the drunkenness of wine, the caresses of
women, the rough play and give and take of physical contests, - and
they seemed trivial and mean compared with this sublime ardor he
now enjoyed.

The situation was obscured to Ruth. She had never had any
experiences of the heart. Her only experiences in such matters
were of the books, where the facts of ordinary day were translated
by fancy into a fairy realm of unreality; and she little knew that
this rough sailor was creeping into her heart and storing there
pent forces that would some day burst forth and surge through her
in waves of fire. She did not know the actual fire of love. Her
knowledge of love was purely theoretical, and she conceived of it
as lambent flame, gentle as the fall of dew or the ripple of quiet
water, and cool as the velvet-dark of summer nights. Her idea of
love was more that of placid affection, serving the loved one
softly in an atmosphere, flower-scented and dim-lighted, of
ethereal calm. She did not dream of the volcanic convulsions of
love, its scorching heat and sterile wastes of parched ashes. She
knew neither her own potencies, nor the potencies of the world; and
the deeps of life were to her seas of illusion. The conjugal
affection of her father and mother constituted her ideal of love-
affinity, and she looked forward some day to emerging, without
shock or friction, into that same quiet sweetness of existence with
a loved one.

So it was that she looked upon Martin Eden as a novelty, a strange
individual, and she identified with novelty and strangeness the
effects he produced upon her. It was only natural. In similar
ways she had experienced unusual feelings when she looked at wild
animals in the menagerie, or when she witnessed a storm of wind, or
shuddered at the bright-ribbed lightning. There was something
cosmic in such things, and there was something cosmic in him. He
came to her breathing of large airs and great spaces. The blaze of
tropic suns was in his face, and in his swelling, resilient muscles
was the primordial vigor of life. He was marred and scarred by
that mysterious world of rough men and rougher deeds, the outposts
of which began beyond her horizon. He was untamed, wild, and in
secret ways her vanity was touched by the fact that he came so
mildly to her hand. Likewise she was stirred by the common impulse
to tame the wild thing. It was an unconscious impulse, and
farthest from her thoughts that her desire was to re-thumb the clay
of him into a likeness of her father's image, which image she
believed to be the finest in the world. Nor was there any way, out
of her inexperience, for her to know that the cosmic feel she
caught of him was that most cosmic of things, love, which with
equal power drew men and women together across the world, compelled
stags to kill each other in the rutting season, and drove even the
elements irresistibly to unite.

His swift development was a source of surprise and interest. She
detected unguessed finenesses in him that seemed to bud, day by
day, like flowers in congenial soil. She read Browning aloud to
him, and was often puzzled by the strange interpretations he gave
to mooted passages. It was beyond her to realize that, out of his
experience of men and women and life, his interpretations were far
more frequently correct than hers. His conceptions seemed naive to
her, though she was often fired by his daring flights of
comprehension, whose orbit-path was so wide among the stars that
she could not follow and could only sit and thrill to the impact of
unguessed power. Then she played to him - no longer at him - and
probed him with music that sank to depths beyond her plumb-line.
His nature opened to music as a flower to the sun, and the
transition was quick from his working-class rag-time and jingles to
her classical display pieces that she knew nearly by heart. Yet he
betrayed a democratic fondness for Wagner, and the "Tannhauser"
overture, when she had given him the clew to it, claimed him as
nothing else she played. In an immediate way it personified his
life. All his past was the VENUSBURG motif, while her he
identified somehow with the PILGRIM'S CHORUS motif; and from the
exalted state this elevated him to, he swept onward and upward into
that vast shadow-realm of spirit-groping, where good and evil war
eternally.

Sometimes he questioned, and induced in her mind temporary doubts
as to the correctness of her own definitions and conceptions of
music. But her singing he did not question. It was too wholly
her, and he sat always amazed at the divine melody of her pure
soprano voice. And he could not help but contrast it with the weak
pipings and shrill quaverings of factory girls, ill-nourished and
untrained, and with the raucous shriekings from gin-cracked throats
of the women of the seaport towns. She enjoyed singing and playing
to him. In truth, it was the first time she had ever had a human
soul to play with, and the plastic clay of him was a delight to
mould; for she thought she was moulding it, and her intentions were
good. Besides, it was pleasant to be with him. He did not repel
her. That first repulsion had been really a fear of her
undiscovered self, and the fear had gone to sleep. Though she did
not know it, she had a feeling in him of proprietary right. Also,
he had a tonic effect upon her. She was studying hard at the
university, and it seemed to strengthen her to emerge from the
dusty books and have the fresh sea-breeze of his personality blow
upon her. Strength! Strength was what she needed, and he gave it
to her in generous measure. To come into the same room with him,
or to meet him at the door, was to take heart of life. And when he
had gone, she would return to her books with a keener zest and
fresh store of energy.

She knew her Browning, but it had never sunk into her that it was
an awkward thing to play with souls. As her interest in Martin
increased, the remodelling of his life became a passion with her.

"There is Mr. Butler," she said one afternoon, when grammar and
arithmetic and poetry had been put aside.

"He had comparatively no advantages at first. His father had been
a bank cashier, but he lingered for years, dying of consumption in
Arizona, so that when he was dead, Mr. Butler, Charles Butler he
was called, found himself alone in the world. His father had come
from Australia, you know, and so he had no relatives in California.
He went to work in a printing-office, - I have heard him tell of it
many times, - and he got three dollars a week, at first. His
income to-day is at least thirty thousand a year. How did he do
it? He was honest, and faithful, and industrious, and economical.
He denied himself the enjoyments that most boys indulge in. He
made it a point to save so much every week, no matter what he had
to do without in order to save it. Of course, he was soon earning
more than three dollars a week, and as his wages increased he saved
more and more.

"He worked in the daytime, and at night he went to night school.
He had his eyes fixed always on the future. Later on he went to
night high school. When he was only seventeen, he was earning
excellent wages at setting type, but he was ambitious. He wanted a
career, not a livelihood, and he was content to make immediate
sacrifices for his ultimate again. He decided upon the law, and he
entered father's office as an office boy - think of that! - and got
only four dollars a week. But he had learned how to be economical,
and out of that four dollars he went on saving money."

She paused for breath, and to note how Martin was receiving it.
His face was lighted up with interest in the youthful struggles of
Mr. Butler; but there was a frown upon his face as well.

"I'd say they was pretty hard lines for a young fellow," he
remarked. "Four dollars a week! How could he live on it? You can
bet he didn't have any frills. Why, I pay five dollars a week for
board now, an' there's nothin' excitin' about it, you can lay to
that. He must have lived like a dog. The food he ate - "

"He cooked for himself," she interrupted, "on a little kerosene
stove."

"The food he ate must have been worse than what a sailor gets on
the worst-feedin' deep-water ships, than which there ain't much
that can be possibly worse."

"But think of him now!" she cried enthusiastically. "Think of what
his income affords him. His early denials are paid for a thousand-
fold."

Martin looked at her sharply.

"There's one thing I'll bet you," he said, "and it is that Mr.
Butler is nothin' gay-hearted now in his fat days. He fed himself
like that for years an' years, on a boy's stomach, an' I bet his
stomach's none too good now for it."

Her eyes dropped before his searching gaze.

"I'll bet he's got dyspepsia right now!" Martin challenged.

"Yes, he has," she confessed; "but - "

"An' I bet," Martin dashed on, "that he's solemn an' serious as an
old owl, an' doesn't care a rap for a good time, for all his thirty
thousand a year. An' I'll bet he's not particularly joyful at
seein' others have a good time. Ain't I right?"

She nodded her head in agreement, and hastened to explain:-

"But he is not that type of man. By nature he is sober and
serious. He always was that."

"You can bet he was," Martin proclaimed. "Three dollars a week,
an' four dollars a week, an' a young boy cookin' for himself on an
oil-burner an' layin' up money, workin' all day an' studyin' all
night, just workin' an' never playin', never havin' a good time,
an' never learnin' how to have a good time - of course his thirty
thousand came along too late."

His sympathetic imagination was flashing upon his inner sight all
the thousands of details of the boy's existence and of his narrow
spiritual development into a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year man.
With the swiftness and wide-reaching of multitudinous thought
Charles Butler's whole life was telescoped upon his vision.

"Do you know," he added, "I feel sorry for Mr. Butler. He was too
young to know better, but he robbed himself of life for the sake of
thirty thousand a year that's clean wasted upon him. Why, thirty
thousand, lump sum, wouldn't buy for him right now what ten cents
he was layin' up would have bought him, when he was a kid, in the
way of candy an' peanuts or a seat in nigger heaven."

It was just such uniqueness of points of view that startled Ruth.
Not only were they new to her, and contrary to her own beliefs, but
she always felt in them germs of truth that threatened to unseat or
modify her own convictions. Had she been fourteen instead of
twenty-four, she might have been changed by them; but she was
twenty-four, conservative by nature and upbringing, and already
crystallized into the cranny of life where she had been born and
formed. It was true, his bizarre judgments troubled her in the
moments they were uttered, but she ascribed them to his novelty of
type and strangeness of living, and they were soon forgotten.
Nevertheless, while she disapproved of them, the strength of their
utterance, and the flashing of eyes and earnestness of face that
accompanied them, always thrilled her and drew her toward him. She
would never have guessed that this man who had come from beyond her
horizon, was, in such moments, flashing on beyond her horizon with
wider and deeper concepts. Her own limits were the limits of her
horizon; but limited minds can recognize limitations only in
others. And so she felt that her outlook was very wide indeed, and
that where his conflicted with hers marked his limitations; and she
dreamed of helping him to see as she saw, of widening his horizon
until it was identified with hers.

"But I have not finished my story," she said. "He worked, so
father says, as no other office boy he ever had. Mr. Butler was
always eager to work. He never was late, and he was usually at the
office a few minutes before his regular time. And yet he saved his
time. Every spare moment was devoted to study. He studied book-
keeping and type-writing, and he paid for lessons in shorthand by
dictating at night to a court reporter who needed practice. He
quickly became a clerk, and he made himself invaluable. Father
appreciated him and saw that he was bound to rise. It was on
father's suggestion that he went to law college. He became a
lawyer, and hardly was he back in the office when father took him
in as junior partner. He is a great man. He refused the United
States Senate several times, and father says he could become a
justice of the Supreme Court any time a vacancy occurs, if he wants
to. Such a life is an inspiration to all of us. It shows us that
a man with will may rise superior to his environment."

"He is a great man," Martin said sincerely.

But it seemed to him there was something in the recital that jarred
upon his sense of beauty and life. He could not find an adequate
motive in Mr. Butler's life of pinching and privation. Had he done
it for love of a woman, or for attainment of beauty, Martin would
have understood. God's own mad lover should do anything for the
kiss, but not for thirty thousand dollars a year. He was
dissatisfied with Mr. Butler's career. There was something paltry
about it, after all. Thirty thousand a year was all right, but
dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such princely
income of all its value.

Much of this he strove to express to Ruth, and shocked her and made
it clear that more remodelling was necessary. Hers was that common
insularity of mind that makes human creatures believe that their
color, creed, and politics are best and right and that other human
creatures scattered over the world are less fortunately placed than
they. It was the same insularity of mind that made the ancient Jew
thank God he was not born a woman, and sent the modern missionary
god-substituting to the ends of the earth; and it made Ruth desire
to shape this man from other crannies of life into the likeness of
the men who lived in her particular cranny of life.