Martin Eden

intellectual moralist, and more offending to him than platitudinous pomposity was the morality of those about him, which was a curious hotchpotch of the economic, the metaphysical, the sentimental, and the imitative.
    A sample of this curious messy mixture he encountered nearer home. His sister Marian had been keeping company with an industrious young mechanic, of German extraction, who, after thoroughly learning the trade, had set up for himself in a bicycle-repair shop. Also, having got the agency for a low-grade make of wheel, he was prosperous. Marian had called on Martin in his room a short time before to announce her engagement, during which visit she had playfully inspected Martin’s palm and told his fortune. On her next visit she brought Hermann von Schmidt along with her. Martin did the honors and congratulated both of them in language so easy and graceful as to affect disagreeably the peasant-mind of his sister’s lover. This bad impression was further heightened by Martin’s reading aloud the half-dozen stanzas of verse with which he had commemorated Marian’s previous visit. It was a bit of society verse, airy and delicate, which he had named “The Palmist.” He was surprised, when he finished reading it, to note no enjoyment in his sister’s face. Instead, her eyes were fixed anxiously upon her betrothed, and Martin, following her gaze, saw spread on that worthy’s asymmetrical features nothing but black and sullen disapproval. The incident passed over, they made an early departure, and Martin forgot all about it, though for the moment he had been puzzled that any woman, even of the working class, should not have been flattered and delighted by having poetry written about her.
    Several evenings later Marian again visited him, this time alone. Nor did she waste time in coming to the point, upbraiding him sorrowfully for what he had done.
    “Why, Marian,” he chided, “you talk as though you were ashamed of your relatives, or of your brother at any rate.”
    “And I am, too,” she blurted out.
    Martin was bewildered by the tears of mortification he saw in her eyes. The mood, whatever it was, was genuine.
    “But, Marian, why should your Hermann be jealous of my writing poetry about my own sister?”
    “He ain’t jealous,” she sobbed. “He says it was indecent, ob—obscene.”
    Martin emitted a long, low whistle of incredulity, then proceeded to resurrect and read a carbon copy of “The Palmist.”
    “I can’t see it,” he said finally, proffering the manuscript to her. “Read it yourself and show me whatever strikes you as obscene—that was the word, wasn’t it?”
    “He says so, and he ought to know,” was the answer, with a wave aside of the manuscript, accompanied by a look of loathing. “And he says you’ve got to tear it up. He says he won’t have no wife of his with such things written about her which anybody can read. He says it’s a disgrace, an’ he won’t stand for it.”
    “Now, look here, Marian, this is nothing but nonsense,” Martin began; then abruptly changed his mind.
    He saw before him an unhappy girl, knew the futility of attempting to convince her husband or her, and, though the whole situation was absurd and preposterous, he resolved to surrender.
    “All right,” he announced, tearing the manuscript into half a dozen pieces and throwing it into the waste-basket.
    He contented himself with the knowledge that even then the original typewritten manuscript was reposing in the office of a New York magazine. Marian and her husband would never know, and neither himself nor they nor the world would lose if the pretty, harmless poem ever were published.
    Marian, starting to reach into the waste-basket, refrained.
    “Can I?” she pleaded.
    He nodded his head, regarding her thoughtfully as she gathered the torn pieces of manuscript and tucked them into the pocket of her jacket—ocular evidence of the success of her mission. She reminded him of Lizzie Connolly, though there was less of fire and gorgeous flaunting life in her than in that other girl of the working class whom he had seen twice. But they were on a par, the pair of them, in dress and carriage, and he smiled with inward amusement at the caprice of his fancy which suggested the appearance of either of them in Mrs. Morse’s drawing-room. The amusement faded, and he was aware of a great loneliness. This sister of his and the Morse drawing-room were milestones of the road he had travelled. And he