Martin Eden

words into realization of the puerility of her act, and yet she felt that he had magnified it unduly and was consequently resentful. They sat in silence for a long time, she thinking desperately and he pondering upon his love which had departed. He knew, now, that he had not really loved her. It was an idealized Ruth he had loved, an ethereal creature of his own creating, the bright and luminous spirit of his love-poems. The real bourgeois Ruth, with all the bourgeois failings and with the hopeless cramp of the bourgeois psychology in her mind, he had never loved.
    She suddenly began to speak.
    “I know that much you have said is so. I have been afraid of life. I did not love you well enough. I have learned to love better. I love you for what you are, for what you were, for the ways even by which you have become. I love you for the ways wherein you differ from what you call my class, for your beliefs which I do not understand but which I know I can come to understand. I shall devote myself to understanding them. And even your smoking and your swearing—they are part of you and I will love you for them, too. I can still learn. In the last ten minutes I have learned much. That I have dared to come here is a token of what I have already learned. Oh, Martin!—”
    She was sobbing and nestling close against him.
    For the first time his arms folded her gently and with sympathy, and she acknowledged it with a happy movement and a brightening face.
    “It is too late,” he said. He remembered Lizzie’s words. “I am a sick man—oh, not my body. It is my soul, my brain. I seem to have lost all values. I care for nothing. If you had been this way a few months ago, it would have been different. It is too late, now.”
    “It is not too late,” she cried. “I will show you. I will prove to you that my love has grown, that it is greater to me than my class and all that is dearest to me. All that is dearest to the bourgeoisie I will flout. I am no longer afraid of life. I will leave my father and mother, and let my name become a by-word with my friends. I will come to you here and now, in free love if you will, and I will be proud and glad to be with you. If I have been a traitor to love, I will now, for love’s sake, be a traitor to all that made that earlier treason.”
    She stood before him, with shining eyes.
    “I am waiting, Martin,” she whispered, “waiting for you to accept me. Look at me.”
    It was splendid, he thought, looking at her. She had redeemed herself for all that she had lacked, rising up at last, true woman, superior to the iron rule of bourgeois convention. It was splendid, magnificent, desperate. And yet, what was the matter with him? He was not thrilled nor stirred by what she had done. It was splendid and magnificent only intellectually. In what should have been a moment of fire, he coldly appraised her. His heart was untouched. He was unaware of any desire for her. Again he remembered Lizzie’s words.
    “I am sick, very sick,” he said with a despairing gesture. “How sick I did not know till now. Something has gone out of me. I have always been unafraid of life, but I never dreamed of being sated with life. Life has so filled me that I am empty of any desire for anything. If there were room, I should want you, now. You see how sick I am.”
    He leaned his head back and closed his eyes; and like a child, crying, that forgets its grief in watching the sunlight percolate through the tear-dimmed films over the pupils, so Martin forgot his sickness, the presence of Ruth, everything, in watching the masses of vegetation, shot through hotly with sunshine that took form and blazed against this background of his eyelids. It was not restful, that green foliage. The sunlight was too raw and glaring. It hurt him to look at it, and yet he looked, he knew not why.
    He was brought back to himself by the rattle of the door-knob. Ruth was at the door.
    “How shall I get out?” she questioned tearfully. “I am afraid.”
    “Oh, forgive me,” he cried, springing to his feet. “I’m not myself, you know. I forgot you were here.” He put his hand to his head. “You see, I’m not just right. I’ll take you home. We can go out by the servants’ entrance. No one will see us. Pull down that veil and everything will be all right.”
    She clung to his arm through the dim-lighted passages and down the narrow stairs.
    “I am safe now,” she said, when they emerged on the sidewalk, at the same time