d 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 h