he
grew anxious. To her it seemed that his foolishness was becoming a
madness. Martin knew this and suffered more keenly from it than from the
open and nagging contempt of Bernard Higginbotham. Martin had faith in
himself, but he was alone in this faith. Not even Ruth had faith. She
had wanted him to devote himself to study, and, though she had not openly
disapproved of his writing, she had never approved.

He had never offered to show her his work. A fastidious delicacy had
prevented him. Besides, she had been studying heavily at the university,
and he felt averse to robbing her of her time. But when she had taken
her degree, she asked him herself to let her see something of what he had
been doing. Martin was elated and diffident. Here was a judge. She was
a bachelor of arts. She had studied literature under skilled
instructors. Perhaps the editors were capable judges, too. But she
would be different from them. She would not hand him a stereotyped
rejection slip, nor would she inform him that lack of preference for his
work did not necessarily imply lack of merit in his work. She would
talk, a warm human being, in her quick, bright way, and, most important
of all, she would catch glimpses of the real Martin Eden. In his work
she would discern what his heart and soul were like, and she would come
to understand something, a little something, of the stuff of his dreams
and the strength of his power.

Martin gathered together a number of carbon copies of his short stories,
hesitated a moment, then added his "Sea Lyrics." They mounted their
wheels on a late June afternoon and rode for the hills. It was the
second time he had been out with her alone, and as they rode along
through the balmy warmth, just chilled by she sea-breeze to refreshing
coolness, he was profoundly impressed by the fact that it was a very
beautiful and well-ordered world and that it was good to be alive and to
love. They left their wheels by the roadside and climbed to the brown
top of an open knoll where the sunburnt grass breathed a harvest breath
of dry sweetness and content.

"Its work is done," Martin said, as they seated themselves, she upon his
coat, and he sprawling close to the warm earth. He sniffed the sweetness
of the tawny grass, which entered his brain and set his thoughts whirling
on from the particular to the universal. "It has achieved its reason for
existence," he went on, patting the dry grass affectionately.