th said pensively.

He felt like assuring her that mothers' hearts were not so easily broken,
but instead he said, "And love is the greatest thing in the world."

"Do you know, Martin, you sometimes frighten me. I am frightened now,
when I think of you and of what you have been. You must be very, very
good to me. Remember, after all, that I am only a child. I never loved
before."

"Nor I. We are both children together. And we are fortunate above most,
for we have found our first love in each other."

"But that is impossible!" she cried, withdrawing herself from his arms
with a swift, passionate movement. "Impossible for you. You have been a
sailor, and sailors, I have heard, are--are--"

Her voice faltered and died away.

"Are addicted to having a wife in every port?" he suggested. "Is that
what you mean?"

"Yes," she answered in a low voice.

"But that is not love." He spoke authoritatively. "I have been in many
ports, but I never knew a passing touch of love until I saw you that
first night. Do you know, when I said good night and went away, I was
almost arrested."

"Arrested?"

"Yes. The policeman thought I was drunk; and I was, too--with love for
you."

"But you said we were children, and I said it was impossible, for you,
and we have strayed away from the point."

"I said that I never loved anybody but you," he replied. "You are my
first, my very first."

"And yet you have been a sailor," she objected.

"But that doesn't prevent me from loving you the first."

"And there have been women--other women--oh!"

And to Martin Eden's supreme surprise, she burst into a storm of tears
that took more kisses than one and many caresses to drive away. And all
the while there was running through his head Kipling's line: "_And the
Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under their skins_." It was
true, he decided; though the novels he had read had led him to believe
otherwise. His idea, for which the novels were responsible, had been
that only formal proposals obtained in the upper classes. It was all
right enough, down whence he had come, for youths and maidens to win each
other by contact; but for the exalted personages up above on the heights
to make love in similar fashion had seemed unthinkable. Yet the novels
were wrong. Here was a proof of it. The same pressures and caresses,
unaccompanied by speech, that were efficacious with the girls of the
working-class, were equally effic