hree, greater than learning and artistry, was love. Already he had
discovered that his brain went beyond Ruth's, just as it went beyond the
brains of her brothers, or the brain of her father. In spite of every
advantage of university training, and in the face of her bachelorship of
arts, his power of intellect overshadowed hers, and his year or so of
self-study and equipment gave him a mastery of the affairs of the world
and art and life that she could never hope to possess.

All this he realized, but it did not affect his love for her, nor her
love for him. Love was too fine and noble, and he was too loyal a lover
for him to besmirch love with criticism. What did love have to do with
Ruth's divergent views on art, right conduct, the French Revolution, or
equal suffrage? They were mental processes, but love was beyond reason;
it was superrational. He could not belittle love. He worshipped it.
Love lay on the mountain-tops beyond the valley-land of reason. It was a
sublimates condition of existence, the topmost peak of living, and it
came rarely. Thanks to the school of scientific philosophers he favored,
he knew the biological significance of love; but by a refined process of
the same scientific reasoning he reached the conclusion that the human
organism achieved its highest purpose in love, that love must not be
questioned, but must be accepted as the highest guerdon of life. Thus,
he considered the lover blessed over all creatures, and it was a delight
to him to think of "God's own mad lover," rising above the things of
earth, above wealth and judgment, public opinion and applause, rising
above life itself and "dying on a kiss."

Much of this Martin had already reasoned out, and some of it he reasoned
out later. In the meantime he worked, taking no recreation except when
he went to see Ruth, and living like a Spartan. He paid two dollars and
a half a month rent for the small room he got from his Portuguese
landlady, Maria Silva, a virago and a widow, hard working and harsher
tempered, rearing her large brood of children somehow, and drowning her
sorrow and fatigue at irregular intervals in a gallon of the thin, sour
wine that she bought from the corner grocery and saloon for fifteen
cents. From detesting her and her foul tongue at first, Martin grew to
admire her as he observed the brave fight she made. There were but four
rooms in the little house--three, when Martin's was subtracted. One of
these, the