best and right and that other human creatures
scattered over the world are less fortunately placed than they. It was
the same insularity of mind that made the ancient Jew thank God he was
not born a woman, and sent the modern missionary god-substituting to the
ends of the earth; and it made Ruth desire to shape this man from other
crannies of life into the likeness of the men who lived in her particular
cranny of life.

CHAPTER IX

Back from sea Martin Eden came, homing for California with a lover's
desire. His store of money exhausted, he had shipped before the mast on
the treasure-hunting schooner; and the Solomon Islands, after eight
months of failure to find treasure, had witnessed the breaking up of the
expedition. The men had been paid off in Australia, and Martin had
immediately shipped on a deep-water vessel for San Francisco. Not alone
had those eight months earned him enough money to stay on land for many
weeks, but they had enabled him to do a great deal of studying and
reading.

His was the student's mind, and behind his ability to learn was the
indomitability of his nature and his love for Ruth. The grammar he had
taken along he went through again and again until his unjaded brain had
mastered it. He noticed the bad grammar used by his shipmates, and made
a point of mentally correcting and reconstructing their crudities of
speech. To his great joy he discovered that his ear was becoming
sensitive and that he was developing grammatical nerves. A double
negative jarred him like a discord, and often, from lack of practice, it
was from his own lips that the jar came. His tongue refused to learn new
tricks in a day.

After he had been through the grammar repeatedly, he took up the
dictionary and added twenty words a day to his vocabulary. He found that
this was no light task, and at wheel or lookout he steadily went over and
over his lengthening list of pronunciations and definitions, while he
invariably memorized himself to sleep. "Never did anything," "if I
were," and "those things," were phrases, with many variations, that he
repeated under his breath in order to accustom his tongue to the language
spoken by Ruth. "And" and "ing," with the "d" and "g" pronounced
emphatically, he went over thousands of times; and to his surprise he
noticed that he was beginning to speak cleaner and more correct English
than the officers themselves and the gentleman-adventurers in the cabin
who had fina