nd turn around and about and examine.
There was much that was dim and nebulous in that world, but he saw it as
a whole and not in detail, and he saw, also, the way to master it. To
write! The thought was fire in him. He would begin as soon as he got
back. The first thing he would do would be to describe the voyage of the
treasure-hunters. He would sell it to some San Francisco newspaper. He
would not tell Ruth anything about it, and she would be surprised and
pleased when she saw his name in print. While he wrote, he could go on
studying. There were twenty-four hours in each day. He was invincible.
He knew how to work, and the citadels would go down before him. He would
not have to go to sea again--as a sailor; and for the instant he caught a
vision of a steam yacht. There were other writers who possessed steam
yachts. Of course, he cautioned himself, it would be slow succeeding at
first, and for a time he would be content to earn enough money by his
writing to enable him to go on studying. And then, after some time,--a
very indeterminate time,--when he had learned and prepared himself, he
would write the great things and his name would be on all men's lips. But
greater than that, infinitely greater and greatest of all, he would have
proved himself worthy of Ruth. Fame was all very well, but it was for
Ruth that his splendid dream arose. He was not a fame-monger, but merely
one of God's mad lovers.

Arrived in Oakland, with his snug pay-day in his pocket, he took up his
old room at Bernard Higginbotham's and set to work. He did not even let
Ruth know he was back. He would go and see her when he finished the
article on the treasure-hunters. It was not so difficult to abstain from
seeing her, because of the violent heat of creative fever that burned in
him. Besides, the very article he was writing would bring her nearer to
him. He did not know how long an article he should write, but he counted
the words in a double-page article in the Sunday supplement of the San
Francisco Examiner, and guided himself by that. Three days, at white
heat, completed his narrative; but when he had copied it carefully, in a
large scrawl that was easy to read, he learned from a rhetoric he picked
up in the library that there were such things as paragraphs and quotation
marks. He had never thought of such things before; and he promptly set
to work writing the article over, referring continually to the pages of
the rhetoric