"I--I--beg your pardon," he stammered. "I was thinking."

"It sounded as if you were praying," she said bravely, but she felt
herself inside to be withering and shrinking. It was the first time she
had heard an oath from the lips of a man she knew, and she was shocked,
not merely as a matter of principle and training, but shocked in spirit
by this rough blast of life in the garden of her sheltered maidenhood.

But she forgave, and with surprise at the ease of her forgiveness.
Somehow it was not so difficult to forgive him anything. He had not had
a chance to be as other men, and he was trying so hard, and succeeding,
too. It never entered her head that there could be any other reason for
her being kindly disposed toward him. She was tenderly disposed toward
him, but she did not know it. She had no way of knowing it. The placid
poise of twenty-four years without a single love affair did not fit her
with a keen perception of her own feelings, and she who had never warmed
to actual love was unaware that she was warming now.

CHAPTER XI

Martin went back to his pearl-diving article, which would have been
finished sooner if it had not been broken in upon so frequently by his
attempts to write poetry. His poems were love poems, inspired by Ruth,
but they were never completed. Not in a day could he learn to chant in
noble verse. Rhyme and metre and structure were serious enough in
themselves, but there was, over and beyond them, an intangible and
evasive something that he caught in all great poetry, but which he could
not catch and imprison in his own. It was the elusive spirit of poetry
itself that he sensed and sought after but could not capture. It seemed
a glow to him, a warm and trailing vapor, ever beyond his reaching,
though sometimes he was rewarded by catching at shreds of it and weaving
them into phrases that echoed in his brain with haunting notes or drifted
across his vision in misty wafture of unseen beauty. It was baffling. He
ached with desire to express and could but gibber prosaically as
everybody gibbered. He read his fragments aloud. The metre marched
along on perfect feet, and the rhyme pounded a longer and equally
faultless rhythm, but the glow and high exaltation that he felt within
were lacking. He could not understand, and time and again, in despair,
defeated and depressed, he returned to his article. Prose was certainly
an easier medium.

Following the "Pearl-diving,"