licate and sweet, like a strain of music heard far off and
faint, or, better, like a bell of silver, a perfect tone, crystal-pure.
No mere woman had a voice like that. There was something celestial about
it, and it came from other worlds. He could scarcely hear what it said,
so ravished was he, though he controlled his face, for he knew that Mr.
Higginbotham's ferret eyes were fixed upon him.

It was not much that Ruth wanted to say--merely that Norman had been
going to take her to a lecture that night, but that he had a headache,
and she was so disappointed, and she had the tickets, and that if he had
no other engagement, would he be good enough to take her?

Would he! He fought to suppress the eagerness in his voice. It was
amazing. He had always seen her in her own house. And he had never
dared to ask her to go anywhere with him. Quite irrelevantly, still at
the telephone and talking with her, he felt an overpowering desire to die
for her, and visions of heroic sacrifice shaped and dissolved in his
whirling brain. He loved her so much, so terribly, so hopelessly. In
that moment of mad happiness that she should go out with him, go to a
lecture with him--with him, Martin Eden--she soared so far above him that
there seemed nothing else for him to do than die for her. It was the
only fit way in which he could express the tremendous and lofty emotion
he felt for her. It was the sublime abnegation of true love that comes
to all lovers, and it came to him there, at the telephone, in a whirlwind
of fire and glory; and to die for her, he felt, was to have lived and
loved well. And he was only twenty-one, and he had never been in love
before.

His hand trembled as he hung up the receiver, and he was weak from the
organ which had stirred him. His eyes were shining like an angel's, and
his face was transfigured, purged of all earthly dross, and pure and
holy.

"Makin' dates outside, eh?" his brother-in-law sneered. "You know what
that means. You'll be in the police court yet."

But Martin could not come down from the height. Not even the bestiality
of the allusion could bring him back to earth. Anger and hurt were
beneath him. He had seen a great vision and was as a god, and he could
feel only profound and awful pity for this maggot of a man. He did not
look at him, and though his eyes passed over him, he did not see him; and
as in a dream he passed out of the room to dress. It was not until he
had reach