her's going to leave me."

Onley got up to go, but turned at the door and delivered a parting shot.

"You leave Martin alone, Ruth. He knows what's best for himself. Look
at what he's done already. He makes me sick sometimes, sick and ashamed
of myself. He knows more now about the world, and life, and man's place,
and all the rest, than Arthur, or Norman, or I, or you, too, for that
matter, and in spite of all our Latin, and French, and Saxon, and
culture."

"But Ruth is my teacher," Martin answered chivalrously. "She is
responsible for what little I have learned."

"Rats!" Olney looked at Ruth, and his expression was malicious. "I
suppose you'll be telling me next that you read Spencer on her
recommendation--only you didn't. And she doesn't know anything more
about Darwin and evolution than I do about King Solomon's mines. What's
that jawbreaker definition about something or other, of Spencer's, that
you sprang on us the other day--that indefinite, incoherent homogeneity
thing? Spring it on her, and see if she understands a word of it. That
isn't culture, you see. Well, tra la, and if you tackle Latin, Martin, I
won't have any respect for you."

And all the while, interested in the discussion, Martin had been aware of
an irk in it as well. It was about studies and lessons, dealing with the
rudiments of knowledge, and the schoolboyish tone of it conflicted with
the big things that were stirring in him--with the grip upon life that
was even then crooking his fingers like eagle's talons, with the cosmic
thrills that made him ache, and with the inchoate consciousness of
mastery of it all. He likened himself to a poet, wrecked on the shores
of a strange land, filled with power of beauty, stumbling and stammering
and vainly trying to sing in the rough, barbaric tongue of his brethren
in the new land. And so with him. He was alive, painfully alive, to the
great universal things, and yet he was compelled to potter and grope
among schoolboy topics and debate whether or not he should study Latin.

"What in hell has Latin to do with it?" he demanded before his mirror
that night. "I wish dead people would stay dead. Why should I and the
beauty in me be ruled by the dead? Beauty is alive and everlasting.
Languages come and go. They are the dust of the dead."

And his next thought was that he had been phrasing his ideas very well,
and he went to bed wondering why he could not talk in similar fashion
when h