th, and truth, and high spiritual endowment--

He caught a stray sequence of sentences she was uttering.

"The tone of it all is low. And there is so much that is high. Take 'In
Memoriam.'"

He was impelled to suggest "Locksley Hall," and would have done so, had
not his vision gripped him again and left him staring at her, the female
of his kind, who, out of the primordial ferment, creeping and crawling up
the vast ladder of life for a thousand thousand centuries, had emerged on
the topmost rung, having become one Ruth, pure, and fair, and divine, and
with power to make him know love, and to aspire toward purity, and to
desire to taste divinity--him, Martin Eden, who, too, had come up in some
amazing fashion from out of the ruck and the mire and the countless
mistakes and abortions of unending creation. There was the romance, and
the wonder, and the glory. There was the stuff to write, if he could
only find speech. Saints in heaven!--They were only saints and could not
help themselves. But he was a man.

"You have strength," he could hear her saying, "but it is untutored
strength."

"Like a bull in a china shop," he suggested, and won a smile.

"And you must develop discrimination. You must consult taste, and
fineness, and tone."

"I dare too much," he muttered.

She smiled approbation, and settled herself to listen to another story.

"I don't know what you'll make of this," he said apologetically. "It's a
funny thing. I'm afraid I got beyond my depth in it, but my intentions
were good. Don't bother about the little features of it. Just see if
you catch the feel of the big thing in it. It is big, and it is true,
though the chance is large that I have failed to make it intelligible."

He read, and as he read he watched her. At last he had reached her, he
thought. She sat without movement, her eyes steadfast upon him, scarcely
breathing, caught up and out of herself, he thought, by the witchery of
the thing he had created. He had entitled the story "Adventure," and it
was the apotheosis of adventure--not of the adventure of the storybooks,
but of real adventure, the savage taskmaster, awful of punishment and
awful of reward, faithless and whimsical, demanding terrible patience and
heartbreaking days and nights of toil, offering the blazing sunlight
glory or dark death at the end of thirst and famine or of the long drag
and monstrous delirium of rotting fever, through blood and sweat and
stinging