nd rasped her skin, and who was saying jerkily:-

"The greatest time of my life. You see, I ain't used to things. . . " He
looked about him helplessly. "To people and houses like this. It's all
new to me, and I like it."

"I hope you'll call again," she said, as he was saying good night to her
brothers.

He pulled on his cap, lurched desperately through the doorway, and was
gone.

"Well, what do you think of him?" Arthur demanded.

"He is most interesting, a whiff of ozone," she answered. "How old is
he?"

"Twenty--almost twenty-one. I asked him this afternoon. I didn't think
he was that young."

And I am three years older, was the thought in her mind as she kissed her
brothers goodnight.

CHAPTER III

As Martin Eden went down the steps, his hand dropped into his coat
pocket. It came out with a brown rice paper and a pinch of Mexican
tobacco, which were deftly rolled together into a cigarette. He drew the
first whiff of smoke deep into his lungs and expelled it in a long and
lingering exhalation. "By God!" he said aloud, in a voice of awe and
wonder. "By God!" he repeated. And yet again he murmured, "By God!"
Then his hand went to his collar, which he ripped out of the shirt and
stuffed into his pocket. A cold drizzle was falling, but he bared his
head to it and unbuttoned his vest, swinging along in splendid unconcern.
He was only dimly aware that it was raining. He was in an ecstasy,
dreaming dreams and reconstructing the scenes just past.

He had met the woman at last--the woman that he had thought little about,
not being given to thinking about women, but whom he had expected, in a
remote way, he would sometime meet. He had sat next to her at table. He
had felt her hand in his, he had looked into her eyes and caught a vision
of a beautiful spirit;--but no more beautiful than the eyes through which
it shone, nor than the flesh that gave it expression and form. He did
not think of her flesh as flesh,--which was new to him; for of the women
he had known that was the only way he thought. Her flesh was somehow
different. He did not conceive of her body as a body, subject to the
ills and frailties of bodies. Her body was more than the garb of her
spirit. It was an emanation of her spirit, a pure and gracious
crystallization of her divine essence. This feeling of the divine
startled him. It shocked him from his dreams to sober thought. No word,
no clew, no hint, of the divine ha