he had been up-borne all day on the wings of inspiration.
"Bourgeois," "trader's den"--Brissenden's epithets repeated themselves in
his mind. But what of that? he demanded angrily. He was marrying Ruth,
not her family.

It seemed to him that he had never seen Ruth more beautiful, more
spiritual and ethereal and at the same time more healthy. There was
color in her cheeks, and her eyes drew him again and again--the eyes in
which he had first read immortality. He had forgotten immortality of
late, and the trend of his scientific reading had been away from it; but
here, in Ruth's eyes, he read an argument without words that transcended
all worded arguments. He saw that in her eyes before which all
discussion fled away, for he saw love there. And in his own eyes was
love; and love was unanswerable. Such was his passionate doctrine.

The half hour he had with her, before they went in to dinner, left him
supremely happy and supremely satisfied with life. Nevertheless, at
table, the inevitable reaction and exhaustion consequent upon the hard
day seized hold of him. He was aware that his eyes were tired and that
he was irritable. He remembered it was at this table, at which he now
sneered and was so often bored, that he had first eaten with civilized
beings in what he had imagined was an atmosphere of high culture and
refinement. He caught a glimpse of that pathetic figure of him, so long
ago, a self-conscious savage, sprouting sweat at every pore in an agony
of apprehension, puzzled by the bewildering minutiae of
eating-implements, tortured by the ogre of a servant, striving at a leap
to live at such dizzy social altitude, and deciding in the end to be
frankly himself, pretending no knowledge and no polish he did not
possess.

He glanced at Ruth for reassurance, much in the same manner that a
passenger, with sudden panic thought of possible shipwreck, will strive
to locate the life preservers. Well, that much had come out of it--love
and Ruth. All the rest had failed to stand the test of the books. But
Ruth and love had stood the test; for them he found a biological
sanction. Love was the most exalted expression of life. Nature had been
busy designing him, as she had been busy with all normal men, for the
purpose of loving. She had spent ten thousand centuries--ay, a hundred
thousand and a million centuries--upon the task, and he was the best she
could do. She had made love the strongest thing in him, incre