told him to keep his eyes open for an automobile agency and
garage, for there was no reason that he should not be able to run both
establishments successfully.

With tears in her eyes and her arms around his neck, Marian, at parting,
told Martin how much she loved him and always had loved him. It was
true, there was a perceptible halt midway in her assertion, which she
glossed over with more tears and kisses and incoherent stammerings, and
which Martin inferred to be her appeal for forgiveness for the time she
had lacked faith in him and insisted on his getting a job.

"He can't never keep his money, that's sure," Hermann von Schmidt
confided to his wife. "He got mad when I spoke of interest, an' he said
damn the principal and if I mentioned it again, he'd punch my Dutch head
off. That's what he said--my Dutch head. But he's all right, even if he
ain't no business man. He's given me my chance, an' he's all right."

Invitations to dinner poured in on Martin; and the more they poured, the
more he puzzled. He sat, the guest of honor, at an Arden Club banquet,
with men of note whom he had heard about and read about all his life; and
they told him how, when they had read "The Ring of Bells" in the
Transcontinental, and "The Peri and the Pearl" in The Hornet, they had
immediately picked him for a winner. My God! and I was hungry and in
rags, he thought to himself. Why didn't you give me a dinner then? Then
was the time. It was work performed. If you are feeding me now for work
performed, why did you not feed me then when I needed it? Not one word
in "The Ring of Bells," nor in "The Peri and the Pearl" has been changed.
No; you're not feeding me now for work performed. You are feeding me
because everybody else is feeding me and because it is an honor to feed
me. You are feeding me now because you are herd animals; because you are
part of the mob; because the one blind, automatic thought in the mob-mind
just now is to feed me. And where does Martin Eden and the work Martin
Eden performed come in in all this? he asked himself plaintively, then
arose to respond cleverly and wittily to a clever and witty toast.

So it went. Wherever he happened to be--at the Press Club, at the
Redwood Club, at pink teas and literary gatherings--always were
remembered "The Ring of Bells" and "The Peri and the Pearl" when they
were first published. And always was Martin's maddening and unuttered
demand: Why didn't you feed me then