Her voice faltered and died away.

“Are addicted to having a wife in every port?” he suggested.  “Is that what you mean?”

“Yes,” she answered in a low voice.

“But that is not love.”  He spoke authoritatively.  “I have been in many ports, but I never knew a passing touch of love until I saw you that first night.  Do you know, when I said good night and went away, I was almost arrested.”

“Arrested?”

“Yes.  The policeman thought I was drunk; and I was, too—­with love for you.”

“But you said we were children, and I said it was impossible, for you, and we have strayed away from the point.”

“I said that I never loved anybody but you,” he replied.  “You are my first, my very first.”

“And yet you have been a sailor,” she objected.

“But that doesn’t prevent me from loving you the first.”

“And there have been women—­other women—­oh!”

And to Martin Eden’s supreme surprise, she burst into a storm of tears that took more kisses than one and many caresses to drive away.  And all the while there was running through his head Kipling’s line:  “And the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under their skins.”  It was true, he decided; though the novels he had read had led him to believe otherwise.  His idea, for which the novels were responsible, had been that only formal proposals obtained in the upper classes.  It was all right enough, down whence he had come, for youths and maidens to win each other by contact; but for the exalted personages up above on the heights to make love in similar fashion had seemed unthinkable.  Yet the novels were wrong.  Here was a proof of it.  The same pressures and caresses, unaccompanied by speech, that were efficacious with the girls of the working-class, were equally efficacious with the girls above the working-class.  They were all of the same flesh, after all, sisters under their skins; and he might have known as much himself had he remembered his Spencer.  As he held Ruth in his arms and soothed her, he took great consolation in the thought that the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady were pretty much alike under their skins.  It brought Ruth closer to him, made her possible.  Her dear flesh was as anybody’s flesh, as his flesh.  There was no bar to their marriage.  Class difference was the only difference, and class was extrinsic.  It could be shaken off.  A slave, he had read, had risen to the Roman purple.  That being so, then he could rise to Ruth.  Under her purity, and saintliness, and culture, and ethereal beauty of soul, she was, in things fundamentally human, just like Lizzie Connolly and all Lizzie Connollys.  All that was possible of them was possible of her.  She could love, and hate, maybe have hysterics; and she could certainly be jealous, as she was jealous now, uttering her last sobs in his arms.

“Besides, I am older than you,” she remarked suddenly, opening her eyes and looking up at him, “three years older.”