His power beat against her, wave upon wave; and in the moment his will opposed hers most she felt herself most strongly drawn toward him.  The strength that had always poured out from him to her was now flowering in his impassioned voice, his flashing eyes, and the vigor of life and intellect surging in him.  And in that moment, and for the moment, she was aware of a rift that showed in her certitude—­a rift through which she caught sight of the real Martin Eden, splendid and invincible; and as animal-trainers have their moments of doubt, so she, for the instant, seemed to doubt her power to tame this wild spirit of a man.

“And another thing,” he swept on.  “You love me.  But why do you love me?  The thing in me that compels me to write is the very thing that draws your love.  You love me because I am somehow different from the men you have known and might have loved.  I was not made for the desk and counting-house, for petty business squabbling, and legal jangling.  Make me do such things, make me like those other men, doing the work they do, breathing the air they breathe, developing the point of view they have developed, and you have destroyed the difference, destroyed me, destroyed the thing you love.  My desire to write is the most vital thing in me.  Had I been a mere clod, neither would I have desired to write, nor would you have desired me for a husband.”

“But you forget,” she interrupted, the quick surface of her mind glimpsing a parallel.  “There have been eccentric inventors, starving their families while they sought such chimeras as perpetual motion.  Doubtless their wives loved them, and suffered with them and for them, not because of but in spite of their infatuation for perpetual motion.”

“True,” was the reply.  “But there have been inventors who were not eccentric and who starved while they sought to invent practical things; and sometimes, it is recorded, they succeeded.  Certainly I do not seek any impossibilities—­”

“You have called it ‘achieving the impossible,’” she interpolated.

“I spoke figuratively.  I seek to do what men have done before me—­to write and to live by my writing.”

Her silence spurred him on.

“To you, then, my goal is as much a chimera as perpetual motion?” he demanded.

He read her answer in the pressure of her hand on his—­the pitying mother-hand for the hurt child.  And to her, just then, he was the hurt child, the infatuated man striving to achieve the impossible.

Toward the close of their talk she warned him again of the antagonism of her father and mother.

“But you love me?” he asked.

“I do!  I do!” she cried.

“And I love you, not them, and nothing they do can hurt me.”  Triumph sounded in his voice.  “For I have faith in your love, not fear of their enmity.  All things may go astray in this world, but not love.  Love cannot go wrong unless it be a weakling that faints and stumbles by the way.”