And promptly urged his ambition to grasp at eternal life.  He was not fit to carry water for her—­he knew that; it was a miracle of luck and a fantastic stroke that had enabled him to see her and be with her and talk with her that night.  It was accidental.  There was no merit in it.  He did not deserve such fortune.  His mood was essentially religious.  He was humble and meek, filled with self-disparagement and abasement.  In such frame of mind sinners come to the penitent form.  He was convicted of sin.  But as the meek and lowly at the penitent form catch splendid glimpses of their future lordly existence, so did he catch similar glimpses of the state he would gain to by possessing her.  But this possession of her was dim and nebulous and totally different from possession as he had known it.  Ambition soared on mad wings, and he saw himself climbing the heights with her, sharing thoughts with her, pleasuring in beautiful and noble things with her.  It was a soul-possession he dreamed, refined beyond any grossness, a free comradeship of spirit that he could not put into definite thought.  He did not think it.  For that matter, he did not think at all.  Sensation usurped reason, and he was quivering and palpitant with emotions he had never known, drifting deliciously on a sea of sensibility where feeling itself was exalted and spiritualized and carried beyond the summits of life.

He staggered along like a drunken man, murmuring fervently aloud:  “By God!  By God!”

A policeman on a street corner eyed him suspiciously, then noted his sailor roll.

“Where did you get it?” the policeman demanded.

Martin Eden came back to earth.  His was a fluid organism, swiftly adjustable, capable of flowing into and filling all sorts of nooks and crannies.  With the policeman’s hail he was immediately his ordinary self, grasping the situation clearly.

“It’s a beaut, ain’t it?” he laughed back.  “I didn’t know I was talkin’ out loud.”

“You’ll be singing next,” was the policeman’s diagnosis.

“No, I won’t.  Gimme a match an’ I’ll catch the next car home.”

He lighted his cigarette, said good night, and went on.  “Now wouldn’t that rattle you?” he ejaculated under his breath.  “That copper thought I was drunk.”  He smiled to himself and meditated.  “I guess I was,” he added; “but I didn’t think a woman’s face’d do it.”

He caught a Telegraph Avenue car that was going to Berkeley.  It was crowded with youths and young men who were singing songs and ever and again barking out college yells.  He studied them curiously.  They were university boys.  They went to the same university that she did, were in her class socially, could know her, could see her every day if they wanted to.  He wondered that they did not want to, that they had been out having a good time instead of being with her that evening, talking with her, sitting around her in a worshipful and adoring circle.  His thoughts