“Well, you tell ‘m to-morrow, that’s all,” he said.  “An’ I just want to tell you, before I forget it, that you’d better send for Marian to-morrow to take care of the children.  With Tom quit, I’ll have to be out on the wagon, an’ you can make up your mind to it to be down below waitin’ on the counter.”

“But to-morrow’s wash day,” she objected weakly.

“Get up early, then, an’ do it first.  I won’t start out till ten o’clock.”

He crinkled the paper viciously and resumed his reading.

CHAPTER IV

Martin Eden, with blood still crawling from contact with his brother-in-law, felt his way along the unlighted back hall and entered his room, a tiny cubbyhole with space for a bed, a wash-stand, and one chair.  Mr. Higginbotham was too thrifty to keep a servant when his wife could do the work.  Besides, the servant’s room enabled them to take in two boarders instead of one.  Martin placed the Swinburne and Browning on the chair, took off his coat, and sat down on the bed.  A screeching of asthmatic springs greeted the weight of his body, but he did not notice them.  He started to take off his shoes, but fell to staring at the white plaster wall opposite him, broken by long streaks of dirty brown where rain had leaked through the roof.  On this befouled background visions began to flow and burn.  He forgot his shoes and stared long, till his lips began to move and he murmured, “Ruth.”

“Ruth.”  He had not thought a simple sound could be so beautiful.  It delighted his ear, and he grew intoxicated with the repetition of it.  “Ruth.”  It was a talisman, a magic word to conjure with.  Each time he murmured it, her face shimmered before him, suffusing the foul wall with a golden radiance.  This radiance did not stop at the wall.  It extended on into infinity, and through its golden depths his soul went questing after hers.  The best that was in him was out in splendid flood.  The very thought of her ennobled and purified him, made him better, and made him want to be better.  This was new to him.  He had never known women who had made him better.  They had always had the counter effect of making him beastly.  He did not know that many of them had done their best, bad as it was.  Never having been conscious of himself, he did not know that he had that in his being that drew love from women and which had been the cause of their reaching out for his youth.  Though they had often bothered him, he had never bothered about them; and he would never have dreamed that there were women who had been better because of him.  Always in sublime carelessness had he lived, till now, and now it seemed to him that they had always reached out and dragged at him with vile hands.  This was not just to them, nor to himself.  But he, who for the first time was becoming conscious of himself, was in no condition to judge, and he burned with shame as he stared at the vision of his infamy.