And in his heart of hearts Martin understood the situation only too well, as he leaned back and gloated at Von Schmidt’s head, in fancy punching it well-nigh off of him, sending blow after blow home just right—­the chuckle-headed Dutchman!  One thing he did like about him, however.  Poor as he was, and determined to rise as he was, he nevertheless hired one servant to take the heavy work off of Marian’s hands.  Martin talked with the superintendent of the Asa agencies, and after dinner he drew him aside with Hermann, whom he backed financially for the best bicycle store with fittings in Oakland.  He went further, and in a private talk with Hermann 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.