The situation was obscured to Ruth.  She had never had any experiences of the heart.  Her only experiences in such matters were of the books, where the facts of ordinary day were translated by fancy into a fairy realm of unreality; and she little knew that this rough sailor was creeping into her heart and storing there pent forces that would some day burst forth and surge through her in waves of fire.  She did not know the actual fire of love.  Her knowledge of love was purely theoretical, and she conceived of it as lambent flame, gentle as the fall of dew or the ripple of quiet water, and cool as the velvet-dark of summer nights.  Her idea of love was more that of placid affection, serving the loved one softly in an atmosphere, flower-scented and dim-lighted, of ethereal calm.  She did not dream of the volcanic convulsions of love, its scorching heat and sterile wastes of parched ashes.  She knew neither her own potencies, nor the potencies of the world; and the deeps of life were to her seas of illusion.  The conjugal affection of her father and mother constituted her ideal of love-affinity, and she looked forward some day to emerging, without shock or friction, into that same quiet sweetness of existence with a loved one.

So it was that she looked upon Martin Eden as a novelty, a strange individual, and she identified with novelty and strangeness the effects he produced upon her.  It was only natural.  In similar ways she had experienced unusual feelings when she looked at wild animals in the menagerie, or when she witnessed a storm of wind, or shuddered at the bright-ribbed lightning.  There was something cosmic in such things, and there was something cosmic in him.  He came to her breathing of large airs and great spaces.  The blaze of tropic suns was in his face, and in his swelling, resilient muscles was the primordial vigor of life.  He was marred and scarred by that mysterious world of rough men and rougher deeds, the outposts of which began beyond her horizon.  He was untamed, wild, and in secret ways her vanity was touched by the fact that he came so mildly to her hand.  Likewise she was stirred by the common impulse to tame the wild thing.  It was an unconscious impulse, and farthest from her thoughts that her desire was to re-thumb the clay of him into a likeness of her father’s image, which image she believed to be the finest in the world.  Nor was there any way, out of her inexperience, for her to know that the cosmic feel she caught of him was that most cosmic of things, love, which with equal power drew men and women together across the world, compelled stags to kill each other in the rutting season, and drove even the elements irresistibly to unite.