“But I have not finished my story,” she said.  “He worked, so father says, as no other office boy he ever had.  Mr. Butler was always eager to work.  He never was late, and he was usually at the office a few minutes before his regular time.  And yet he saved his time.  Every spare moment was devoted to study.  He studied book-keeping and type-writing, and he paid for lessons in shorthand by dictating at night to a court reporter who needed practice.  He quickly became a clerk, and he made himself invaluable.  Father appreciated him and saw that he was bound to rise.  It was on father’s suggestion that he went to law college.  He became a lawyer, and hardly was he back in the office when father took him in as junior partner.  He is a great man.  He refused the United States Senate several times, and father says he could become a justice of the Supreme Court any time a vacancy occurs, if he wants to.  Such a life is an inspiration to all of us.  It shows us that a man with will may rise superior to his environment.”

“He is a great man,” Martin said sincerely.

But it seemed to him there was something in the recital that jarred upon his sense of beauty and life.  He could not find an adequate motive in Mr. Butler’s life of pinching and privation.  Had he done it for love of a woman, or for attainment of beauty, Martin would have understood.  God’s own mad lover should do anything for the kiss, but not for thirty thousand dollars a year.  He was dissatisfied with Mr. Butler’s career.  There was something paltry about it, after all.  Thirty thousand a year was all right, but dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such princely income of all its value.

Much of this he strove to express to Ruth, and shocked her and made it clear that more remodelling was necessary.  Hers was that common insularity of mind that makes human creatures believe that their color, creed, and politics are best and right and that other human creatures scattered over the world are less fortunately placed than they.  It was the same insularity of mind that made the ancient Jew thank God he was not born a woman, and sent the modern missionary god-substituting to the ends of the earth; and it made Ruth desire to shape this man from other crannies of life into the likeness of the men who lived in her particular cranny of life.

CHAPTER IX

Back from sea Martin Eden came, homing for California with a lover’s desire.  His store of money exhausted, he had shipped before the mast on the treasure-hunting schooner; and the Solomon Islands, after eight months of failure to find treasure, had witnessed the breaking up of the expedition.  The men had been paid off in Australia, and Martin had immediately shipped on a deep-water vessel for San Francisco.  Not alone had those eight months earned him enough money to stay on land for many weeks, but they had enabled him to do a great deal of studying and reading.