in splendor and glory, came the great idea.  He would write.  He would be one of the eyes through which the world saw, one of the ears through which it heard, one of the hearts through which it felt.  He would write—­everything—­poetry and prose, fiction and description, and plays like Shakespeare.  There was career and the way to win to Ruth.  The men of literature were the world’s giants, and he conceived them to be far finer than the Mr. Butlers who earned thirty thousand a year and could be Supreme Court justices if they wanted to.

Once the idea had germinated, it mastered him, and the return voyage to San Francisco was like a dream.  He was drunken with unguessed power and felt that he could do anything.  In the midst of the great and lonely sea he gained perspective.  Clearly, and for the first lime, he saw Ruth and her world.  It was all visualized in his mind as a concrete thing which he could take up in his two hands and turn around and about and examine.  There was much that was dim and nebulous in that world, but he saw it as a whole and not in detail, and he saw, also, the way to master it.  To write!  The thought was fire in him.  He would begin as soon as he got back.  The first thing he would do would be to describe the voyage of the treasure-hunters.  He would sell it to some San Francisco newspaper.  He would not tell Ruth anything about it, and she would be surprised and pleased when she saw his name in print.  While he wrote, he could go on studying.  There were twenty-four hours in each day.  He was invincible.  He knew how to work, and the citadels would go down before him.  He would not have to go to sea again—­as a sailor; and for the instant he caught a vision of a steam yacht.  There were other writers who possessed steam yachts.  Of course, he cautioned himself, it would be slow succeeding at first, and for a time he would be content to earn enough money by his writing to enable him to go on studying.  And then, after some time,—­a very indeterminate time,—­when he had learned and prepared himself, he would write the great things and his name would be on all men’s lips.  But greater than that, infinitely greater and greatest of all, he would have proved himself worthy of Ruth.  Fame was all very well, but it was for Ruth that his splendid dream arose.  He was not a fame-monger, but merely one of God’s mad lovers.

Arrived in Oakland, with his snug pay-day in his pocket, he took up his old room at Bernard Higginbotham’s and set to work.  He did not even let Ruth know he was back.  He would go and see her when he finished the article on the treasure-hunters.  It was not so difficult to abstain from seeing her, because of the violent heat of creative fever that burned in him.  Besides, the very article he was writing would bring her nearer to him.  He did not know how long an article he should write, but he counted the words in a double-page article in the Sunday supplement of the San Francisco Examiner, and