explained it.  He had never tried.  But Swinburne had, and Tennyson, and Kipling, and all the other poets.  His mind flashed on to his “Pearl-diving.”  He had never dared the big things, the spirit of the beauty that was a fire in him.  That article would be a different thing when he was done with it.  He was appalled by the vastness of the beauty that rightfully belonged in it, and again his mind flashed and dared, and he demanded of himself why he could not chant that beauty in noble verse as the great poets did.  And there was all the mysterious delight and spiritual wonder of his love for Ruth.  Why could he not chant that, too, as the poets did?  They had sung of love.  So would he.  By God!—­

And in his frightened ears he heard his exclamation echoing.  Carried away, he had breathed it aloud.  The blood surged into his face, wave upon wave, mastering the bronze of it till the blush of shame flaunted itself from collar-rim to the roots of his hair.

“I—­I—­beg your pardon,” he stammered.  “I was thinking.”

“It sounded as if you were praying,” she said bravely, but she felt herself inside to be withering and shrinking.  It was the first time she had heard an oath from the lips of a man she knew, and she was shocked, not merely as a matter of principle and training, but shocked in spirit by this rough blast of life in the garden of her sheltered maidenhood.

But she forgave, and with surprise at the ease of her forgiveness.  Somehow it was not so difficult to forgive him anything.  He had not had a chance to be as other men, and he was trying so hard, and succeeding, too.  It never entered her head that there could be any other reason for her being kindly disposed toward him.  She was tenderly disposed toward him, but she did not know it.  She had no way of knowing it.  The placid poise of twenty-four years without a single love affair did not fit her with a keen perception of her own feelings, and she who had never warmed to actual love was unaware that she was warming now.

CHAPTER XI

Martin went back to his pearl-diving article, which would have been finished sooner if it had not been broken in upon so frequently by his attempts to write poetry.  His poems were love poems, inspired by Ruth, but they were never completed.  Not in a day could he learn to chant in noble verse.  Rhyme and metre and structure were serious enough in themselves, but there was, over and beyond them, an intangible and evasive something that he caught in all great poetry, but which he could not catch and imprison in his own.  It was the elusive spirit of poetry itself that he sensed and sought after but could not capture.  It seemed a glow to him, a warm and trailing vapor, ever beyond his reaching, though sometimes he was rewarded by catching at shreds of it and weaving them into phrases that echoed in his brain with haunting notes or drifted across his