But still the incident had brought him nearer.  The memory of it persisted, and in the moments when he was most cast down, he dwelt upon it eagerly.  The gulf was never again so wide.  He had accomplished a distance vastly greater than a bachelorship of arts, or a dozen bachelorships.  She was pure, it was true, as he had never dreamed of purity; but cherries stained her lips.  She was subject to the laws of the universe just as inexorably as he was.  She had to eat to live, and when she got her feet wet, she caught cold.  But that was not the point.  If she could feel hunger and thirst, and heat and cold, then could she feel love—­and love for a man.  Well, he was a man.  And why could he not be the man?  “It’s up to me to make good,” he would murmur fervently.  “I will be the man.  I will make myself the man.  I will make good.”

CHAPTER XII

Early one evening, struggling with a sonnet that twisted all awry the beauty and thought that trailed in glow and vapor through his brain, Martin was called to the telephone.

“It’s a lady’s voice, a fine lady’s,” Mr. Higginbotham, who had called him, jeered.

Martin went to the telephone in the corner of the room, and felt a wave of warmth rush through him as he heard Ruth’s voice.  In his battle with the sonnet he had forgotten her existence, and at the sound of her voice his love for her smote him like a sudden blow.  And such a voice!—­delicate and sweet, like a strain of music heard far off and faint, or, better, like a bell of silver, a perfect tone, crystal-pure.  No mere woman had a voice like that.  There was something celestial about it, and it came from other worlds.  He could scarcely hear what it said, so ravished was he, though he controlled his face, for he knew that Mr. Higginbotham’s ferret eyes were fixed upon him.

It was not much that Ruth wanted to say—­merely that Norman had been going to take her to a lecture that night, but that he had a headache, and she was so disappointed, and she had the tickets, and that if he had no other engagement, would he be good enough to take her?

Would he!  He fought to suppress the eagerness in his voice.  It was amazing.  He had always seen her in her own house.  And he had never dared to ask her to go anywhere with him.  Quite irrelevantly, still at the telephone and talking with her, he felt an overpowering desire to die for her, and visions of heroic sacrifice shaped and dissolved in his whirling brain.  He loved her so much, so terribly, so hopelessly.  In that moment of mad happiness that she should go out with him, go to a lecture with him—­with him, Martin Eden—­she soared so far above him that there seemed nothing else for him to do than die for her.  It was the only fit way in which he could express the tremendous and lofty emotion he felt for her.  It was the sublime abnegation of true love that comes to all lovers, and it came to him there, at the telephone, in a whirlwind of fire and glory; and to die for her, he felt, was to have lived and loved well.  And he was only twenty-one, and he had never been in love before.