“You forget how I talked when you first met me.  I have learned a new language since then.  Before that time I talked as that girl talks.  Now I can manage to make myself understood sufficiently in your language to explain that you do not know that other girl’s language.  And do you know why she carries herself the way she does?  I think about such things now, though I never used to think about them, and I am beginning to understand—­much.”

“But why does she?”

“She has worked long hours for years at machines.  When one’s body is young, it is very pliable, and hard work will mould it like putty according to the nature of the work.  I can tell at a glance the trades of many workingmen I meet on the street.  Look at me.  Why am I rolling all about the shop?  Because of the years I put in on the sea.  If I’d put in the same years cow-punching, with my body young and pliable, I wouldn’t be rolling now, but I’d be bow-legged.  And so with that girl.  You noticed that her eyes were what I might call hard.  She has never been sheltered.  She has had to take care of herself, and a young girl can’t take care of herself and keep her eyes soft and gentle like—­like yours, for example.”

“I think you are right,” Ruth said in a low voice.  “And it is too bad.  She is such a pretty girl.”

He looked at her and saw her eyes luminous with pity.  And then he remembered that he loved her and was lost in amazement at his fortune that permitted him to love her and to take her on his arm to a lecture.

Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking-glass, that night when he got back to his room.  He gazed at himself long and curiously.  Who are you?  What are you?  Where do you belong?  You belong by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly.  You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and vulgar, and unbeautiful.  You belong with the oxen and the drudges, in dirty surroundings among smells and stenches.  There are the stale vegetables now.  Those potatoes are rotting.  Smell them, damn you, smell them.  And yet you dare to open the books, to listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful paintings, to speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your own kind thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie Connollys and to love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million miles beyond you and who lives in the stars!  Who are you? and what are you? damn you!  And are you going to make good?

He shook his fist at himself in the glass, and sat down on the edge of the bed to dream for a space with wide eyes.  Then he got out note-book and algebra and lost himself in quadratic equations, while the hours slipped by, and the stars dimmed, and the gray of dawn flooded against his window.

CHAPTER XIII