And all the while, interested in the discussion, Martin had been aware of an irk in it as well.  It was about studies and lessons, dealing with the rudiments of knowledge, and the schoolboyish tone of it conflicted with the big things that were stirring in him—­with the grip upon life that was even then crooking his fingers like eagle’s talons, with the cosmic thrills that made him ache, and with the inchoate consciousness of mastery of it all.  He likened himself to a poet, wrecked on the shores of a strange land, filled with power of beauty, stumbling and stammering and vainly trying to sing in the rough, barbaric tongue of his brethren in the new land.  And so with him.  He was alive, painfully alive, to the great universal things, and yet he was compelled to potter and grope among schoolboy topics and debate whether or not he should study Latin.

“What in hell has Latin to do with it?” he demanded before his mirror that night.  “I wish dead people would stay dead.  Why should I and the beauty in me be ruled by the dead?  Beauty is alive and everlasting.  Languages come and go.  They are the dust of the dead.”

And his next thought was that he had been phrasing his ideas very well, and he went to bed wondering why he could not talk in similar fashion when he was with Ruth.  He was only a schoolboy, with a schoolboy’s tongue, when he was in her presence.

“Give me time,” he said aloud.  “Only give me time.”

Time!  Time!  Time! was his unending plaint.

CHAPTER XIV

It was not because of Olney, but in spite of Ruth, and his love for Ruth, that he finally decided not to take up Latin.  His money meant time.  There was so much that was more important than Latin, so many studies that clamored with imperious voices.  And he must write.  He must earn money.  He had had no acceptances.  Twoscore of manuscripts were travelling the endless round of the magazines.  How did the others do it?  He spent long hours in the free reading-room, going over what others had written, studying their work eagerly and critically, comparing it with his own, and wondering, wondering, about the secret trick they had discovered which enabled them to sell their work.

He was amazed at the immense amount of printed stuff that was dead.  No light, no life, no color, was shot through it.  There was no breath of life in it, and yet it sold, at two cents a word, twenty dollars a thousand—­the newspaper clipping had said so.  He was puzzled by countless short stories, written lightly and cleverly he confessed, but without vitality or reality.  Life was so strange and wonderful, filled with an immensity of problems, of dreams, and of heroic toils, and yet these stories dealt only with the commonplaces of life.  He felt the stress and strain of life, its fevers and sweats and wild insurgences—­surely this was the stuff to write about!  He wanted