Chapter XXXVII - Page 2

great stuff he was writing. "It will
go! It will go!" was the refrain that kept, sounding in his ears.
Of course it would go. At last he was turning out the thing at
which the magazines would jump. The whole story worked out before
him in lightning flashes. He broke off from it long enough to
write a paragraph in his note-book. This would be the last
paragraph in "Overdue"; but so thoroughly was the whole book
already composed in his brain that he could write, weeks before he
had arrived at the end, the end itself. He compared the tale, as
yet unwritten, with the tales of the sea-writers, and he felt it to
be immeasurably superior. "There's only one man who could touch
it," he murmured aloud, "and that's Conrad. And it ought to make
even him sit up and shake hands with me, and say, 'Well done,
Martin, my boy.'"

He toiled on all day, recollecting, at the last moment, that he was
to have dinner at the Morses'. Thanks to Brissenden, his black
suit was out of pawn and he was again eligible for dinner parties.
Down town he stopped off long enough to run into the library and
search for Saleeby's books. He drew out 'The Cycle of Life," and
on the car turned to the essay Norton had mentioned on Spencer. As
Martin read, he grew angry. His face flushed, his jaw set, and
unconsciously his hand clenched, unclenched, and clenched again as
if he were taking fresh grips upon some hateful thing out of which
he was squeezing the life. When he left the car, he strode along
the sidewalk as a wrathful man will stride, and he rang the Morse
bell with such viciousness that it roused him to consciousness of
his condition, so that he entered in good nature, smiling with
amusement at himself. No sooner, however, was he inside than a
great depression descended upon him. He fell from the height where
he had been up-borne all day on the wings of inspiration.
"Bourgeois," "trader's den" - Brissenden's epithets repeated
themselves in his mind. But what of that? he demanded angrily. He
was marrying Ruth, not her family.

It seemed to him that he had never seen Ruth more beautiful, more
spiritual and ethereal and at the same time more healthy. There
was color in her cheeks, and her eyes drew him again and again -
the eyes in which he had first read immortality. He had forgotten
immortality of late, and the trend of his scientific reading had
been away from it; but here, in Ruth's eyes, he read an argument
without words that transcended all worded arguments. He saw that
in her eyes before which all discussion fled away, for he saw love
there. And in his own eyes was love; and love was unanswerable.
Such was his passionate doctrine.

The half hour he had with her, before they went in to dinner, left
him