“Our little girl has become a woman,” Mrs. Morse said proudly to her husband an hour later.

“That means,” he said, after a long look at his wife, “that means she is in love.”

“No, but that she is loved,” was the smiling rejoinder.  “The experiment has succeeded.  She is awakened at last.”

“Then we’ll have to get rid of him.”  Mr. Morse spoke briskly, in matter-of-fact, businesslike tones.

But his wife shook her head.  “It will not be necessary.  Ruth says he is going to sea in a few days.  When he comes back, she will not be here.  We will send her to Aunt Clara’s.  And, besides, a year in the East, with the change in climate, people, ideas, and everything, is just the thing she needs.”

CHAPTER XX

The desire to write was stirring in Martin once more.  Stories and poems were springing into spontaneous creation in his brain, and he made notes of them against the future time when he would give them expression.  But he did not write.  This was his little vacation; he had resolved to devote it to rest and love, and in both matters he prospered.  He was soon spilling over with vitality, and each day he saw Ruth, at the moment of meeting, she experienced the old shock of his strength and health.

“Be careful,” her mother warned her once again.  “I am afraid you are seeing too much of Martin Eden.”

But Ruth laughed from security.  She was sure of herself, and in a few days he would be off to sea.  Then, by the time he returned, she would be away on her visit East.  There was a magic, however, in the strength and health of Martin.  He, too, had been told of her contemplated Eastern trip, and he felt the need for haste.  Yet he did not know how to make love to a girl like Ruth.  Then, too, he was handicapped by the possession of a great fund of experience with girls and women who had been absolutely different from her.  They had known about love and life and flirtation, while she knew nothing about such things.  Her prodigious innocence appalled him, freezing on his lips all ardors of speech, and convincing him, in spite of himself, of his own unworthiness.  Also he was handicapped in another way.  He had himself never been in love before.  He had liked women in that turgid past of his, and been fascinated by some of them, but he had not known what it was to love them.  He had whistled in a masterful, careless way, and they had come to him.  They had been diversions, incidents, part of the game men play, but a small part at most.  And now, and for the first time, he was a suppliant, tender and timid and doubting.  He did not know the way of love, nor its speech, while he was frightened at his loved one’s clear innocence.

In the course of getting acquainted with a varied world, whirling on through the ever changing phases of it, he had learned a rule of conduct which was to the effect that when one played a strange game, he should let the other fellow play first.  This had stood him in good stead a thousand times and trained him as an observer as well.  He knew how to watch the thing that was strange, and to wait for a weakness, for a place of entrance, to divulge itself.  It was like sparring for an opening in fist-fighting.  And when such an opening came, he knew by long experience to play for it and to play hard.