As Martin Eden went down the steps, his hand dropped into his coat pocket.  It came out with a brown rice paper and a pinch of Mexican tobacco, which were deftly rolled together into a cigarette.  He drew the first whiff of smoke deep into his lungs and expelled it in a long and lingering exhalation.  “By God!” he said aloud, in a voice of awe and wonder.  “By God!” he repeated.  And yet again he murmured, “By God!” Then his hand went to his collar, which he ripped out of the shirt and stuffed into his pocket.  A cold drizzle was falling, but he bared his head to it and unbuttoned his vest, swinging along in splendid unconcern.  He was only dimly aware that it was raining.  He was in an ecstasy, dreaming dreams and reconstructing the scenes just past.

He had met the woman at last—­the woman that he had thought little about, not being given to thinking about women, but whom he had expected, in a remote way, he would sometime meet.  He had sat next to her at table.  He had felt her hand in his, he had looked into her eyes and caught a vision of a beautiful spirit;—­but no more beautiful than the eyes through which it shone, nor than the flesh that gave it expression and form.  He did not think of her flesh as flesh,—­which was new to him; for of the women he had known that was the only way he thought.  Her flesh was somehow different.  He did not conceive of her body as a body, subject to the ills and frailties of bodies.  Her body was more than the garb of her spirit.  It was an emanation of her spirit, a pure and gracious crystallization of her divine essence.  This feeling of the divine startled him.  It shocked him from his dreams to sober thought.  No word, no clew, no hint, of the divine had ever reached him before.  He had never believed in the divine.  He had always been irreligious, scoffing good-naturedly at the sky-pilots and their immortality of the soul.  There was no life beyond, he had contended; it was here and now, then darkness everlasting.  But what he had seen in her eyes was soul—­immortal soul that could never die.  No man he had known, nor any woman, had given him the message of immortality.  But she had.  She had whispered it to him the first moment she looked at him.  Her face shimmered before his eyes as he walked along,—­pale and serious, sweet and sensitive, smiling with pity and tenderness as only a spirit could smile, and pure as he had never dreamed purity could be.  Her purity smote him like a blow.  It startled him.  He had known good and bad; but purity, as an attribute of existence, had never entered his mind.  And now, in her, he conceived purity to be the superlative of goodness and of cleanness, the sum of which constituted eternal life.