and it reduced his stock of money amazingly; but when he added the hundred dollars he was to receive from the Examiner to the four hundred and twenty dollars that was the least The Youth’s Companion could pay him, he felt that he had reduced the perplexity the unwonted amount of money had caused him.  Nor did he mind, in the course of learning to ride the wheel home, the fact that he ruined his suit of clothes.  He caught the tailor by telephone that night from Mr. Higginbotham’s store and ordered another suit.  Then he carried the wheel up the narrow stairway that clung like a fire-escape to the rear wall of the building, and when he had moved his bed out from the wall, found there was just space enough in the small room for himself and the wheel.

Sunday he had intended to devote to studying for the high school examination, but the pearl-diving article lured him away, and he spent the day in the white-hot fever of re-creating the beauty and romance that burned in him.  The fact that the Examiner of that morning had failed to publish his treasure-hunting article did not dash his spirits.  He was at too great a height for that, and having been deaf to a twice-repeated summons, he went without the heavy Sunday dinner with which Mr. Higginbotham invariably graced his table.  To Mr. Higginbotham such a dinner was advertisement of his worldly achievement and prosperity, and he honored it by delivering platitudinous sermonettes upon American institutions and the opportunity said institutions gave to any hard-working man to rise—­the rise, in his case, which he pointed out unfailingly, being from a grocer’s clerk to the ownership of Higginbotham’s Cash Store.

Martin Eden looked with a sigh at his unfinished “Pearl-diving” on Monday morning, and took the car down to Oakland to the high school.  And when, days later, he applied for the results of his examinations, he learned that he had failed in everything save grammar.

“Your grammar is excellent,” Professor Hilton informed him, staring at him through heavy spectacles; “but you know nothing, positively nothing, in the other branches, and your United States history is abominable—­there is no other word for it, abominable.  I should advise you—­”

Professor Hilton paused and glared at him, unsympathetic and unimaginative as one of his own test-tubes.  He was professor of physics in the high school, possessor of a large family, a meagre salary, and a select fund of parrot-learned knowledge.

“Yes, sir,” Martin said humbly, wishing somehow that the man at the desk in the library was in Professor Hilton’s place just then.

“And I should advise you to go back to the grammar school for at least two years.  Good day.”

Martin was not deeply affected by his failure, though he was surprised at Ruth’s shocked expression when he told her Professor Hilton’s advice.  Her disappointment was so evident that he was sorry he had failed, but chiefly so for her sake.