“That’s pretty clear,” he said. “I never thought of it before. I never thought of it before, and I’ll never say it again.”
She was pleased and surprised with the quickness and surety of his mind.
“You’ll find it all in the grammar,” she went on. “There’s something else I noticed in your speech.”
Martin flushed again.
“You say ‘ben’ for ‘been,’” she continued; “‘come’ for ‘came’; and the way you chop your endings is something dreadful.”
“How do you mean?” He leaned forward. “How do I chop?”
“You don’t complete the endings. ‘A-n-d’ spells ‘and.’ You pronounce it ‘an’. ‘I-n-g’ spells ‘ing.’ Sometimes you pronounce it ‘ing’ and sometimes you leave off the ‘g.’ ‘T-h-e-m’ spells ‘them.’ You pronounce it – oh, well, what you need is the grammar. I’ll get one and show you how to begin.”
She arose, and he stood up awkwardly, worrying as to whether he was doing the right thing.
When she returned with the grammar, she sat down beside him. She turned the pages of the grammar, and their heads were inclined toward each other. He could scarcely breathe, and his heart was pounding the blood up into his throat and suffocating him.
Several weeks went by, during which Martin Eden studied his grammar, and reviewed the books on etiquette. He forgot about his friends. The girls of the Lotus Club wondered what had become of him and worried everybody with questions. Martin made another discovery in the library. He found books that helped him to learn metre and construction and form.
During those several weeks he saw Ruth six times, and each time was an inspiration. She helped him with his English, corrected his pronunciation, and started him on arithmetic. But their intercourse was not all devoted to elementary study. They were talking about the last poetry he had read, the latest poet she had studied. And when she read aloud to him her favorite passages, he delighted a lot. Never, in all the women, had he heard a voice like hers. The least sound of it was a stimulus to his love, and he thrilled and throbbed with every word she uttered.
The situation was obscured to Ruth. She had never had any experiences of the heart. Her knowledge of love was purely theoretical, her idea of love was not clear. She did not dream of the volcanic convulsions of love. She knew neither her own powers, nor the powers of the world; and the deeps of life were to her seas of illusion.