, and was fascinated by the glimpse he was catching into the tie-ribs
of language. He leaned closer to the page, and her hair touched his cheek. He
had fainted but once in his life, and he thought he was going to faint again. He
could scarcely breathe, and his heart was pounding the blood up into his throat
and suffocating him. Never had she seemed so accessible as now. For the moment
the great gulf that separated them was bridged. But there was no diminution in
the loftiness of his feeling for her. She had not descended to him. It was he
who had been caught up into the clouds and carried to her. His reverence for
her, in that moment, was of the same order as religious awe and fervor. It
seemed to him that he had intruded upon the holy of holies, and slowly and
carefully he moved his head aside from the contact which thrilled him like an
electric shock and of which she had not been aware.
 

                                  Chapter VIII

Several weeks went by, during which Martin Eden studied his grammar, reviewed
the books on etiquette, and read voraciously the books that caught his fancy. Of
his own class he saw nothing. The girls of the Lotus Club wondered what had
become of him and worried Jim with questions, and some of the fellows who put on
the glove at Riley's were glad that Martin came no more. He made another
discovery of treasure-trove in the library. As the grammar had shown him the
tie-ribs of language, so that book showed him the tie-ribs of poetry, and he
began to learn metre and construction and form, beneath the beauty he loved
finding the why and wherefore of that beauty. Another modern book he found
treated poetry as a representative art, treated it exhaustively, with copious
illustrations from the best in literature. Never had he read fiction with so
keen zest as he studied these books. And his fresh mind, untaxed for twenty
years and impelled by maturity of desire, gripped hold of what he read with a
virility unusual to the student mind.
    When he looked back now from his vantage-ground, the old world he had known,
the world of land and sea and ships, of sailor-men and harpy-women, seemed a
very small world; and yet it blended in with this new world and expanded. His
mind made for unity, and he was surprised when at first he began to see points
of contact between the two worlds. And he was ennobled, as well, by the
loftiness of thought and beauty he found in