He slept that night, and did his writing next morning, and then the book tempted him and he fell, reading all afternoon, oblivious to everything and oblivious to the fact that that was the afternoon Ruth gave to him.

His first consciousness of the immediate world about him was when Bernard Higginbotham jerked open the door and demanded to know if he thought they were running a restaurant.
Martin Eden had been mastered by curiosity all his days.

He wanted to know, and it was this desire that had sent him adventuring over the world.

But he was now learning from Spencer that he never had known, and that he never could have known had he continued his sailing and wandering forever.

He had merely skimmed over the surface of things, observing detached phenomena, accumulating fragments of facts, making superficial little generalizations--and all and everything quite unrelated in a capricious and disorderly world of whim and chance.