The Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under their skins
Martin Eden“The Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under their skins” is a saying Martin Eden recalls when Ruth Morse’s tears and jealousy unsettle his ideas about class. Its force in the scene is both intimate and social: Martin takes Ruth’s visible feelings as proof that people from different classes share fundamental human needs, and that the class boundary separating them is not an essential difference.
The Saying in the Scene
Ruth has just heard Martin acknowledge that other women have been in his life. He tells her that this does not stop him from loving her first; she bursts into tears, and he comforts her with kisses and caresses. As he holds her, the line comes to mind: “And the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under their skins.” Her distress surprises him, and her jealousy makes the saying feel newly evident rather than merely literary.
Martin’s Reading of Class
The thought overturns Martin’s expectations about upper-class romance. The novels he has read have led him to suppose that people of Ruth’s standing require formal proposals, unlike the working-class couples he knows, who may be drawn together through physical contact. Ruth’s response suggests to him that unspoken tenderness and bodily affection cross that social divide. He recalls Herbert Spencer as a source of the broader insight that people are fundamentally alike beneath their outward distinctions.
What the Expression Makes Possible
Martin applies the saying directly to his hope of marrying Ruth. He regards class as an external difference that can be overcome, and imagines that Ruth’s culture and idealized purity do not cancel her ordinary human capacity to love, hate, or feel jealousy. He compares her, in this respect, with Lizzie Connolly, concluding that feelings possible in one are possible in the other. The expression thus brings Ruth closer to him: it converts her tears from a sign of distance into evidence of shared human nature. Her sudden reminder that she is three years older than he is immediately returns the scene to a concrete difference between them, even as Martin has found in the saying a reason to believe their class difference need not prevent marriage.
