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So he noticed that his feelings always waned before Corydon's. She wished him to linger love meant so much to her! Then too, the code of passion was all unknown to him. What was right and what was wrong? When should one yield to desire, and when should one restrain it?
Corydon's excitement over these questions was all the greater because she was just then making the discovery of the relationship of Socialism to the problems of her own sex. Some one sent her a copy of Charlotte Gilman's "Women and Economics"; she read it at a sitting, and brought it to Thyrsis, who thus came to understand the scientific basis of yet another article of his faith.
He would come over sometimes, late in the afternoon, and lay his head in Corydon's lap, almost sobbing from weariness; and yet, after he had eaten a little and helped her with the hardest of her tasks, he would go away again, and work half through the night.
Corydon's soul was making a monstrous effort to return to its habitation; Corydon felt herself hanging, a tortured speck of being, in a dark and illimitable void. "This may be Hell," she thought. "I have neither hands nor feet, and I cannot fight; but I can will to get back!" This effort cost her inexpressible agony.
But now it has happened; and I have worked over the problem with all the faculties I possess. A man who was worthy of Corydon's love would be very apt, under the circumstances, to feel that he must crush his impulses towards her.
In the boarding-house with Corydon lived some elderly ladies, who had a remarkable faculty for divining the evil deeds of other people. They had divined the evil deeds of Corydon and Thyrsis, and one of them was moved to come to Corydon's mother one day, and warn her lest others should divine them too.
Such was their mood that she could not feel sure whether he was laughing or crying. Now, indeed, they were facing the reality of life. All the problems with which they had ever wrestled were as child's play to this problem; they could sit and read the deadly terror in each other's eyes. Corydon's lip was trembling, and her face was white and drawn and old.
And so they underwent the humiliation of telling their landlady, and they obtained permission to keep Corydon's trunk in the hall, as there was no place for it in the tiny room. Such things as would not go upon the little dressing-stand, or hang behind the door, they put into boxes and shoved under the bed.
And meanwhile his wife had set herself to the task of probing the innermost corners of Corydon's soul. The burden of Channing's discourse was Thyrsis' impatience and lack of balance, his fanaticism and his too great opinion of his own work. "My dear fellow, he said, "you are the most friendless human being I have ever encountered upon earth.
It was afternoon of the next day before the man finally came, and brought some relief to Thyrsis' soul, and perhaps also to Corydon's body. He took her temperature and listened to her breathing, and pronounced it a severe attack of grippe, with a touch of bronchitis; and he laid out an assortment of capsules and liquids, and promised to come again if Thyrsis sent for him.
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