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In the course of that summer there befell Corydon an adventure; Thyrsis had gone off one day for a walk, and when he came back she told him about it how a young lady had stopped at the house to ask for a drink of water, and had sat upon the piazza to rest, and had talked with her. Now Corydon was in a state of excitement over a discovery.
Corydon could not speak, but she nodded; a moment later she sunk back with a gasp. "A kind of bearing-down pain?" said the nurse. "Different from the other?" Corydon gasped her assent again. "That is the birth," the nurse said. "The doctor will be here in a moment."
"Isn't he a little love!" Corydon repeated. Thyrsis stared at her. But then, quickly, he hid his thought. He even pretended to be interested. "Isn't he pretty?" she asked him. Now as a matter of fact he seemed to Thyrsis to be quite conspicuously ugly. He had red hair, and a flat nose, and was altogether lacking in aristocratic attributes.
Save for the story which this Doctor West of the Hotel Robinson might spin, I would have gone back to the Corydon and forgotten it. I wandered about a good bit, when a bell-hop showed me an unexpected way out, and there was Mister Sachs at the gangway, looking about for me. "'Why, where 'ave you been? he asked. 'I thought you'd gone.
The woman, who was a seamstress, was away a good deal in the day, and Corydon learned with delight that she might use the piano in the parlor. The rooms were the smallest they had ever seen, but they were clean, and the price was only fifty cents a day a dollar and a half a week for Thyrsis' and two dollars for Corydon's, because there was a steam-radiator in it.
But now he had read how Thoreau had lived upon corn-meal mush; and he and Corydon resolved to patronize the less expensive foods. The price of meat and eggs and butter in the winter-time was in truth appalling; so they would buy potatoes and rice and corn-meal and prunes and turnips.
I believe the three women laid their heads together previously; and, packet after packet, sent off their warnings to the Virginian lady. One raw April morning, as Corydon goes to pay his usual duty to Phillis, he finds, not his charmer with her dear smile as usual ready to welcome him, but Mrs. Lambert, with very red eyes, and the General as pale as death.
And then, on another occasion, Thyrsis endeavored to tell her about Berkeley, whom he had been reading. But Corydon did not take to the sensational philosophy either; she would come back again and again to the evasion of old Dr. Johnson "When I kick a stone, I know the stone is there!"
But to Corydon the internal arrangements of babies were mysterious things to be understood only by a child-specialist at five dollars per visit. "He told me what to do," she would say; "and I am going to do it."
But Corydon turned upon him swiftly. "No!" she cried. "Stop! It's no joke!" She was staring at him, her eyes wide with consternation and dismay. "Think!" she exclaimed. "He's given up his career!" "Yes," he said, "so it seems." "It's awful!" she cried. "Oh, how could he!" He saw the way the news affected her, and he made an effort to control himself. "The man simply couldn't face it," he said.
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