Chapter XX: Section 2: This song was as far as Thyrsis had written, and he paused

Corydon was sitting with her hands clasped, and a look of enthrallment upon her face. “Oh, beautiful! beautiful!” she cried.

A thrill of pleasure went through the poet. “You like it, then?” he said.

“Oh, I like it!” she answered. And then she gazed at him, with wide-open eyes of amazement. “But you! You!” she exclaimed.

“Why not I?” he asked.

“How in the world did you do it? Where did you get it from?”

“It is mine,” said Thyrsis, quickly.

“But I can’t imagine it! I had no idea you were interested in such things!”

“But how could you know what I am interested in?”

“I see how you live--apart from everybody. And you spend all your time in books!”

Thyrsis suddenly recollected something which had amused him very much. Corydon had been reading “Middlemarch,” and had told him that Dr. Casaubon reminded her of him. “And so I’m still just a bookworm to you!” he laughed.

“But isn’t your interest in things always intellectual?” she asked.

“Then you suppose I’m doing this just as an exercise in technique?” he countered.

“It’s taken me quite by surprise,” said Corydon.

“We have three faculties in us,” Thyrsis propounded--“intellect, feeling, and will; and to be a complete human being, we have to develop all of them.”

“But you spend so much time piling up learning!”

“I need to know a great many things,” he said. “I’m not conscious of studying anything I don’t need for my purpose.”

“What is the purpose?” she asked.

He touched the precious manuscript. “This,” he said.

There was a pause.

“But you lose so much when you cut yourself off from the world,” said Corydon. “And there are other people, whom you might help.”

“People don’t need my help; or at least, they don’t want it.”

“But how can you know that--if you never go among them?”

“I can judge by the lives they live.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Corydon, quickly, “but people aren’t to blame for the lives they live!”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because--they can’t help them. They are bound fast.”

“They should break loose.”

“That is easy for you to say,” said Corydon. “You have no ties.”

“I did have them--I might have them still. But I broke them.”

“Ah, but you are a man!”

“What difference does that make?”

“It makes all the difference in the world. You can earn money, you can go away by yourself. But suppose you were a girl--shut up in a home, and told that that was your ‘sphere’?”

“I’d fight,” said Thyrsis--“I’d break my way out somehow, never fear. If one doesn’t break out, it simply means that his desire is not strong enough.”

Thyrsis had been surprised at the depth of Corydon’s interest in his manuscript; he had not supposed that she would be so susceptible to anything of the imagination. And now he was surprised to see that her hands were clenched tightly, and that she sat staring ahead of her intently.

“Are you dissatisfied with your life?” he asked.

“Is there anything in it that I could be satisfied with?” she cried.

“I had no idea of that,” he said.

“No,” she replied; “that only shows how stupid you can be!”

“But--you never showed any signs--”

“Didn’t you know that I was trying to prepare for college last year?”

“Yes; but you gave it up.”

“What could I do? I had no help--no encouragement. I was groping like a blind person. And I told you about it.”

“But I told you what to study,” objected Thyrsis.

“Yes,” said the girl; “but how could I do it? You know how to study--you’ve been taught. But I don’t know anything, and I don’t know how to find anything out. I began on the Latin, but I didn’t even know how the words should be pronounced.”

“Nobody else knows that,” observed Thyrsis, somewhat inconsequently.

“It was all so dull and dreary,” she went on--“everything they would have had me learn. I wanted things that had life in them, things that were beautiful and worth while--like this book of yours, for instance.”

“I am really delighted that you like it,” said Thyrsis, touched by that.

“Tell me the rest of it,” she said.