that day forth. Not so very long afterwards they
came upon Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler”;
and Thyrsis shuddered to observe that of all the heroines
in the world’s literature, that was the one which
most appealed to her. Nor did he fail to observe
the working of the thing in himself; the subtle and
deeply-buried instinct which made him prefer to be
wretched with a “leisure-class wife” rather
than to be contented with a plebeian one!
THE PRICE OF RANSOM
The faint grey of dawn was stealing across the
lake; and still the spell was upon them.
“There thou art gone, and
me thou leavest here
Sole in these fields! yet will I not despair.”
So she whispered; and he answered her—
“He loved his mates; but yet
he could not keep,
Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep.
Some life of men unblest
He knew, which made him droop, and filled his
head.
He went; his piping took a troubled sound
Of storms that rage outside our happy ground._”
Section 1. 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.
Whenever Thyrsis met a stranger, it was necessary
for him to go through elaborate intellectual processes,
to find the person out by an exchange of ideas.
And if by any chance the person was insincere, and
used ideas as a blind and a cover, then Thyrsis might
never find him out at all. In other words, he
took people at the face-value of their cultural equipment;
and only after long and tragic blunderings could he
by any chance get deeper. But with his wife it
happened quite otherwise; this case was the first
which he witnessed, but the same thing happened many
times afterwards. With her there would be a strange
flash of recognition; it was a sort of intuition, perhaps
a psychic thing—who could tell? By
some unknown process in soul-chemistry, she would
divine things about a person that he might have been
a life-time in finding out.
It might be a burst of passionate interest, or on
the other hand, of repugnance and fear. And long
years of practice taught Thyrsis that this instinct
of hers was never to be disregarded. Not once
in all her life did he know her to give her affection
to a base person; and if ever he disregarded her antipathies,
he did it to his cost. Once they were sitting
in a restaurant, and a man was brought up to be introduced
by a friend; he was a person of not unpleasant aspect,
courteous and apparently a gentleman, and yet Corydon
flushed, and could scarcely keep her seat at the table,
and would not give the man her hand. Years after
Thyrsis came upon the discovery about this man, that
he made a practice of unnatural vices.
