Chapter CLXIV: 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.

He came home now to find Corydon flushed with excitement. “She has such a beautiful soul!” she exclaimed. “I never met anyone like her. And we just took to each other; she told me all about herself, and we are going to be friends.”

“Who is she?” asked Thyrsis.

“She’s visiting Mr. Harding, the clergyman at Bellevue,” was the answer.

Bellevue was a town in the valley, on the other side from the university; it had a Presbyterian church, whose young pastor Thyrsis had met once or twice in his tramps about the country. This Miss Gordon, it seemed, was the niece of an elderly relative, his housekeeper; she was studying trained nursing, and afterwards intended to go out as a missionary to Africa.

“She’s so anxious to meet you,” Corydon went on. “She’s coming up to see me to-morrow, and she’s going to bring Mr. Harding. You won’t mind, will you, Thyrsis?”

“I guess I can stand it if he can,” said Thyrsis, grimly.

“You mustn’t say anything to hurt their feelings,” said Corydon, quickly. “She’s terribly orthodox, you know; and she takes it so seriously. I was surprised--I had never thought that I could stand anybody like that.”

Thyrsis merely grunted.

“I guess ideas don’t matter so much after all,” said Corydon. “It’s a deep nature that I care about. But just fancy--she was pained because the baby hadn’t been baptized!”

“You ought to have hid the dreadful truth,” said he.

“I couldn’t hide things from her,” laughed Corydon, “But she says I can make a Socialist out of her, and she’ll make a Christian out of me!”

His reply was, “Wait until she discovers the sensuous temperament!”

But Corydon answered that Delia Gordon had a sensuous temperament also. “She seemed to me like a Joan of Arc. Just think of her going away from all her family, to a station on the Congo River! She told me all about it--how wretched the people are, and what the women suffer. She woke up in the middle of the night, and a voice told her to go--told her the name of the place. And she’d never heard it before, and hadn’t had the least idea of going away!”

Thyrsis was unmoved by this miracle. “I suppose,” he said, “you’ll be hearing voices yourself, and going with her. Tell me, is she pretty?”

“You wouldn’t call her pretty,” said Corydon, after a little thought. “She’s just--just dear. Oh, Thyrsis, I simply fell in love with her!”

“You certainly chose an odd kind of an affinity,” he said. “A Presbyterian missionary!”

“It’s worse than that,” confessed Corydon. “She’s a Seventh-day Adventist.”

“Good God! And what may that be?”

“Why, she keeps Saturday instead of Sunday. She calls it the Sabbath. And she thinks that ‘evolution’ is wicked, and she believes in some kind of a hell! She’s not just sure what kind, apparently.”

“You watch out,” said he, “or the first thing you know she’ll be baptizing the baby behind your back.”

“Would that do any good?” asked Corydon, guilelessly.

He laughed as he answered, “It would, from her point of view.”

To which she replied, “Well, if we didn’t know it and the baby didn’t, I guess it wouldn’t do any harm.”

“And it might save him from some kind of a hell!” added Thyrsis.