Chapter CLXXXVI: Section 7: From visions such as this Thyrsis came back to wrestle with

all the problems of a household; with pumps that froze and drains that clogged, with stoves that went out and ashes that spilled, with milk-boys that were late and kitchen-maids that were snow-bound. He would leave his work at one or two o’clock in the morning, and make his way through the snow and the storm to the house, and crawl into bed, and then take his chances of being awakened by the baby, or by some spell of agony with Corydon.

He might not sleep alone; that supreme symbol of domesticity Corydon could not give up, and he soon ceased to ask for it. It seemed such a little thing to yield; and yet it meant so much to him! The room where he slept came to seem to him a chamber of terror, a place to which he went “like the galley-slave at night, scourged to his dungeon”. It was a place where a crime was enacted; where the vital forces of his being were squandered, and the body and soul of him were wrung and squeezed dry like a sponge. This was marriage--it was the essence of marriage; it was the slavery into which he had delivered himself, the duty to which he was bound. And in how many millions of homes was this same thing going on--this licensed preying of one personality upon another? And the nightmare thing was upheld and buttressed by all the forces of society--priests were saying blessings over it and moralists were singing the praises of it--“the holy bonds of matrimony”, it was called!

It was all the worse to Thyrsis because there was that in him which welcomed this animal intimacy. So he saw that day by day their lives were slipping to a lower plane; day by day they were discovering new weaknesses and developing new vices in themselves. Corydon was now a good part of the time in pain of some sort; and the doctors had accustomed her to stave off these crises with various kinds of drugs, so that she had a set of shelves crowded with pills and powders and bottles. She had learned to rely upon them in emergencies, to plead for them when she was helpless; and so Thyrsis saw her declining into an inferno. He would argue with her and plead with her and fight with her; he would spend days trying to open her eyes to the peril, to show her that it was better to suffer pain than to resort to these treacherous aids.