Chapter XXVI: Section 8: The key to all the future was the book; but alas, the book

was not coming on. How could one write amid such excitement? This was a new kind of wine in Thyrsis’ blood. This was reality! And before it his dream-phantoms seemed to have dissolved into nothingness.

They would make a compact for so many days, and he would start to work; but he would find himself thinking of Corydon, and new problems would arise, and he would take to writing her notes--and finally realize in despair that he might as well go and see her.

Meantime Corydon would be wrestling with tasks of her own. They had talked over her development, and agreed that what she needed was discipline. And because Thyrsis had read her some of Goethe’s lyrics, she had decided to begin with German. Thyrsis had wasted a great deal of time with German courses in college, and so he was able to tell her everything not to do. He got her a little primer of grammar, just enough to make clear the language-structure; and then he set her to acquiring a vocabulary. He had little books full of words that he had prepared for himself, and these she drilled into her brain, all day and nearly all night. She stopped for nothing but to eat--in the woods when the weather was fair and in her room when it rained, she studied words, words, words! And she made amazing progress--while Thyrsis was wrestling with his angels she read Grimm’s fairy tales, and some of Heyse’s “Novellen,” and “Hermann and Dorothea,” and “Wilhelm Tell.”

But these were children’s tasks, and her pilgrimage was one of despair. Above were the heights where Thyrsis dwelt, inaccessible, almost invisible; and how many years must she toil to reach them! She would come to him with tears in her eyes--tears of shame for her ignorance and her stupidity. And then Thyrsis would kiss the tears away, and tell her how many brilliant and clever women he had met, who had the souls of dolls behind all their display of culture.

So Corydon would escape that unhappiness--but alas, only to fall into another kind. For she was a maiden, beautiful and tender, and ineffably precious to Thyrsis; and when they met, their hands would come together--it was as natural for them to embrace as for the flowers to grow. And this would lead to moods of weakness and satisfaction--not to that divine discontent, that rage of impatience which Thyrsis craved. It seemed to him that Corydon grew more and more in love with him, and more willing to cling to him; and he was savage because of his own complaisance. They would spend hours, exchanging endearments and whispering youthful absurdities; and then, the next day, he would write a note of protest, and Corydon would be wild with misery, and would tear up his love-notes, and vow in tears that he should never touch her hand again. Now and then he would try to suggest to her that what she needed for the fulfillment of her life was not a madman like himself, but a husband who would love her and cherish her, as other women were loved and cherished; and there was nothing in all the world that galled her quite so much as this.