Chapter XXXIII: Section 3: But the world would not be content to leave it on that

basis. When they parted that afternoon, it was with a carefully-arranged program of work--they were to visit each other on alternate days and go on with their German and music. But in less than a week they had run upon an obstruction; there was no quiet room for them at Corydon’s save her bedroom, and one evening when Thyrsis came, she made the announcement that they could no longer study there.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Well,” explained Corydon, “they say the maid might think it wasn’t nice.”

She had expected him to fly into a rage, but he only smiled grimly. “I had come to tell you the same sort of thing,” he explained. “It seems you can’t visit me so often, and you’re never to stay after ten o’clock at night.”

“Why is that?” she inquired.

“It’s a question of what the hall-boy might think,” said he.

They sat gazing at each other in silence. “You see,” said Thyrsis, at last, “the thing is impossible--we’ve got to go and get married. The world will never give us any peace until we do.”

“Nobody has any idea of what we mean!” exclaimed Corydon.

“No idea whatever,” he said. “They’ve nothing in them in anyway to correspond with it. You talk to them about souls, and they haven’t any. You talk to them about love, and they think you mean obscenity. Everybody is thinking obscenity about us!”

“Everybody but our parents,” put in Corydon.

To which he answered, angrily, “They are thinking of what the others are thinking.”

But everybody seemed to have to think something, and that was the aspect of the matter that puzzled them most. Why did everybody find it necessary to be thinking about it at all? Why did everybody consider it his business? As Thyrsis phrased it--“Why the hell can’t they let us alone?”

“We’ve got to get married,” said she. “That’s the only way to get the best of them.”

“But is that really getting the best of them?” he objected. “Isn’t that their purpose--to make us get married?”

This was a pregnant question, but they did not follow it up just then. They went on to the practical problem of where and when and how to accomplish their purpose.

“We can go to a court,” said he.

“Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “We’d have to meet a lot of men, and I couldn’t stand it.”

“But surely you don’t want to go to a church!” he said.

“Couldn’t we get some clergyman to marry us quietly?”

“But then, there’s a lot of rigmarole!”

“But mightn’t he leave it out?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “They generally believe in it, you see.”

He decided to make an attempt, however.

“Let’s go to-morrow morning,” he said. “I’m going over to have the sound-post set in my violin, and that’ll take an hour or so. Perhaps we can finish it up in the meantime.”

“A good idea,” said Corydon. “It’ll give me to-night to tell mother and father.”