It had been like an explosion; the barriers had been destroyed between them, and he saw her as she really was. And he could hardly believe it--all through the adventures that followed he would find himself standing in the same kind of daze, whispering to himself--“Corydon! Little Corydon!”
He did not try to do any work that evening. He thought about her, and the problem of her life. She had stirred him strangely; he saw her beautiful with a new kind of beauty. He resolved that he would put her upon the way to some of the joy she sought.
She came early the next morning, and they sat by the lake-shore and talked. They talked about the things she needed to study, and how she should study them; about the books she had read and the books she was to read next. And from this they went on to a hundred questions of literature and philosophy and life. They became eager and excited; their thoughts took wings, and they lost all sense of time and place. There were so many things to be discussed!
Corydon, in spite of all her anti-clericalism, believed in immortality; she laid claim to intuitions and illuminations concerning it. And to Thyrsis, on the other hand, the idea of immortality was the consummation of all unfaith. To him life was a bubble upon the stream of time, a shadow of clouds upon the mountains; there was nothing about it that could be or should be immortal.
“The act of faith,” he cried, “is to give ourselves into the arms of life, to take it as it comes, to rejoice in its infinite unfoldment, the ‘plastic dance of circumstance’; to behold the budding flower and the new-born suns as equal expressions of the joy of becoming. But people are weak, they love themselves, and they set themselves up as the centre of existence!”
But Corydon was personal, and loved life; and she stood out that death was unthinkable--that she had the sense of infinity within her. Thyrsis strove to make her see that one was to wreak one’s hunger for infinity at each moment, and not put it off to any future age; that life was a thing for itself, and needed no sequel to justify it. “It is a free gift, and we have no claim upon it; we must take it on the terms of the giver.”
From that they came to religion. Thyrsis loved the forms of the old faiths, because of the poetry there was in them; and so he wrestled with Corydon’s paganism. He tried to show her how one could read “Paradise Lost” and the English prayer-book, precisely as one read Virgil and Homer; to which Corydon answered that she had been to Sunday-school.