A thrill of pleasure went through the poet. “You like it, then?” he said.
“Oh, I like it!” she answered. And then she gazed at him, with wide-open eyes of amazement. “But you! You!” she exclaimed.
“How in the world did you do it? Where did you get it from?”
“But I can’t imagine it! I had no idea you were interested in such things!”
“But how could you know what I am interested in?”
“I see how you live--apart from everybody. And you spend all your time in books!”
Thyrsis suddenly recollected something which had amused him very much. Corydon had been reading “Middlemarch,” and had told him that Dr. Casaubon reminded her of him. “And so I’m still just a bookworm to you!” he laughed.
“But isn’t your interest in things always intellectual?” she asked.
“Then you suppose I’m doing this just as an exercise in technique?” he countered.
“It’s taken me quite by surprise,” said Corydon.
“We have three faculties in us,” Thyrsis propounded--“intellect, feeling, and will; and to be a complete human being, we have to develop all of them.”
“But you spend so much time piling up learning!”
“I need to know a great many things,” he said. “I’m not conscious of studying anything I don’t need for my purpose.”
He touched the precious manuscript. “This,” he said.
“But you lose so much when you cut yourself off from the world,” said Corydon. “And there are other people, whom you might help.”
“People don’t need my help; or at least, they don’t want it.”
“But how can you know that--if you never go among them?”
“Ah!” exclaimed Corydon, quickly, “but people aren’t to blame for the lives they live!”
“Because--they can’t help them. They are bound fast.”
“That is easy for you to say,” said Corydon. “You have no ties.”
“I did have them--I might have them still. But I broke them.”
“It makes all the difference in the world. You can earn money, you can go away by yourself. But suppose you were a girl--shut up in a home, and told that that was your ‘sphere’?”
“I’d fight,” said Thyrsis--“I’d break my way out somehow, never fear. If one doesn’t break out, it simply means that his desire is not strong enough.”
Thyrsis had been surprised at the depth of Corydon’s interest in his manuscript; he had not supposed that she would be so susceptible to anything of the imagination. And now he was surprised to see that her hands were clenched tightly, and that she sat staring ahead of her intently.