“Are you dissatisfied with your life?” he asked.
“Is there anything in it that I could be satisfied with?” she cried.
“No,” she replied; “that only shows how stupid you can be!”
“Didn’t you know that I was trying to prepare for college last year?”
“What could I do? I had no help--no encouragement. I was groping like a blind person. And I told you about it.”
“But I told you what to study,” objected Thyrsis.
“Yes,” said the girl; “but how could I do it? You know how to study--you’ve been taught. But I don’t know anything, and I don’t know how to find anything out. I began on the Latin, but I didn’t even know how the words should be pronounced.”
“Nobody else knows that,” observed Thyrsis, somewhat inconsequently.
“It was all so dull and dreary,” she went on--“everything they would have had me learn. I wanted things that had life in them, things that were beautiful and worth while--like this book of yours, for instance.”
“I am really delighted that you like it,” said Thyrsis, touched by that.
Section 3. Thyrsis told his story at some length; in the ardor of her sympathy his imagination took fire, and he told it eloquently, he discovered new beauties in it that he had not seen before. And Corydon listened with growing delight and amazement.
“So that is the way you spend your time!” she exclaimed.
“And that is why you live like a hermit!”
“And you think that you would lose your vision if you went among people?”
“I know because I have tried. You don’t realize how hard I have to work over a thing like this. I have carried it in my mind for a year; I have lived for nothing else--I have literally had no other interest in the world. Every sentence I have read to you has been the product of work added to work--of one impulse piled upon another--of thinking and criticizing and revising. Just the little bit I have done has taken me a whole month, and I have hardly stopped to eat; it’s been my first thought in the morning and my last at night. And when the mood of it comes to me, then I work in a kind of frenzy that lasts for hours and even days; and if I give up in the middle and fall back, then I have to do it all over again. It’s like toiling up a mountain-side.”
“I see,” whispered Corydon. “And then, do you expect to have no human relationships as long as you live?”