And as Thyrsis listened to this song, his passion died. Reason awoke again, and a cold fear struck into his heart! What was the meaning of _this?_
Long hours afterward, as she lay, half-asleep, in his arms, she felt him give a sudden start and shudder.
“Nothing,” he said--“I just happened to think of something. Something that frightened me.”
“I was thinking, dear--_suppose I should become domestic!_”
_She had been reading in the little cabin, and a hush had fallen upon them.
“Yes, thou art gone! And round me too the night In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade.”
“Gone!” she said, and smiled sadly. “Where is he gone?”
“But Thyrsis nevermore we swains shall see; See him come back, and cut a smoother reed, And blow a strain the world at last shall heed-- For Time, not Corydon, hath conquer’d thee!”
Then, after a pause, she added, “How often I have remembered those words! And how pitiful they are, when I remember them!”_
Section 1. It was a tiny cupboard of a room in a tenement. They sat upon their bed to eat, and they hid their soiled dishes beneath it. Dirty children screamed upon the avenue in front, and frowsy-headed women and wolfish men caroused in the saloon below. Yet here there came to them the angel with the flame-tipped wings, and here they dreamed their dream of wonder.
In the glory of their new-found passion all life became transfigured to them; they discovered new meaning in the most trivial actions. There was no corner so obscure that they might not come upon the young god hidden; they might touch his warm, tender flesh, and hear his silvery laughter, and thrill with the wonder of his presence. They spoke a new language, full of fire and color; they read new meanings in each other’s eyes. The slightest touch of hand upon hand, or of lips to lips, was enough to dissolve them in tenderness and delight.
They rejoiced in the marvel of each other’s being--in the glory of their bodies, newly revealed. To Thyrsis especially this was life’s last miracle, a discovery so fraught with bliss as to be a continual torment. The incitements that were hidden in the softness and the odor of unbound and tumbled hair; the exquisiteness of maiden breasts, moulded of marble, rosy-tipped; the soft contour of snowy limbs, the rhythmic play of moving muscles--to dwell amid these things, to possess them, was suddenly to discover in reality what before had only existed in the realm of painting and sculpture.