things that tempted and enslaved. For him was the morning-air, and
the shock of cold water, and the hardness of the wild things of the
open. Other people did not feel this way; other people pampered
themselves and defiled themselves--and so Thyrsis went apart. He
lived quite alone with his thoughts, he had never a chum, scarcely
even any friends. Where in the long procession of lodging and
boarding-houses and summer-resorts should he meet people who knew
what he knew about life? Where in all the world should he meet them,
save in the books of great men in times past?

There was not much of what is called "culture" in his family; no
music at all, and no poetry. But there were novels, and there were
libraries where one could get more of these, so Thyrsis became a
devourer of stories; he would disappear, and they would find him at
meal-times, hidden in a clump of bushes, or in a corner behind a
sofa--anywhere out of the world. He read whole libraries of
adventure: Mayne-Reid and Henty, and then Cooper and Stevenson and
Scott. And then came more serious novels--"Don Quixote" and "Les
Miserables," George Eliot, whom he loved, and Dickens, whose social
protest thrilled him; and chiefest of all Thackeray, who moulded his
thought. Thackeray knew the world that he knew, Thackeray saw to the
heart of it; and no high-souled lad who had read him and worshipped
him was ever after to be lured by the glamor of the "great" world--a
world whose greatness was based upon selfishness and greed.

Thyrsis knew no foreign language, and fate or instinct kept him from
those writers who jested with uncleanness; so he was virginal, and
pure in all his imaginings. Other lads exchanged confidences in
forbidden things, they broke down the barriers and tore away the
veils; but Thyrsis had never breathed a word about matters of sex to