spiritual, or even any sentimental color. He desired woman, as
woman--it mattered not what woman. How low his impulses took him
Thyrsis realized with a shudder from one remark that he made--that
his poverty did not help him to live virtuously, for about the docks
and in the workingmen's quarters there were women who would sell
themselves for fifty cents a night.

This man's whole life was determined by that craving; in fact it
seemed to Thyrsis that his God had made the universe with relation
to it--a heaven to reward him if he abstained, and a hell to punish
him if he yielded. It was because of this that he clung to the
church, and shrunk from any dallying with "rationalism". He
disapproved of the theatre, because it appealed to these cravings;
he disapproved of all pictures and statues of the nude human form,
because the sight of them overmastered him. For the same reason he
shrunk from all impassioned poetry, and from dancing, and even from
non-religious music. He was rigid in his conformance to all the
social conventions, because they served the purpose of saving him
and his young women-friends from temptation; and he looked forward
to the completion of a divinity-course as his goal, because then he
would be able to settle down and marry, and so at last to gratify
his desires. He stated this quite baldly, quoting the authority of
St. Paul, that it was "better to marry than to burn."

This conversation brought Thyrsis to a realization that there was a
great deal in the world that was not found in the poetry of Tennyson
and Longfellow; and so he began to pry into the souls of others of
his fellow-students.

Section 8. Warner had given him the religious attitude; and now he