me tell you what I came to say. I'm so ignorant and so helpless--I
didn't see how I could be of any use to you. And so I wanted to tell
you that you must do whatever seemed best to you--just don't count
me at all. You see what I mean--I'm not afraid for myself, but just
for you. I couldn't bear the thought that I might be in your way. I
felt I had to come and tell you that, before you went back to your
work."

Now Thyrsis had set out with mighty battlements reared about him;
and not all the houris and the courtesans of all the ages could have
found a way to breach them. But before those simple sentences of
Corydon's, uttered in her gentle voice, and with her maiden's gaze
of wonder--the battlements crumbled and rocked.

And that was always the way of it. There were endless new
explanations and new attitudes, new excursions and discoveries. They
would part with a certain understanding, but they never knew with
what view they would meet in the morning. They were swung from one
extreme to the other, from certitude to doubt, from joy to dismay
and despair. And so, day after day they would sit and talk, for
uncounted hours. Corydon would come to the little cabin, or Thyrsis
would come to the village, and they would wander about the roads or
the woods, forgetting their meals, forgetting all the world. Once
they wandered away into the mountains, and they sat until the dusk
closed round them; they were almost lost that night.

"Of course," Thyrsis had been saying, "we should not be married like
other men and women."

"No," said Corydon, "of course not."