“If someone should give me a heart to keep, With love for the golden key!” Yet, amid all these raptures, Thyrsis was haunted by ghosts of doubt. Would he be able to do what his heart yearned to do? Love meant so much to her--and could it mean that much to him? Why could it not be to him the complete thing it was to her--why must he argue and wonder and fear? For Thyrsis’ ancestors had not dallied in Arcadian meadows. They had come from the wilds of Palestine and the deserts of Northern Africa; they had argued and wondered and feared in Gothic cloisters, in New England meeting-houses; and the shadow of their souls hung over him still. He could not love love as Corydon loved it, he could not trust it as she trusted it. It could never seem to him the utterly natural thing--there was always a fear of pollution, a hint of satiety, a thrill of shame. Directly the first fires of passion had spent themselves, these anxieties came to him; he remembered how in his virgin youth he had thought of passion--as of something strange and uncomfortable, even grotesque, suggesting too closely a kinship with the animals. So he noticed that his feelings always waned before Corydon’s. She wished him to linger--love meant so much to her! Then too, the code of passion was all unknown to him. What was right and what was wrong? When should one yield to desire, and when should one restrain it? To Corydon such questions never came--to her there was no such possibility as excess; she was complete and perfect, and nature told her. If there were temptations and restraints and regrets, they were for Thyrsis; and he had to keep them for his own secret, he could ask no help from her. For he discovered immediately that with his proud imperiousness, he could not endure to have Corydon refuse herself to him. So this laid a new burden upon him, an appalling one. For were they not always together--her lips always calling him, the impulse towards her always with him? There was another circumstance--the means they had to take to prevent the consequences of their love. From the very first, Thyrsis had shrunk from the thought of this; but it was only later that he realized how much it repelled him. It offended all his sense of economy and purpose; it was something done, and at the same time undone--and so it had in it the essence of all futility and wrongness. It took from passion its meaning and its excuse; and yet he could not say this to Corydon; and he knew also that he could no longer do without her. He was bound--bound fast! And every hour his chains would become tighter; what was now spontaneous joy would become a habit--a thing like eating and sleeping, a new and humiliating necessity of the flesh! Section 2. Such were their problems. They might have solved them all, perhaps--had they only had time. But others came crowding upon them, others still more insistent and perplexing. The world was pressing them, jealous of their dream of delight.