All their life was so different from the way they had dreamed it! The dream still lured them; but its voice grew fainter and more remote. How were they to keep it real to themselves, how were they to hold it? Their existence was made up of endless sordidness, of dreary commonplace, that opposed them with its passive inertia where it did not actively attack them. “Ah, Thyrsis!” Corydon would cry to him, “this will kill us if it lasts too long!” For one thing, they no longer heard any music at all--She was not strong enough to practice the piano; and his violin was gone. Here in the great city an endless stream of concerts and operas and recitals flowed past; and here were they, like starving children who press their faces against a pastry-cook’s window and devour the sweets with their eyes. Thyrsis kept up with musical and dramatic progress by reading the accounts in the papers and magazines; but this was a good deal like slaking one’s thirst with a mirage. He used to wonder sometimes if he were to write to these great artists--would they invite him to hear them, or would they too despise him? He never had the courage to try. Once in the course of the long winter some one presented Corydon with two tickets to the opera, and they went together, in a state of utter bliss. It was an unusual experience for Thyrsis, for their seats were in the orchestra, and hitherto he had always heard his operas from the upper rows in the fifth balcony, where the air was hot and stifling, and the singers appeared as a pair of tiny arms that waved, and a head (frequently a bald head) that emitted a thin, far-distant voice. This had become to him one of the conventions of the opera; and now to discover the singers as full-sized human beings, with faces and legs and loud voices, was very disturbing to his sense of illusion.