“But dearest,” he said, “how absurd it is to be ashamed of an idea! If ugly things exist, don’t we have to hear of them and know of them? And so why frighten ourselves because they are in our minds?” “But Thyrsis,” cried she, “they are so hateful!” “Yes,” he said. “But then the more you hate them, the more they haunt you!” “That’s just it!” she exclaimed. “But what harm can they do? Can they have any effect upon your character? You must say to yourself that all this is a consequence of the structure of your brain-cells. What could be more futile than trying to forget? As if the very essence of the trying was not remembering!” So Thyrsis went on to argue with her. He made her promise him that in future she would tell him of all her obsessions, permitting no fear or shame to deter her; and so thereafter he would have to listen periodically to long accounts of her psychological agonies, and help her to hunt out the “hob-goblins” from the tangled thickets of her mind. They were forever settling the matter, positively and finally--but alas, only to have something unsettle it again. So Thyrsis had to add to his other accomplishments the equipment of a psycho-pathologist; he brushed up his French, and read learned treatises upon the researches in the _Salpêtrière_, and the theories of the “Nancy School”. Section 4. Another month passed by, and still there was no rift in the clouds. Once more Corydon was forbidden to see him, and so her pain grew day by day. At last there came another letter, voicing utter despertion. Something must be done, she declared, she was slowly going out of her mind. Thyrsis could have no idea of the shamefulness of her position, the humiliations she had to face. “I tell you the thing is putting a brand upon my soul,” she wrote. “It is something I shall never get over all my life. It is withering me up--it is destroying my self-respect, my very decency; it is depriving me of my power to act, or even to think. People come in, relatives or friends--even strangers to me--and peer at me and pry into my affairs; I hear them whispering in the parlor--‘Hasn’t he got a position yet?’ or ‘How can she have anything to do with him?’ The servants gossip about me--the woman I have for a nurse despises me and insults me, and I have not the courage to rebuke her. To-day I went almost wild with fury--I rushed into the bathroom and locked the door and flung myself upon the floor. I found myself gnawing at the rug in my rage--I mean that literally. That is what life has left for me! “I tell you you must take me away, we must get out of this fiendish city. Let us go into the wilderness as you said, and live as we can--I would rather starve to death than face these things. Let us get into the country, Thyrsis. You can work as a farm-hand, and earn a few dollars a week--surely that could not be a greater strain upon us than the way things are now.”