Section 12. In later years they used to discuss this problem, and they could never be sure what would have happened in their lives--what would have been the reaction of their different temperaments--if they had been given any fair chance to live and grow as they wanted to. But here they were, mashed together in this stew-pot of domesticity, with all the most unlovely aspects of things forced continually upon their attention. Each was in some way a handicap and a torment to the other--a means which fate used to limit and crush and destroy the other; and as ever, they had in their hours of anguish no recourse save to sit down and reason it out together, and absolve each other from blame. Thyrsis invented a phrase whereby he might make this point clear to Corydon, and keep it in her thoughts. The phrase was “the economic screw”; it pressed upon him, and through him it crushed her. All things that he sought to be and could not be, all things that he would not be and was; all that was hard and unloving in him--his irritability and impatience, his narrowness and bitterness--in all this he showed her that cruel force that was destroying them both. It was a hard rôle for Thyrsis, to be the judge and the jury and the executioner of the stern will of this “economic screw”. There was, for instance, the episode of the “turkey-red table-cover”, which became a classic in their later lives. Corydon was always chafing at the bareness of their little home; and going into the shops in the town, and discovering things which might have made it lovely. One evil day she went alone; and when she came back, Thyrsis, as usual, pounced upon his mail, and came upon a letter from a magazine-editor whom he had been trying to please with an article, and who now scolded him mercilessly for his obstinacy and his egotism and his didacticism, and all his other unpublishable qualities. Then came the unwrapping of the bundles, and Corydon’s guileless and joyful announcement that she had come upon a wonderful bargain in the dry-goods store, a beautiful piece of “turkey-red” cloth which would serve as the table-cover for which her soul had been pining--and which she had obtained for the incredibly small sum of thirty cents! Whereupon, of course, Thyrsis began to exclaim in dismay. Thirty cents was a third of all they had to live upon for a day! And to pay it for a fool piece of rag for which they had no earthly need! So Corydon sank down in the middle of the floor and dissolved in floods of tears; and at the next trip into town the “turkey-red table-cover” was returned, and over the bare board table there were new expositions of the theory of the “economic screw”!