This was illustrated whenever there was any misunderstanding between them, any crisis of unhappiness or fit of melancholia. It was quite in vain at such times that Thyrsis would ask her to sweep these things aside and forget them; it was disastrous to suggest that she put any blame upon herself, or scold herself into a different attitude. He might take days to make up his mind to do what he had to do--yet that fit of misery would last until he had come and done it. He had to put his arms about her, and make her realize that she was precious to him, that she was necessary to him, that he loved her and appreciated her and believed in her; so, and so only, would the current of her life begin once more to flow. And why could he not do this more quickly? Why did he have to wait until she had suffered agonies? Why did he have to be dragged to it by the hair of his head, as it were--as a means of keeping her from going insane from misery? Was it that he did not really love her? Mocking voices in his soul told him that was it--but he knew it was not so. He loved her; but he loved her in his way, and that was not her way. And how shall one explain that strange impulse in the heart of man, that makes it impossible for him to be content with anything that is upon the earth--that makes him restless in the presence of beauty and love and joy, and all those things with which he so obviously ought to be content? It is so clearly irrational and unjustifiable; and yet that impulse continues to drive him forth, as it drove him to destroy the statues in the Athenian temples, and to burn the silken robes and the jewelled treasures in the public-squares of Venice. One contemplates the thing in its most unlovely aspects--in the form of Simeon Stylites upon his pillar, devoured by worms, or of Bernard Gui, with his racks and his thumb-screws and his “secular arm”--and it seems the very culmination of all human madness and horror. And yet, it does not cease to come; and he upon whom it seizes may not free himself by any power of his will, by any cunning of his wit; and no agony of yearning and grief may be sufficient to enable him to love a woman as a woman desires to be loved. Section 15. Thyrsis would work over the book until he was utterly exhausted; and then, limp as a rag, he would come back to the world of reality and face these complications. He needed to rest, he needed to be soothed and comforted and sung to sleep; he needed to receive--and instead he had to give. Sometimes he wondered vaguely if this might not have been otherwise; he knew nothing about women--but surely there might have been, somewhere in the world, some woman who would have understood, and would have asked nothing from him. But he dwelt on that thought but seldom, for it seemed a kind of treason; he was not married to any such hypothetical woman--he was married to Corydon, and it was Corydon he had to save from the wolves.