Thyrsis would read passages of this book aloud to Corydon, and they would chuckle over it together; but the reading of it did not bring Corydon the same unalloyed delight. In the leisure-class _régime_, the woman is a cherished possession--for it is through her that the ability to waste both time and goods can best be shown. So came Veblen’s grim and ironic exposition of the leisure-class woman, an exposition which Corydon found almost too painful to be read. For Corydon’s ancestors, as far back as documents could trace, had been members of that class. They had left her the frail and beautiful body, conspicuously useless and dependent; they had left her all the leisure-class impulses and cravings, all the leisure-class impotences and futilities to contend with. They had taught her nothing about cooking, nothing about sewing, nothing about babies, nothing about money; they had taught her only the leisure-class dream of “love in a cottage”--and she had run away with a poor poet to try it out! The depth of these instincts in Corydon was amusingly illustrated by the fact that she always woke up dull and discouraged, and was seldom really herself until afternoon; and that along about ten o’clock at night, when for the sake of her health she should have been going to bed, she would be laughing, talking, singing, ablaze with interest and excitement. Thyrsis would point this out to her, and please himself by picturing the role which she should have been filling--wearing an empire gown and a rope or two of rubies, and presiding in an opera-box or a _salon_. Corydon would repudiate all this with indignation; but all the same she never escaped from the phrases of Veblen--she remained his “leisure-class wife” from that day forth. Not so very long afterwards they came upon Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler”; and Thyrsis shuddered to observe that of all the heroines in the world’s literature, that was the one which most appealed to her. Nor did he fail to observe the working of the thing in himself; the subtle and deeply-buried instinct which made him prefer to be wretched with a “leisure-class wife” rather than to be contented with a plebeian one! BOOK XIV THE PRICE OF RANSOM _The faint grey of dawn was stealing across the lake; and still the spell was upon them. “There thou art gone, and me thou leavest here Sole in these fields! yet will I not despair.” So she whispered; and he answered her-- “He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep, Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep. Some life of men unblest He knew, which made him droop, and filled his head. He went; his piping took a troubled sound Of storms that rage outside our happy ground._”