Then there was another stumbling-block--the newspapers! Thyrsis had to know what was going on in the world. He had learned to read the papers and magazines like an exchange-editor; his eye would fly from column to column, and he would rip the insides out of one in two or three minutes. To Corydon it was agony to see him do this, for it took her half an hour to read a newspaper. She besought him to read it out loud--and was powerless to understand the distress that this caused him. He stood it as long as he could, and then he took to marking in the papers the things that she needed to know; and this he continued to do religiously, until he had come to realize that Corydon never remembered anything that she read in the papers. This was something it took him years to comprehend; there were certain portions of the ordinary human brain which simply did not exist in his wife. She had lived eighteen years in the world, and it had never occurred to her to ask how steam made an engine go, or what was the use of the little glass knobs on the telegraph-poles. And it was the same with politics and business, and with the thousand and one personalities of the hour. When these things came up, Thyrsis would patiently explain to her what she needed to know; and he would take it for granted that she would pounce upon the information and stow it away in her mind--just as he would have done in a similar case. But then, two or three weeks later, the same topic would come up, and he would see a look of sudden terror come into Corydon’s eyes--she had forgotten every word of it! He came, after a long time, to honor this ignorance. People had to bring some real credentials with them to win a place in Corydon’s thoughts; it was not enough that they were conspicuous in the papers. And it was the same with facts of all sorts; science existed for Corydon only as it pointed to beauty, and history existed only as it was inspiring. They read Green’s “History of the English People” in the evenings; and every now and then Corydon would have to go and plunge her face into cold water to keep her eyes open, The long parliamentary struggle was utter confusion to her--she had no joy to watch how “freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent.” But once in a while there would come some story, like that Of Joan of Arc--and there would be the girl, with her hands clenched, and hot tears in her eyes, and the fires of martyrdom blazing in her soul!