II
Between Corydon and Thyrsis the determining factor, as in nine tenths of marriages, was propinquity. Corydon came to the place where Thyrsis was writing his great novel; she visited the romantic cabin in the Fairy Glen; and since someone had to read the manuscript, she carried it off, and came back flushed with the discovery that this hateful, egotistical, self-centered youth whom she had known and disliked for ten years or more was a hothearted dreamer, engaged in pouring out a highly romantic love story destined soon to be recognized as the great American novel. “Oh, it is wonderful!” she exclaimed; and the rest of the scene tells itself. Literary feelings turned quickly into personal ones, and the solitary poet had a companion and supporter.
But, oh, the grief of the parents on both sides of this ill-assorted match! Quite literally, if a bomb had exploded in the midst of their summer vacation, it could not have discommoded them more. A clamor of horrified protests broke out. “But you are crazy! You are nothing but children! And you have no money! How can people get married without a cent in the world!” The two mothers fell to disagreeing as to which of their offspring was the more to blame, and so an old-time friendship passed into temporary eclipse. Corydon was hastily spirited away to another summer resort; but not until she had taken a solemn vow—to learn the German language more rapidly than Thyrsis had learned it!
At the end of October the poet returned to New York with an invisible crown on his brow and inaudible trumpets pealing in his ears. He and Corydon proceeded to spend all day and half the night reading Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris and practicing Mozart’s sonatas for violin and piano. But there developed grave obstacles to this program. Corydon’s family was inconvenienced if Thyrsis arrived at the apartment before breakfast; also, the mother of Thyrsis adhered stubbornly to the idea that Corydon ought not to play the piano later than eleven in the evening, and should be taken home before her family went to bed. There was only one way in the world to escape such fetters—by means of a marriage license.
Thyrsis had only ten or fifteen dollars, but was wealthy in the certain future of his masterpiece. So the young couple went to the study of the Reverend Minot J. Savage at the Church of the Messiah and were pronounced man and wife. By this step, as Thyrsis quickly discovered, he had deprived himself of the last chance of getting help in his literary career. With one accord, all relatives and friends now agreed that he must “go to work.” And by this phrase they did not mean eight hours a day of Goethe plus six of Mozart; they did not mean even the writing of great American novels; they meant getting a job with a newspaper, or perhaps with a bonding company.