“It wouldn’t be ugliness,” replied he. “It would be Nature! ‘Blessings on thee, little man!’”
“That’s all very well. But I want Cedric to have curls—”
“Curls!” he cried. “And then a Fauntleroy suit, I suppose!”
“No—at least not while we’re poor. But I want him to look decent——”
“If you have curls, then you’ll want a nurse-maid to brush them!”
“Nonsense, Thyrsis! Can’t a mother take care of her child’s own hair?”
“Some mothers can—they have nothing better to do. But if you were going in for the hair-dresser’s art, why did you cut off your own?”
And so would come yet new discussions. “You’ll be wanting me to maintain an establishment!” Thyrsis would cry, whenever these aesthetic impulses manifested themselves. He seemed to be haunted by that image of an establishment. All married men came to it in the end—there seemed to be something in matrimony that predisposed to it; and far better adopt at once the ideals and habits of the gypsies, than to settle into respectability with a nurse-maid and a cook!
Thyrsis was under the necessity of sweeping clean his soul, because of all the luxury and wantonness he saw in this metropolis, and the madness to which it goaded his soul. Some day fame would come to him, he knew—wealth also, perhaps; and oh, there must be one man in all the city who was not corrupted, who did not learn extravagance and self-indulgence, who practiced as well as preached the life of faith! And so, again and again, he and Corydon would renew the pledges of their courtship-days—pledges to a discipline of Spartan sternness.
Poor as he was, Thyrsis still found time to figure over the things he meant to do when he got money: the publishing-house that was to bring out his books at cost, and the free reading-rooms and the circulating libraries. Also, he wanted to edit a magazine; for there was a great truth which he wished to teach the world. “We must make these things that we have suffered count for something!” he would say to Corydon, again and again. “We must use them to open people’s eyes!” He was thinking how, when at last he had escaped from the pit, he would be in a position to speak for those others who were left behind. Men would heed him then, and he could show them how impossible it was for the creative artist to do his work, and at the same time carry on the struggle for bread. He would induce some rich man to set aside a fund for the endowment of young writers; and so the man who had a real message might no longer have to starve.