Later on came those stages when he no longer had to gain his wealth by physical prowess; when cunning took the place of force, and he ruled by laws and religions and moral codes, and handed down his power through long lines of descendants. Then ostentation became a highly specialized and conventionalized thing—its criterion changing gradually to "conspicuous waste of time". Those characteristics were cultivated which
served to advertise to the world that their possessor had never had to earn wealth, nor to do anything for himself ; the aristocrat became a special type of being, with small feet and hands and a feeble body, with special ways of walking and talking, of dressing and eating and playing. He developed a separate religion, a separate language, separate literatures and arts, separate vices and virtues. And fantastic and preposterous as some of these might seem, they were real things, they were the means whereby the leisure-class individual took part in the competition of his own world, and secured his own prestige and the survival of his line. Some philosopher had said that virtue is a product like vinegar ; and it was a pleasant thing to discover that French heels and "picture-hats" and course-dinners were products also.
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 regime, 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
THE MASTERS OF THE SNAKE 539
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"
§ 1. IN the course of that summer there befell Cory-don an adventure; Thyrsis had gone off one day for a walk, and when he came back she told him about it— how a young lady had stopped at the house to ask for a drink of water, and had sat upon the piazza to rest s and had talked with her. Now Corydon was in a state of excitement over a discovery.
Whenever Thyrsis met a stranger, it was necessary for him to go through elaborate intellectual processes, to find the person out by an exchange of ideas. And if by any chance the person was insincere, and used ideas as a blind and a cover, then Thyrsis might never find him out at all. In other words, he took people at the face-value of their cultural equipment; and only after long and tragic blunderings could he by any chance get deeper. But with his wife it happened quite otherwise; this case was the first which he witnessed, but the same thing happened many times afterwards. With her there would be a strange flash of recognition; it was a sort of intuition, perhaps a psychic thing—who could tell? By some unknown process in soul-chemistry, she would divine things about a person that he might have been a life-time in finding out.
It might be a burst of passionate interest, or on the other hand, of repugnance and fear. And long years, of practice taught Thyrsis that this instinct of hers was never to be disregarded. Not once in all her life did he know her to give her affection to a base person; and if ever he disregarded her antipathies, he did it to
his cost. Once they were sitting in a restaurant, and a man was brought up to be introduced by a friend; he was a person of not unpleasant aspect, courteous and apparently a gentleman, and yet Corydon flushed, and could scarcely keep her seat at the table, and would not give the man her hand. Years after Thyrsis came upon the discovery about this man, that he made a practice of unnatural vices.
He came home now to find Corydon flushed with excitement. "She has such a beautiful soul!" she exclaimed. "I never met anyone like her. And we just took to each other; she told me all about herself, and we are going to be friends."
"Who is she?" asked Thyrsis.
"She's visiting Mr. Harding, the clergyman at Bellevue," was the answer.
Bellevue was a town in the valley, on the other side from the university; it had a Presbyterian church, whose young pastor Thyrsis had met once or twice in his tramps about the country. This Miss Gordon, it seemed, was the niece of an elderly relative, his housekeeper ; she was studying trained nursing, and afterwards intended to go out as a missionary to Africa.
"She's so anxious to meet you," Corydon went on. "She's coming up to see me to-morrow, and she's going to bring Mr. Harding. You won't mind, will you, Thyrsis?"
"I guess I can stand it if he can," said Thyrsis, grimly.
"You mustn't say anything to hurt their feelings," said Corydon, quickly. "She's terribly orthodox, you know; and she takes it so seriously. I was surprised —I had never thought that I could stand anybody like that."
Thyrsis merely grunted.
"I guess ideas don't matter so much after all," said Corydon. "It's a deep nature that I care about. But just fancy—she was pained because the baby hadn't been baptized!"
"You ought to have hid the dreadful truth," said he.
"I couldn't hide things from her," laughed Corydon. "But she says I can make a Socialist out of her, and she'll make a Christian out of me!"
His reply was, "Wait until she discovers the sensuous temperament!"
But Corydon answered that Delia Gordon had a sensuous temperament also. "She seemed to me like a Joan of Arc. Just think of her going away from all her family, to a station on the Congo River! She told me all about it—how wretched the people are, and what the women suffer. She woke up in the middle of the night, and a voice told her to go—told her the name of the place. And she'd never heard it before, and hadn't had the least idea of going away!"