It was Being, in all its ineffable mystery, its monstrous and unendurable strangeness. They lived face to face with it, they saw a thousand aspects of it. Sometimes Corydon would be obsessed with the sense of the sheer weight she carried; a burden fastened upon her and not to be got rid of—an imposition and torment to her. Then again, she would see herself in grotesque and even comical lights—as akin to all the animals, a cousin of the patient cow. And then would come a moment of sudden wonder, when she would be transfigured, a being divine, conferring the boon of life upon another.
It was in this last way that Thyrsis thought of her. There was about her a sense of brooding mystery, as of one who walks in the midst of supernatural presences. She would sit for hours gazing before her, like
