“I can’t agree with you. For twenty-five years I had real, hard, unpleasant work five days in the week, and it profited neither myself nor anybody else. I went on with it because it seemed impossible to leave it. It left me, and my life has been a much brighter and healthier thing to me. Panoukian is young enough to talk himself into action. I shall go on talking forever.”
And he went on talking. Matilda produced a workbox and a pile of stockings and began darning them. They sat one on either side of the fireplace, and in the chimney sounded the explosive coo of a pigeon.
“My dear,” said Old Mole, “you know, I believe in Panoukian. I believe he will make something of himself. I fancy that when he is mature enough to know what he wants he will be absolutely ruthless in making for it.”
“Do you?”
Matilda rolled a pair of stockings up into a ball and tossed them into a basket on the sofa some yards away. It was a neat shot, and Old Mole admired the gesture with which she made it, the fling of the arm, the swift turn of the wrist.
“I do,” he said. “Until then there can be no harm in his talking.”
“No. I suppose not. But you do go on so.”
Panoukian returned. Matilda made ready, and they set out. Old Mole took them up to the Holborn gate and watched them walk along toward Chancery Lane. It was a July evening. He watched them until they were swallowed up in the hurrying crowd, the young man tall and big, towering above Matilda small and neat. He saw one or two men in the street turn and look at her, at them perhaps, for they made a handsome couple. He admired them and was moved, and a mist covered his spectacles. He took them off and wiped them. Then, kindling to the thought of a quiet evening to end in the excitement of their return, he walked slowly back under the windows flaring in the sunset.
“Truly,” he said, “the world is with the young men. There can be no pleasanter task for the middle-aged than to assist them, but, alas! we can teach them nothing, for, as the years go by, there is more and more to learn.”
He sat up until half-past one with the chamber growing ever more chill and empty, and his heart sinking as he thought of accidents that might have befallen them. He was asleep on their return and never knew its precise hour. They gave a perfectly frank and probable account of their doings: dinner at a grill-room, a music-hall, supper at a German restaurant, and then on to an At Home at the Schlegelmeiers’, where there had been a squash so thick that once you were in a room it was impossible to move to any of the others. They had been wedged into the gallery of the great drawing-room at Withington House, where the principal entertainment had been a Scotch comedian who chanted lilting ballads. It was this distinguished artist’s habit to make his audience sing the chorus of each song, and it had been diverting to see duchesses and ladies of high degree and political hostesses singing with the abandon of the gods at an outlying two-shows-a-night house: