“No, no. Quite right. I haven’t. No. I beg your pardon. I’m glad to see you such friends. She isn’t very good at making friends. Acquaintances come and go, but there seem to be very few people whom she and I can share.”
“I have the profoundest respect for her,” said Panoukian. “As we were coming back in the dawn she told me all her life. The things she has suffered, the misery she has come through.”
And they fraternized in their sympathy for Matilda. Panoukian gave an instance of her early sufferings. She had never told it to her husband, and he returned to Gray’s Inn puzzled and uneasy, to find her sitting idle, doing nothing, with no pretence at activity. He was tender with her, and asked if she might be ill. She said no, but she had been thinking and wanted to know what was the good of anything. She said she knew she never could be like the other women they knew; it wasn’t any good, they seemed to feel that she was different and hadn’t had their education and pleasant girlhood, and they only wanted her because they thought she was a success. He told her that he wanted nothing less than for her to be like the other women, that he never wanted her to live in and be one of the crowd, but only to be herself, her own brave, delightful self.
“That’s what Arthur says.” (They had begun to call Panoukian Arthur during their few days of high spirits.) “He says you’ve got to be yourself or nothing. And I don’t understand, and thinking makes it so hard. . . .” She did not want him to speak. She said, “You still love me? You still want me?”
And there came back to him almost the love of their wanderings, the old desire with its sting of jealousy.
For three days after that she never once spoke to him.
It seemed she wrote to Panoukian, for he appeared again on her last night before the opening of the new play, and was there when she returned from the dress rehearsal. She shook hands with him, made him sit by the fireplace opposite Old Mole, took up some sewing, and said:
“Now talk.”
After some diffidence Panoukian began, and they came round to “Lossie Loses,” the last weeks of which had at length been announced. It would have run for two years and two months. Panoukian’s theory of its success was that people were much like children, and once they were pleased with a story wanted it told over and over again without a single variation.
“The public,” said Matilda, “are very funny. When they don’t listen to you, you think them idiots; when they do, you adore them and think them wonderful.”