For many weeks she did not see her lover. Old Mole knew that because she was home earlier from the theater and was rarely out in the afternoon, and spent much time in writing—she who could never write without an effort—letters, the charred fragments of which he found in the hearth. Then she was restless and frantically busy:
Ruefully he would think:
“Idiots! They are trying to give it up for me.”
What if they did give it up? He began excitedly to persuade himself that they would redeem their fault, find nobility in self-sacrifice. But that would not do. He was too wary a guardian of his egoism. That would not do. They had nothing to gain from it. They could give him back nothing. They had taken nothing from him. What she had been to her lover was something which she had never been, never could be, to him. . . . That was how he now phrased it to himself. His love had fashioned her, shaped her, made her lovely: it had needed another love to breathe life into her. And, warming into life, she was afraid of life.
He saw Panoukian in the street. Lean the young man was, and drawn, and pale, prowling: a figure of thin hunger, famished and desperate. He saw Old Mole and swerved to avoid him, but he was not quick enough, and his arm was squeezed with a timid friendliness. He gave a nervous start, butted forward with his head and snarled:
“Go to Hell!”
And he broke away and wriggled like an eel into the crowd.
“God help us!” said Old Mole, “for we are making pitiable fools of ourselves. The vulgar snap and quarrel would be better than this. . . . No, it would not.”
It was painfully amusing to him to see Matilda’s face in the picture-postcard shops. The photographers had touched her up into a toothy popular beauty, blank, expressionless, fatuous. It was the woman’s face with the woman painted out: just a mask, signifying nothing, never a thought, never a feeling, never a desire, and not a spark of will. To thousands of young men it would serve as an ideal of womanhood, and they would slop their calfish emotions over it; they would go to see her in the theater, covet her with mealy lasciviousness. What a filthy business was the theater! He wished to God he had never let her enter it, and told himself things would have been very different then. But would they? What had he given her to hold her? What ultimately had he given her? Tenderness and little kindnesses, indulgence and fondling: but those were only so many trinkets, little flowers plucked in the hedgerows and passed to the fair companion. But finally, finally, what had he given her? And bitterly he said:
“Instruction. . . . A damned ugly word.”