To him it was not at all like a vault, but like an engine disconnected from its power. The mind abhors a vacuum, and he was striving to fill the emptiness all about him, thronging the auditorium with imaginary people, and struggling to occupy the magic area of light in which he stood. In vain: he was impotent. He felt trapped.
“Let us go,” he said.
On the stairs they met the manager.
“Hullo, Tilly,” he said. “You’re a good girl.”
“Thanks.”
Old Mole hated the young man, for he was common and loose in manner and in no way worthy of the enchanted Matilda or of the marvelous organism, the theater, in which she seemed to live so easily and freely.
His thoughts were much too confused for him to impart them to her, and he was vastly relieved when they left the theater and she became his Matilda.
That night he read to her. He had been delighting in “Lucretius,” and he had marked passages, and he turned to that beginning:
“Iam iam non domus accipiet te læta, neque uxor Optima. . . .”
He translated for her: