For a brief space after a storm of summer rain the world is a place of glowing color, of flowing, harmonious lines. So it was now with Old Mole, and he discovered the charm of things. His habitual life went on undisturbed, and he could find pleasure even in that. His love for Matilda reduced him to a sort of passiveness, so that he asked nothing of her, gave her of himself only so much as she demanded, and was content to watch her, to be with her, to feel that he was in no way impeding her progress. She showed no change save that there was a sort of effort in her self-control, as though she were deliberately maintaining her old attitude toward him. She never made any further allusion to her avowed hatred of the theater, and returned to it as though nothing had suffered. He told himself that it was perhaps only a mood of exhaustion, or that, though she might have passed through a crisis, yet it was possible for her to be unaware of it, so that its effects would only gradually become visible and very slowly translated into action. After all, she was still very young, and the young are mercifully spared having to face their crises. . . . When he went to see her play her part again she had mastered her scene by artistry; the almost barbaric splendor of her outburst was gone; she had a trick for it, and her little scene became, as it was intended to be, only a cog in the elaborate machinery by which the entertainment moved. This time Panoukian was with him, and denounced the piece as an abomination, a fraud upon the public--(who liked it immensely)--and he produced a very ingenious, subtle diagnosis of the diseases that were upon it and submitted it to a thorough and brutal vivisection, act by act, as they sat through it. Old Mole was astonished to find that Panoukian's violence annoyed him, offended him as an injustice, and, though he did not tell him so, saw clearly that he was applying to the piece a standard which had never for one moment been in the mind of the author, whose concern had been to the best of his no great powers to contrive an amusing traffic which should please everybody and offend none, supply the leading actors with good and intrinsically flattering parts, tickle the public into paying for its long-continued presentation, and so pay the rent of the theater, the formidable salary list, and provide for the satisfaction of his pleasures, the caprices of his extremely expensive wife, and his by no means peculiar mania for appearing in the columns of the newspapers and illustrated journals; pure Harbottling; but it had nothing at all to do with what Panoukian was talking about, namely, art. It was certainly all out of drawing and its moral perspective was all awry, but it was hardly more fantastical and disproportionate than Panoukian's criticism. It was entirely unimportant: to apply a serious standard to it was to raise it to a level in the mind to which it had no right. Of the two, the