From that flight upward Old Mole came to the sensation of falling. He was possessed by a prevision, felt that in a moment he would see all things plain, would know exactly what was going to happen. He strained forward, felt sleep overcoming him, struggled against it, and fell asleep. Then Matilda was busy all day rehearsing, and, during the little time he had with her, she talked the slang and gossip of the theater. Once she asked after the work, and he read a little of it to her, and she liked it and he plucked up courage to go on with it. She laughed at his cuts at women and admitted that he had thrust home at more than one of her own foibles. He had written part of a chapter on the _Theater as Education._ She could make nothing of that. The theater to her was a place in which you played "parts," sometimes good and sometimes bad, and you were always waiting for the supreme, all-conquering "part" to turn up. She did what she was asked to do to the very best of her ability; that was her work and she did not look beyond it. The flattering side of London, its pleasures, fashions and functions had fallen into the background and she gave it just the attention which her interest seemed to demand. It never struck her as strange that she should be given no more of a play than her own part to read, and if she had been given the play would probably not have read it. She learned her part, movements and gestures, cues during rehearsal, and never watched any scene in which she did not appear. By her part in the "intellectual" play she was mystified. None of her Copas or Butcher tricks were in the least suited to it. She had an enormous part to learn: all talk, gibes at marriage, and honor, and wealth, and domesticity, all the fetishes of the theater in which she was beginning to find her footing. The manager of the theater was his own producer; he had chosen her because she looked the part, "the rising temperament," he called it, and he added to her bewilderment with the invention of elaborate detail to break the flood of talk, and, in the absence of action, to bind the play together. Everyone in that theater spoke of the play with awe, so she concealed her perplexity and brought it to Old Mole. "There are no scenes in it," she said. "No cues. Nothing you can take hold of. I say my lines: the other people in the play don't seem to take any notice of them, but just go on talking. I suppose it's very clever, but it isn't acting. I don't believe even my uncle could do anything with it." He recommended her to read the play, and she procured a copy from the author. When she had read it she said: "I know why nothing happens in it. There isn't a soul in it who cares about anybody else. It's all teasing. They can't do anything else because they don't care. And they have nothing really to talk about, so I suppose that's why they discuss the Poor Law Commission, and the Cat and Mouse Bill, and the Social Evil and all sorts of things I never heard of."