It was astonishing to Old Mole that he could be so deeply interested in these things. He had expected to be absorbed in his sorrow and the problem of handling it. Then he found that he was testing the two theaters, the Butcherish and the "intellectual," by the passion that had flamed into his heart through his love for Matilda at the moment when it had been outraged. In neither was there a spark to respond to his fire. The Butcher theater was a corpse; the intellectual theater that same corpse turned in its grave. And it amused him to imagine how his case would be handled in them; in the one it would be measured by rule of thumb--the eternal triangle, halo'd husband, weeping wife, discomfited lover, or, if violent effects were sought for, the woman damned to an unending fall, the two men stormily thanking their vain and shallow God they were rid of her; in the other it would be talked out of court, husband and wife would never rise above a snarl, and lover would go on talking; in both men and women would be cut and trimmed to fit in with a formula. In the one the equation would be worked out pat; in the other it would go sprawling on and on like the algebraic muddle of a flurried candidate in an examination who has omitted a symbol and gone on in desperate hope of a result. Old Mole had discarded formulæ. He was dealing with a thing that had happened. Judgment of it, he said, was futile. The issue of it depended not on himself alone. As its consequences unfolded themselves he must apply the test of passion, grasp and, so far as possible, understand, and let passion burn its way to an outlet. Familiarity with this mystery, straining on from day to day, soon made it possible for him to accept the surface happenings of life without resentment.