"There is no social problem," said Old Mole, "there is only the moral problem, and that is settled by the act of living, or left in a greater tangle by the refusal to live." One night as he returned home from a dinner at a literary and artistic club he stood at the head of the little stairs looking down into the darkness. He was filled with regret for the past that had contained so much pleasantness and appalled by the vision of the future stretching on without Matilda, for it would be without her though she stayed under his roof. Between the theater and the other she gave so much that she had very little left for him--so little: gentleness and kindness and consideration, things which it were almost kinder not to give. It were best, he thought, that she should go and make her own life, with or without the other. She had her career, her work: friends she would always make, acquaintances she could always have in abundance. . . . And yet she stayed. He had felt dependent on her for the solution, for the proof, as it were, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. But she stayed. There must then be something that she treasured in her life with him. . . . And he was curious to know what it might be. Almost before he was aware of it he was down the little stairs and at her door, listening, and he was chilled with pity. She was weeping, and smothering the sound of it. "Poor child!" he thought. And he tapped lightly at her door. No sound. Again he tapped. She came then. "I heard you," he said. "It was more than I could bear." She led him into her room and made him sit on her bed as she slithered into it again. She would not have the light turned on. "I couldn't bear you to be unhappy. You have been so happy." "Yes," she said. "Do you want to go?" he asked. "I'm afraid." At first he thought she meant she was afraid of the tongues of the many, but that fear could be no more than superficial. Hers was deep. It seemed to shake her as an angry wind a tree. "Well, well," he said. She reached out in the darkness for his hand. In silence she pressed his hand, and then: "You never know," she said. It was all she could tell him, that she was suffering. He said: "There is nothing to fear," and in silence he pressed her hand. "You _have_ been good to me." There was a knell in the words. They were the epitaph of their life together. "I think," he said, "that, if we were so foolish as to tot up the gains on either side, mine would be the greater." Again she pressed his hand. "I'm not a bit like Josephine really, am I?" "My dear child." He was very near tears. "My dear child, not a bit." So he left her.