"God help us!" said Old Mole, "for we are making pitiable fools of ourselves. The vulgar snap and quarrel would be better than this. . . . No, it would not." It was painfully amusing to him to see Matilda's face in the picture-postcard shops. The photographers had touched her up into a toothy popular beauty, blank, expressionless, fatuous. It was the woman's face with the woman painted out: just a mask, signifying nothing, never a thought, never a feeling, never a desire, and not a spark of will. To thousands of young men it would serve as an ideal of womanhood, and they would slop their calfish emotions over it; they would go to see her in the theater, covet her with mealy lasciviousness. What a filthy business was the theater! He wished to God he had never let her enter it, and told himself things would have been very different then. But would they? What had he given her to hold her? What ultimately had he given her? Tenderness and little kindnesses, indulgence and fondling: but those were only so many trinkets, little flowers plucked in the hedgerows and passed to the fair companion. But finally, finally, what had he given her? And bitterly he said: "Instruction. . . . A damned ugly word." She had been his pupil, he her master. At every step he had instructed her, not tritely as a Mr. Barlow, but he had been Barlowish, and that was bad. He had never admitted her to equality. How could he? He had never admitted himself to equality with his inmost self. He had always, as it were, instructed himself, set out upon the crowded way of life with mnemonic precepts, and gathered more and more of them, so that he had never, after childhood, drawn upon his innate knowledge, that was more than knowledge. Without its use his life had, for convenience, been split up into parts more and more, with passing years, at variance with each other. And when the time came to give his life he was no longer master of it. He could lend this and that and the other part; lend, in usury, for only a life can be given. . . . He had brought her to suffering: the much he had given her, the pleasantness and ease, making her only the more intimately feel her need of the more he might have given. He had brought her to suffering and through her suffering he was beginning to learn. When he thought of her suffering he was tempted to say to her--perhaps not in words--"You will not go. I will. I will leave you free." But that would be to lay her under another obligation, and once more to instruct. The thing was beyond good and evil now: they three were passing through the inmost fire of life. Absurdly he thought of the three Hebrews of the Bible and of an old rhyme his nurse had been used to gabble at him and Robert when they were little boys: _Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, Shake the bed, Make the bed, And into bed you go._ For a moment or two, like a proper Englishman, he sighed for the happy state of childhood. Then he shook that off.