She had not thought about him and was nonplussed. However, he needed very little cajoling before he gave his consent to her plan, and she told him that if he got bored he could easily go away by himself and come back when he wasn't bored any longer. Inwardly he felt that the difficulty was not going to be so easily settled as all that, but he was on the whole relieved to be rid of Mr. Copas, who had arranged to move on as soon as the pantomime opened to the distraction of the public and the devastation of his business. When Mr. Mole announced his intention of remaining the actor was affronted and refused to speak to him again. Matilda said, a little maliciously, that he was afraid of being asked for the money he owed them, and that was her parting shot after Mrs. Copas, who got her own back with the loud sneer in Mr. Mole's presence: "There's not many married women would wear tights and not many husbands would let 'em." Old Mole gasped, and looked forward with dread to the first performance of the pantomime. He was spared the indignity of tights, for the fifty women in the chorus were divided into "girls" and "boys," in accordance with their size, and Matilda was a "girl." She took her work very seriously, put far more energy into it than she had ever done into "Iphigenia" or "Josephine." The theater, one of the largest in England, awed her by the size of its machinery, and she was excited and impressed by all the talk and gossip she heard of the doings of the theaters and the halls. She disliked most of her colleagues in the chorus, and of the principals only one was not too exalted to take notice of her. This was a young actor named, professionally, Carlton Timmis (pronounced Timms), who played the Demon King. He was very attentive and kind to her, and when she asked if she might introduce him to her husband he was obviously dismayed, but expressed himself as delighted. He was a rather beautiful young man and very romantic, and he and Old Mole found much to talk of together. "You can't think," said Timmis, "what a relief it is to meet a man with a soul. Among all those idiots one is parched, withered, dried up." And much the same thought was in Old Mole's mind. Looking back he was astonished that he could for so long have tolerated the unintelligent society in which he had been cast. Timmis had decided, if erratic, opinions, and he loved nothing better than gloomily to grope after philosophical conceptions. Being very young and unsuccessful, he was pessimistic and clutched eagerly at everything which encouraged him in his belief in a world blindly responding to some mysterious law of destruction. Old Mole was inclined toward optimistic Deism and materialism, and they struck sparks out of each other, Timmis moving in a whirl of nebulous ideas, and his interlocutor moving so slowly that, by contrast, he seemed almost rigid.