He went to see her play her part in the pantomime and suffered agonies of nervousness for her. She delivered her ten lines without mishap, sang her part in the quartet inaudibly, and her dance in the duet was applauded so loudly that at last the conductor tapped his little desk, and Matilda came tripping forth again with her comedian, bowed, kissed her hand, and went through the movements--absurd, banal, pointless as they were--with a shy grace and a breathless, childish pleasure that were charming. He was swept into the collective pleasure of the audience and clapped his hands with them and felt that the Matilda there on the stage was not his Matilda, but a creature belonging to another world, of whose existence he was aware, while nothing in his world could have any influence or any bearing on her whatsoever. . . . He would meet her at the stagedoor, and she would be his Matilda, while the other remained behind, as it were, inanimate in her charmed existence. Both were infused with life from the same source of life; the essence passed from one to the other, and therefore there was not one Matilda but three Matildas. He lost himself in this mystic conception and was timely rescued by her meeting him as he passed through the vestibule. She took his arm and hugged it and asked him if he liked it. "Wasn't it good getting an encore? That dance has only been encored six times before." He told her how nervous he had been. "I wasn't a bit nervous once I was on, but in the wings it was awful."