She said she wanted to take him behind the scenes so that he could see what a real theater was like. They passed through the stagedoor and along narrow, dusty passages, up steep flights of stone stairs, she chatting gaily in spite of the frequent notices enjoining silence, and every now and then they were stopped and Matilda was embraced by male and female alike, and all the women said how glad they were, and the men said: "good egg" or "top hole." Suddenly out of the narrow, dusty ways they came upon the stage, huge and eerie. There was only a faint light, the curtain was up, and there were tiny women in the auditorium dropping white cloths from the galleries and shrouding all the seats. Never had Old Mole had such a sense of emptiness and desolation. A man's voice came from far up above the stage, and it sounded like a thin ghostly mocking. There was a creaking and a rasping, and a great sheet of painted canvas descended, the wings were set in place, and a flight of stairs was wheeled up and clamped: the scene was set for the opening of the pantomime. Suddenly the lights were turned on. Matilda began to hum the opening bars of the overture. Old Mole blinked. He was nearly blinded. The colors in the scenery glowed in the light. He had the most alarming sense of being cut off from his surroundings, of being projected, thrust forward toward the mysterious, empty auditorium with its shrouded seats and the little women bustling up and down in it. Almost irresistibly he was impelled to shout to them, to engage their attention, to make them look at him. His mind eased and a thrill of importance ran through him: never had he seemed to himself to bulk so large. He was almost frightened: the immense power of the machinery, the lighted stage and the darkened auditorium alarmed and weighed crushingly upon him. "It's like a vault," said Matilda, "with no one in front. But when it's full, on a Saturday night, hundreds and hundreds of faces, it's wonderful." To him it was not at all like a vault, but like an engine disconnected from its power. The mind abhors a vacuum, and he was striving to fill the emptiness all about him, thronging the auditorium with imaginary people, and struggling to occupy the magic area of light in which he stood. In vain: he was impotent. He felt trapped. "Let us go," he said. On the stairs they met the manager. "Hullo, Tilly," he said. "You're a good girl." "Thanks." Old Mole hated the young man, for he was common and loose in manner and in no way worthy of the enchanted Matilda or of the marvelous organism, the theater, in which she seemed to live so easily and freely. His thoughts were much too confused for him to impart them to her, and he was vastly relieved when they left the theater and she became his Matilda. That night he read to her. He had been delighting in "Lucretius," and he had marked passages, and he turned to that beginning: "Iam iam non domus accipiet te læta, neque uxor Optima. . . ."