middle desert of the two deaths, that of his wife and that, ten
years later, of his boy--he had never taken any one anywhere. It
came over him in especial--though the monition had, as happened,
already sounded, fitfully gleamed, in other forms--that the
business he had come out on hadn't yet been so brought home to him
as by the sight of the people about him. She gave him the
impression, his friend, at first, more straight than he got it for
himself--gave it simply by saying with off-hand illumination: "Oh
yes, they're types!"--but after he had taken it he made to the full
his own use of it; both while he kept silence for the four acts and
while he talked in the intervals. It was an evening, it was a world
of types, and this was a connexion above all in which the figures
and faces in the stalls were interchangeable with those on the
stage.

He felt as if the play itself penetrated him with the naked elbow
of his neighbour, a great stripped handsome red-haired lady who
conversed with a gentleman on her other side in stray dissyllables
which had for his ear, in the oddest way in the world, so much
sound that he wondered they hadn't more sense; and he recognised by
the same law, beyond the footlights, what he was pleased to take
for the very flush of English life. He had distracted drops in
which he couldn't have said if it were actors or auditors who were
most true, and the upshot of which, each time, was the consciousness
of new contacts. However he viewed his job it was "types" he should
have to tackle. Those before him and around him were not as the
types of Woollett, where, for that matter, it had begun to seem to
him that there must only have been the male and the female.
These made two exactly, even with the individual varieties. Here,
on the other hand, apart from the personal and the sexual range--