The general said:
"I can't . . . I can't get to the bottom of all this. . . . What in the world did Ruggles want to go and tell your father that for? . . . What are you going to do for a living after the war? They won't take you back into your office, will they?"
Tietjens said:
"No, sir. The Department will not take me back. Every one who has served in this war will be a marked man for a long time after it is over. That's proper enough. We're having our fun now."
The general said:
"You say the wildest things."
Tietjens answered:
"You generally find the things I say come true, sir. Could we get this over? Ruggles told my father what he did because it is not a good thing to belong to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries in the twentieth. Or really, because it is not good to have taken one's public-school's ethical system seriously. I am really, sir, the English public schoolboy. That's an eighteenth-century product. What with the love of truth that—God help me!—they rammed into me at Clifton and the belief Arnold forced upon Rugby that the vilest of sins—the vilest of all sins—is to peach to the head master! That's me, sir. Other men get over their schooling. I never have. I remain adolescent. These things are obsessions with me. Complexes, sir!"
The general said:
"All this seems to be very wild. . . . What's this about peaching to a head master?"