Tietjens said:
"One's friends ought to believe that one is a gentleman. Automatically. That is what makes one and them in harmony. Probably your friends are your friends because they look at situations automatically as you look at them. . . . Mr. Ruggles knew that I was hard up. He envisaged the situation. If he were hard up, what would he do? Make a living out of the immoral earnings of women. . . . That translated into the Government circles in which he lives means selling your wife or mistress. Naturally he believed that I was the sort of fellow to sell my wife. So that's what he told my father. The point is, my father should not have believed him."
"But I . . ." the general said.
Tietjens said:
"You never believed anything against me, sir."
The general said:
"I know I've damn well worried myself to death over you . . ."
Tietjens was sentimentally at rest, still with wet eyes. He was walking near Salisbury in a grove, regarding long pastures and ploughlands running to dark, high elms from which, embowered. . . . Embowered was the word!—peeped the spire of George Herbert's church. . . . One ought to be a seventeenth-century parson at the time of the renaissance of Anglican saintliness . . . who, wrote, perhaps poems. No, not poems. Prose. The statelier vehicle!
That was home-sickness! . . . He himself was never to go home!
The general said: