"Well, yes," Tietjens said musingly, "I think I should want to be rude to her. I don't say I should be. Certainly I shouldn't if she were good looking. Or if she were your soul's affinity. You can rely on that."
Macmaster had a sudden vision of Tietjens' large and clumsy form walking beside the lady of his, Macmaster's, delight, when ultimately she was found—walking along the top of a cliff amongst tall grass and poppies and making himself extremely agreeable with talk of Tasso and Cimabue. All the same, Macmaster imagined, the lady wouldn't like Tietjens. Women didn't as a rule. His looks and his silences alarmed them. Or they hated him.
. . . Or they liked him very much indeed. And Macmaster said conciliatorily:
"Yes, I think I could rely on that!" He added: "All the same I don't wonder that . . ."
He had been about to say:
"I don't wonder that Sylvia calls you immoral." For Tietjens' wife alleged that Tietjens was detestable. He bored her, she said, by his silences; when he did speak she hated him for the immorality of his views. . . . But he did not finish his sentence, and Tietjens went on:
"All the same when the war comes it will be these little snobs who will save England, because they've the courage to know what they want and to say so."
Macmaster said loftily:
"You're extraordinarily old-fashioned at times, Chrissie. You ought to know as well as I do that a war is impossible—at any rate with this country in it. Simply because . . ." He hesitated and then emboldened himself: "We—the circumspect—yes, the circumspect classes, will pilot the nation through the tight places."
"War, my good fellow," Tietjens said—the train was slowing down preparatorily to running into Ashford—"is inevitable, and with this country plumb centre in the middle of it. Simply because you fellows are such damn hypocrites. There's not a country in the world that trusts us. We're always, as it were, committing adultery—like your fellow!—with the name of Heaven on our lips." He was jibing again at the subject of Macmaster's monograph.