"You are an incorrigible fellow. . . . If ever there's any known, certain fact . . ."
"But go and look at the beastly things," Tietjens said. "You'll see they've got just a facing of Caen stone that they tide-floated here, and the fillings-up are just rubble, any rubbish. . . . Look here! It's a known certain fact, isn't it, that your eighteen-pounders are better than the French seventy-fives. They tell us so in the House, on the hustings, in the papers: the public believes it. . . . But would you put one of your tin-pot things firing—what is it?—four shells a minute?—with the little bent pins in their tails to stop the recoil—against their seventy-fives with the compressed-air cylinders. . . ."
The General sat stiffly upon his cushions:
"That's different," he said. "How the devil do you get to know these things?"
"It isn't different," Tietjens said, "it's the same muddle-headed frame of mind that sees good building in Henry VIII. as lets us into wars with hopelessly antiquated field guns and rottenly inferior ammunition. You'd fire any fellow on your staff who said we could stand up for a minute against the French."
"Well, anyhow," the General said, "I thank heaven you're not on my staff for you'd talk my hind leg off in a week. It's perfectly true that the public . . ."
But Tietjens was not listening. He was considering that it was natural for an unborn fellow like Sandbach to betray the solidarity that should exist between men. And it was natural for a childless woman like Lady Claudine Sandbach with a notoriously, a flagrantly unfaithful husband to believe in the unfaithfulness of the husbands of other women!
The General was saying:
"Who did you hear that stuff from about the French field gun?"
Tietjens said: