I remember Clifton hated it when the Governors decided to admit the first Jew and the first nigger.’

Macmaster said:

‘I wish you wouldn’t go on.’

‘There was a fellow,’ Tietjens continued, ‘whose land was next to ours. Conder his name was. His wife was habitually unfaithful to him. She used to retire with some fellow for three months out of every year. Conder never moved a finger. But we felt Groby and the neighbourhood were unsafe. It was awkward introducing him – not to mention her – in your drawing-room. All sorts of awkwardnesses. Everyone knew the younger children weren’t Conder’s. A fellow married the youngest daughter and took over the hounds. And not a soul called on her. It wasn’t rational or just. But that’s why society distrusts the cuckold, really. It never knows when it mayn’t be driven into something irrational and unjust.’

‘But you aren’t,’ Macmaster said with real anguish, ‘going to let Sylvia behave like that.’

‘I don’t know,’ Tietjens said. ‘How am I to stop it? Mind you, I think Conder was quite right. Such calamities are the will of God. A gentleman accepts them. If the woman won’t divorce, he must accept them, and it gets talked about. You seem to have made it all right this time. You and, I suppose, Mrs. Satterthwaite between you. But you won’t be always there. Or I might come across another woman.’

Macmaster said:

‘Ah!’ and after a moment:

‘What then?’

Tietjens said:

‘God knows … There’s that poor little beggar to be considered. Marchant says he’s beginning to talk broad Yorkshire already.’

Macmaster said:

‘If it wasn’t for that.… That would be a solution.’

Tietjens said: ‘Ah!’

When he paid the cabman, in front of a grey cement portal with a gabled arch, reaching up, he said:

‘You’ve been giving the mare less licorice in her mash. I told you she’d go better.’

The cabman, with a scarlet, varnished face, a shiny hat, a drab box-cloth coat and a gardenia in his buttonhole, said:

‘Ah! Trust you to remember, sir.’

In the train, from beneath his pile of polished dressing and despatch cases – Tietjens had thrown his immense kit-bag with his own hands into the guard’s van – Macmaster looked across at his friend. It was, for him, a great day. Across his face were the proof-sheets of his first, small, delicate-looking volume.… A small page, the type black and still odorous! He had the agreeable smell of the printer’s ink in his nostrils; the fresh paper was still a little damp. In his white, rather spatulate, always slightly cold fingers, was the pressure of the small, flat, gold pencil he had purchased especially for these corrections. He had found none to make.

He had expected a wallowing of pleasure – almost the only sensuous pleasure he had allowed himself for many months. Keeping up the appearances of an English gentleman on an exiguous income was no mean task.