The mental process in Macmaster had been quite subconscious. He would not, advisedly, have introduced the painter-poet as a topic.

Tietjens said:

‘I haven’t said anything at all that I can remember.’

The obstinacy of his hard race awakened in Macmaster:

‘Since,’ he quoted, ‘when we stand side by side

           Only hands may meet,

        Better half this weary world

           Lay between us, sweet!

        Better far tho’ hearts may break

           Bid farewell for aye!

        Lest thy sad eyes, meeting mine,

           Tempt my soul away!’

 

‘You can’t,’ he continued, ‘say that that isn’t poetry! Great poetry.’

‘I can’t say,’ Tietjens answered contemptuously. ‘I don’t read poetry except Byron. But it’s a filthy picture.…’

Macmaster said uncertainly:

‘I don’t know that I know the picture. Is it in Chicago?’

‘It isn’t painted!’ Tietjens said. ‘But it’s there!’

He continued with sudden fury:

‘Damn it. What’s the sense of all these attempts to justify fornication? England’s mad about it. Well, you’ve got your John Stuart Mills and your George Eliots for the high-class thing. Leave the furniture out! Or leave me out, at least I tell you it revolts me to think of that obese, oily man who never took a bath, in a grease-spotted dressing-gown and the underclothes he’s slept in, standing beside a five-shilling model with crimped hair, or some Mrs. W. Three Stars, gazing into a mirror that reflects their fetid selves and gilt sunfish and drop chandeliers and plates sickening with cold bacon fat and gurgling about passion.’

Macmaster had gone chalk white, his short beard bristling:

‘You daren’t … you daren’t talk like that,’ he stuttered.

‘I dare!’ Tietjens answered; ‘but I oughtn’t to … to you! I admit that. But you oughtn’t, almost as much, to talk about that stuff to me, either. It’s an insult to my intelligence.’

‘Certainly,’ Macmaster said stiffly, ‘the moment was not opportune.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ Tietjens answered. ‘The moment can never be opportune. Let’s agree that making a career is a dirty business – for me as for you! But decent augurs grin behind their masks. They never preach to each other.’

‘You’re getting esoteric,’ Macmaster said faintly.

‘I’ll underline,’ Tietjens went on. ‘I quite understand that the favour of Mrs. Cressy and Mrs. de Limoux is essential to you! They have the ear of that old don Ingleby.’

Macmaster said:

‘Damn!’

‘I quite agree,’ Tietjens continued, ‘I quite approve. It’s the game as it has always been played. It’s the tradition, so it’s right. It’s been sanctioned since the days of the Précieuses Ridicules.’

‘You’ve a way of putting things,’ Macmaster said.

‘I haven’t,’ Tietjens answered. ‘It’s just because I haven’t that what I do say sticks out in the minds of fellows like you who are always fiddling about after literary expression. But what I do say is this: I stand for monogamy.’

Macmaster uttered a ‘You!’ of amazement.

Tietjens answered with a negligent ‘I!’ He continued:

‘I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of course if a man who’s a man wants to have a woman he has her. And again, no talking about it. He’d no doubt be in the end better, and better off, if he didn’t. Just as it would probably be better for him if he didn’t have the second glass of whisky and soda.…’

‘You call that monogamy and chastity!’ Macmaster interjected.

‘I do,’ Tietjens answered. ‘And it probably is, at any rate it’s clean.