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With a Scots young man such a position had been perfectly possible. Tietjens had been able to go to his fair, ample, saintly mother in her morning-room and say:

'Look here, mother, that fellow Macmaster! He'll need a little money to get through the University,' and his mother would answer:

'Yes, my dear. How much?'

With an English young man of the lower orders that would have left a sense of class obligation. With Macmaster it just didn't.

During Tietjens' late trouble--for four months before Tietjens' wife had left him to go abroad with another man--Macmaster had filled a place that no other mart could have filled. For the basis of Christopher Tietjens' emotional existence was a complete taciturnity--at any rate as to his emotions. As Tietjens saw the world, you didn't 'talk.' Perhaps you didn't even think about how you felt.

And, indeed, his wife's flight had left him almost completely without emotions that he could realize, and he had not spoken more than twenty words at most about the event. Those had been mostly to his father, who, very tall, very largely built, silver-haired and erect, had drifted, as it were, into Macmaster's drawing-room in Gray's Inn, and after five minutes of silence had said: