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Macmaster said:

'You haven't...But by Jove you're the only man in England that could do it.'

'That was what Mr Waterhouse said,' Tietjens commented. 'He said old Ingleby had told him so.'

'I do hope,' Macmaster said, 'that you answered him politely!'

'I told him,' Tietjens answered, 'that there were a dozen men who could do it as well as I, and I mentioned your name in particular.'

'But I couldn't,' Macmaster answered. 'Of course I could convert a 3d. rate into 4½d. But these are the actuarial variations; they're infinite. I couldn't touch them.'

Tietjens said negligently: 'I don't want my name mixed up in the unspeakable affair. When I give him the papers on Monday I shall tell him you did most of the work.'

Again Macmaster groaned.

Nor was this distress mere altruism. Immensely ambitious for his brilliant friend, Macmaster's ambition was one ingredient of his strong desire for security. At Cambridge he had been perfectly content with a moderate, quite respectable place on the list of mathematical postulants. He knew that that made him safe, and he had still more satisfaction in the thought that it would warrant him in never being brilliant in after life. But when Tietjens, two years after, had come out as a mere Second Wrangler, Macmaster had been bitterly and loudly disappointed. He knew perfectly well that Tietjens simply hadn't taken trouble; and, ten chances to one, it was on purpose that Tietjens hadn't taken trouble. For the matter of that, for Tietjens it wouldn't have been trouble.