The remark had been, as it were, torn from him, because he had observed, in the strong light of the compartment, that half of Tietjens' forelock and a roundish patch behind it was silvery white. That might have been going on for weeks: you live beside a man and notice his changes very little. Yorkshire men of fresh colour and blondish often go speckled with white very young; Tietjens had had a white hair or two at the age of fourteen, very noticeable in the sunlight when he had taken his cap off to bowl. But Macmaster's mind, taking appalled change, had felt assured that Tietjens had gone white with the shock of his wife's letter: in four hours! That meant that terrible things must be going on within him; his thoughts, at all costs, must be distracted. 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 Mill's and your George Eliot's 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.