Once Sir John came into tea and quite formally and with a sort of portentousness announced that that was his seventy-first birthday, and that he was a broken man. He seriously proposed that Tietjens should come into partnership with him with the reversion of the business--not, of course, of his private fortune. Tietjens had listened amiably, asking a detail or two of Sir John's proposed arrangement. Then he had said, with the rather caressing voice that he now and then bestowed on a pretty woman, that he didn't think it would do. There would be too much beastly money about it. As a career it would be more congenial to him than his office . . . but there was too much beastly money about it. Once more, a little to Sylvia's surprise--but men are queer creatures!--Sir John seemed to see this objection as quite reasonable, though he heard it with regret and combated it feebly. He went away with a relieved jauntiness; for, if he couldn't have Tietjens he couldn't; and he invited Sylvia to dine with him somewhere where they were going to have something fabulous and very nasty at about two guineas the ounce on the menu. Something like that! And during dinner Sir John had entertained her by singing the praises of her husband. He said that Tietjens was much too great a gentleman to be wasted on the old furniture trade: that was why he hadn't persisted. But he sent by Sylvia a message to the effect that if ever Tietjens _did_ come to be in want of money . . . Occasionally Sylvia was worried to know why people--as they sometimes did--told her that her husband had great gifts. To her he was merely unaccountable. His actions and opinions seemed simply the products of caprice--like her own and, since she knew that most of her own manifestations were a matter of contrariety, she abandoned the habit of thinking much about him. But gradually and dimly she began to see that Tietjens had, at least, a consistency of character and a rather unusual knowledge of life. This came to her when she had to acknowledge that their move to the Inn of Court had been a social success and had suited herself. When they had discussed the change at Lobscheid--or rather when Sylvia had unconditionally given in to every stipulation of Tietjens!--he had predicted almost exactly what would happen, though it had been the affair of her mother's cousin's opera box that had most impressed her. He had told her, at Lobscheid, that he had no intention of interfering with her social level, and he was convinced that he was not going to. He had thought about it a good deal.