"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. What is loathsome is all your fumbling in placket-holes and polysyllabic Justification by Love. You stand for lachrymose polygamy. That's all right if you can get your club to change its rules." "You're out of my depth," Macmaster said. "And being very disagreeable. You appear to be justifying promiscuity. I don't like it." "I'm probably being disagreeable," Tietjens said. "Jeremiahs usually are. But there ought to be a twenty years' close time for discussions of sham sexual morality. Your Paolo and Francesca--and Dante's--went, very properly, to Hell, and no bones about it. You don't get Dante justifying them. But your fellow whines about creeping into Heaven." "He _doesn't_," Macmaster exclaimed. Tietjens continued with equanimity: "Now your novelist who writes a book to justify his every tenth or fifth seduction of a commonplace young woman in the name of the rights of shop boys . . ." "I'll admit," Macmaster coincided, "that Briggs is going too far. I told him only last Thursday at Mrs. Limoux's. . . ." "I'm not talking of anyone in particular," Tietjens said. "I don't read novels. I'm supposing a case. And it's a cleaner case than that of your pre-Raphaelite horrors! No! I don't read novels, but I follow tendencies. And if a fellow chooses to justify his seductions of uninteresting and viewy young females along the lines of freedom and the rights of man, it's relatively respectable. It would be better just to boast about his conquests in a straightforward and exultant way. But . . ." "You carry joking too far sometimes," Macmaster said. "I've warned you about it."