Some Do Not …

Sylvia Tietjens

Sylvia moves through the novel as the elegant, humiliating fact of Christopher's marriage — a woman whose infidelity is public and whose return is demanded as a right. Her letter from Brittany, fed-up with Perowne, sets the plot's central pressure: whether a man of Christopher's scruples can be shamed into a life he did not choose. Her beauty and her cruelty are the same instrument, and everyone around the Tietjens marriage is forced to take sides.

Christopher Tietjens

Christopher Tietjens is the last of a vanishing type: a man who cleans his pipe with a surgical needle, arranges his son's boarding by telephone the day after his wife elopes, and considers his father an almost perfect friend because they need not talk. His marriage to Sylvia is a slow public wound he refuses to dress; his growing, unspoken attraction to Valentine Wannop is the novel's quiet counter-current. He matters because the book tests whether his kind of integrity can survive a world of gossip, war, and women who mistake decency for weakness.

Valentine Wannop

Valentine Wannop is clever, broke, and fiercely committed to the cause of women, yet she moves through the novel's social world as an outsider — the girl in the housemaid's pantry, the daughter of a woman who wrote her husband's leaders. Her attraction to Christopher is complicated by her disillusion when she discovers that Edith Ethel Duchemin, her idol, has been Macmaster's mistress all along. She matters because she is the one person who sees Tietjens clearly and loves him for exactly what he is, not despite it.

Vincent Macmaster

Macmaster is Christopher's closest colleague and the novel's study in social climbing dressed as literary refinement — a man who quotes aptly rather than originally and whose passion for Edith Ethel Duchemin swims in a sea of renunciations and beautiful quotations. His secret affair with her, exposed to Valentine in a moment of screaming vulgarity, shatters the illusion of a chaste intellectual colony. He matters because his compromises throw Christopher's stubborn honesty into relief, and because his friendship is both real and quietly corrosive.

Edith Ethel Duchemin

Edith Ethel Duchemin presides over the rectory as an intellectual hostess, holding forth on the beauty of lifelong fidelity while conducting a long affair with Vincent Macmaster. When Valentine witnesses her screaming coarse hatred at her lover — the dirty little Port of Leith fish-handler — the whole edifice of refined renunciation collapses. She matters because her hypocrisy is the novel's sharpest exposure of the gap between the talk of the educated class and its appetites, and because her coming marriage to Macmaster reshapes the social circle around the Tietjens.

Mark Tietjens

Mark Tietjens is a cynical, detached man of the world who nonetheless walks a weeping Valentine across a quadrangle to plead his brother's case and to scheme a safe transport job for him. He inspects her like a horse — good neck, clean hips, a real good filly — and then grips her arm and tells her Christopher is one of the best. He matters because he is the family's practical conscience, the one Tietjens who sees clearly what Christopher's honour will cost and tries, without sentiment, to prevent it.