Tiberius imagined he must have sat down in the middle of a conversation about the benefits of human staff over house elves, because he could not see why on earth Evelyn would have said such a thing had it not been part of a larger conversation. On its own, it was inane, so he assumed he must have been missing context. Surely she couldn't have been addressing the comment to him. If pressed to have an opinion, he supposed he preferred house elves to human staff, as the former could tolerate much more abuse and had a more natural proclivity towards discretion where the goings-on of their masters were concerned. That being said, he really would have preferred not to express any opinion at all. Maybe she was speaking to one of the other women at the table... if this was the sort of thing that housewives were supposed to care about, he supposed. Antigone had never seemed interested, but then, Antigone wasn't interested in much that didn't directly benefit her.

"Mm," he mumbled noncommittally as he poured. "We've a mix of both. I don't know what my wife's preference is," he admitted, tone clearly implying he had no particular desire to learn. "But it isn't as though we host a great many dinner parties."