deliciously thrilling and emotional year. A terrific and stupendous
year. Many well-known people died.

III

It was naturally a year of strong partisanship. A year of violent
feelings violently expressed; and amidst them, and because of them,
Sabre found with new certainty that he had no violent feelings.
Increasingly he came to know that he had well expressed his
constitutional habit, the outstanding trait in his character, when, on
the day of that talk in the office with Nona, he had spoken of his
disastrous inability--disastrous from the point of view of being
satisfactory to single-minded persons, or of pulling out that big
booming stuff called success--to see a thing, whatever it might be, from
a single point of view and go all out for it from that point of view.
"Convictions," he had said, and often in the welter of antagonistic
convictions of 1913 thought again, "Convictions. If you're going to pull
out this big booming stuff they call success, if you're going to be
_satisfactory_ to anybody or to anything, you must shut down on
everybody's point of view but your own. You must have convictions. And
narrower than that--not only convictions but conviction. Conviction that
your side is the right side and that the other side is wrong, wrong to
hell."

And he had no such convictions. Above all, and most emphatically, he had
never the conviction that his side, whichever side it might be in any of
the issues daily tabled for men's discussion, was the right side and the
other side the wrong and wicked and disastrous side.

He used to think, "I can't stand shouting and I can't stand smashing.
And that's all there is. These newspapers and these arguments you
hear--it's all shouting and smashing. It's never thinking and building.
It's all destructive; never constructive. All blind hatred of the other
views, never fair examination of them. You get some of these Unionists
together, my class, my friends. They say absolutely nothing else but
damning and blasting and foaming at Lloyd George and Asquith and the
trade-unionists. Absolutely nothing else at all. And you get some of
these other chaps together, or their newspapers, and it's exactly the
same thing the other way about. And yet we're all in the same boat.
There's only one _life_--only one _living_--and we're all in it. Come
into it the same way and go out of it the same way; and all up against
the same real facts as we are against the same weather. That fire the