daily bicycle ride, awake at night mentally
pacing about the assembled parts of his puzzles, he told himself with
complete impartiality that the cause of these effects was entirely of
his own making. "I can't stick shouting and smashing"--"I can't help
seeing the bits of right in the other point of view": those were the
causes. He was so difficult to get on with: that was the effect of the
complaint.

"Really, Sabre, I find it most difficult to get on with you nowadays,"
Mr. Fortune used to say. "We seem never to agree. We are perpetually at
loggerheads. Loggerheads. I do most strongly resent being perpetually
bumped and bruised by unwilling participation in a grinding congestion
of loggerheads."

And Twyning, "Well, I simply can't hit it off with you. That's all there
is to it. I try to be friendly; but if you can't hear Lloyd George's
name without taking up that kind of attitude, well, all I can say is
you're trying to put up social barriers in a place where there's no room
for social barriers, and that's in business."

And Mabel: "Well, if you want to know what I think, I think you're
getting simply impossible to get on with. You simply never think the
same as other people think. I should have thought it was only common
decency at a time like this to stand up for your own class; but, no.
It's always your own class that's in the wrong and the common people who
are in the right."

"Always." He began to hate the word "always." But it was true. In those
exciting and intensely opinionated days it seemed there was never a
subject that came up, whether at The Precincts or at home, but he found
himself on the other side of the argument and giving intense displeasure
because he was on the other side. In Mabel's case--he did not
particularly trouble himself about what Twyning and Fortune thought--but
in Mabel's case, much set on his duty to give her happiness, he came to
prepare with care for the dangerous places of their intercourse. But
never with success. Places whose aggravations drove her to her angriest
protestations of how utterly impossible he was to get on with never
looked dangerous as they were approached: he would ride in to them with
her amicably or with a slack rein,--and suddenly, mysteriously,
unexpectedly, he would be floundering, the relations between them yet a
little more deeply foundered.

Such utterly harmless looking places:

"And those are the people, mind you," said Mabel--not for the first tim