defensive; back against
the wall; can't get away; always making feeble little rushes at the mob.
By Jove, that's pathetic, Mabel."

She said, "I'm not listening, you know."

He was startled. "Eh?"

"I say I'm not listening. I always know that whenever I say anything
about any one I dislike, you immediately start making excuses for them,
so I simply don't listen."

He mastered a sudden feeling within him. "Well, it wasn't very
interesting," he said.

"No, it certainly wasn't. Pathetic!" She gave her sudden burst of
laughter. "You think such extraordinary things pathetic; I wonder you
don't start an orphanage!"

He halted and faced her. "Look here, I think I'll leave you here. I
think I'll go for a bit of a walk."

Pretty hard, sometimes, not to--

III

At The Precincts the increasing habit of seeing the other side of things
was confined, in its increasing exemplifications of how impossible he
was to get on with, to the furiously exciting incidents of public
affairs; but the result was the same; the result was that, just as, on
opening his door on return home at night, he had that chill and rather
eerie feeling of stepping into an empty house, so, on entering the
office of a morning, he came to have again that sensation that it was a
deserted habitation into which he was stepping; no welcome here; no
welcome there. He began to look forward with a new desire for the escape
and detachment of the bicycle ride; he began to approach its termination
at either end with a sense of apprehension, gradually of dismay.

They were as unexpected, the conflicts of opinion, in the office as they
were at home. The subject would come up, he would enter it according to
his ideas and without foreseeing trouble, and suddenly he would find
himself in acute opposition and giving acute offence because he was in
acute opposition.

The Suffragettes! The day when Mr. Fortune received through the post
letters upon which militancy had squirted its oppression and its
determination in black and viscid form through the aperture of the
letter box. "And you're sticking up for them!" declared Mr. Fortune in a
very great passion. "You're deliberately sticking up for them.
You--pah!--pouff!--paff! I have got the abominable stuff all over my
fingers."

Sabre displayed the "wrinkled-up nut" of his Puzzlehead boyhood. "I'm
not sticking up for them. I detest their methods as much as you do. I
think they're monstrous and indefensible. All I sai