eople's sufferings rendered into a perfectly gentle mind by the habit
of daily travelling to business in London on the top of a motor omnibus.
It would only need to be shown that the gentle mind secured his seat
with dignity and comfort at the bus's starting point and daily for years
watched with amusement, and then with callousness and so with brutality
the struggles of the unhappy fellow creatures who fought to assail it at
its stopping places on the way to the City.

Mark Sabre was not in the least aware of any steadily permeating
influence from his sense of detachment on this daily habit of years. But
he was influenced. On entering his Penny Green world on the return home,
or on entering his Tidborough office world, on the way out, he had
sometimes a curious feeling of descending into this odd affair of life
to which he did not really belong. And for the few moments while the
feeling persisted he sometimes, more or less unconsciously, took towards
affairs a rather whimsical attitude, as though they did not really
matter: an irritating attitude, unpractical, it was sometimes hinted by
his partners; an irritating attitude--"You really are very difficult to
understand sometimes"--it was often told him by Mabel.

II

This very matter of the bicycle ride, indeed, apart altogether from its
effect upon his mood, supplied an instance of the kind of thing Mabel
found it so difficult to understand in her husband.

He made what she called a childish game of it. Every day on the ride
home, Sabre ceased pedalling at precisely the same point on the slope
down into Penny Green and coasted until the machine came to a standstill
within a few yards of his own gate. This point of cessation was never
twice in a week at the same spot; and Sabre found great interest in
seeing every day exactly where it would be, and by intense wriggling of
his front wheel and prodigious feats of balancing, squeezing out of the
machine's momentum the last possible fraction of an inch. There was a
magnificent distance record when, on one single occasion only, he had
been deposited plumb in line with his own gate; and there was a
divertingly lamentable shortage record, touched on more than one
occasion, when he had come to ground plumb in line with the gate of Mr.
Fargus, his neighbour on that side.

Each of these records, though marked by the gates, was also and more
exactly marked by a peg hammered into the edge of the Green.

This was childish; a