It much affected his relations with those nearest to him,--with Mabel, with Mr. Fortune, and with Twyning. In those months, and in the months following, the year changing and advancing in equal excitements and strong opinions through winter into spring, he found himself increasingly out of favour at The Precincts and increasingly estranged in his home. And it was his own fault. Detached and reflective in the fond detachment of the 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 time "those are the people that we have to lick stamps for Lloyd George for!"