Mysterious manoeuvring! But he felt he was approaching the edge. "In the dark?"
"Yes, not in the dark. What I mean is, I really cannot imagine why you must keep up your riding all through the winter. It was different when there was no other way. Now the railway is running I simply cannot imagine why you don't use it."
"Well, that's easy--because I like the ride."
"You can't possibly like riding back on these pitch dark nights, cold and often wet. That's absurd."
"Well, I like it a jolly sight better than fugging up in those carriages with all that gassing crowd of Garden Home fussers."
And immediately, _whizz!_ he went over the edge.
"That's just it!" Mabel said. And he thought, "Ah!"
"That's just it. And of course you laugh. Why you can't be friendly with people like other men, I never can imagine. There're heaps of the nicest people up at the Garden Home, but from the first you've set yourself against them. Why you never like to make friends like other people!"
They were at dinner. She made an elaborate business of reaching for the salt. "If you ask me, it's because you don't think they're good enough for you."
He thought, "That's to rouse me. I'm dashed if I'm going to be roused." He thought, "It's getting the devil, this. There's never a subject we start but we work up to something like this. We work on one another like acid on acid. In a minute she'll have another go at it, and then I shall fly off, and then there we'll be. It's my fault. She doesn't think out these things like I do. She just says what comes into her head, whereas I know perfectly well where we're driving to, so I'm really responsible. I rile her. I either rile her by saying something in trying not to fly off, or else I let myself go, and off I fly, and we're at it. Acid on acid. It's getting the devil, this. But I'm dashed if I'll fly off. It's up to me."
He tried in his mind for some matter that would change the subject. Extraordinary how hard it was to find a new topic when some other infernal thing hung in the air. It was like, in a nightmare, trying with leaden limbs to crawl away from danger.
She resumed precisely at the point where she had left off. While his mind had journeyed in review all around and about the relations between them, her mind had remained cumbrously at the thought of her last words. There, he told himself, was the whole difference between them. He was intellectually infinitely more agile (he did not put it higher than that) than she. She could not get away from things as he could. They remained in her mind and rankled there. To get impatient with her, to proceed from impatience to loss of temper, was flatly as cruel as to permit impatience and anger with one bedridden and therefore unable to join in robust exercises. He thought, "I'll not do it."