August, the anniversary month of the war, he again offered himself
for enlistment and was again rejected, but this time after a longer
scrutiny: the standard was not at its first height of perfection.
Earnshaw, Colonel Rattray, all the remnant of his former friends, were
gone to the front: Sabre submitted himself through the ordinary channels
and this time received what Twyning had called his "paper." He did not
show it to Twyning, nor mention either to him or to Mr. Fortune that he
had tried again. "Again! most creditable of you, my dear Sabre." "Again,
have you, though? By Jove, that's sporting of you. Did they give you a
paper this time, old man?" No. Not much. Feeling as he felt about the
war, acutely aware as he was of the partners' interest in the matter,
that, he felt, could not be borne.

But on this occasion he told Mabel.

The war had not altered his relations with Mabel. He had had the feeling
that it ought to bring them closer together, to make her more
susceptible to his attempts to do the right thing by her. But it did not
bring them closer together: the accumulating months, the imperceptibly
increasing strangeness and tension and high pitch of the war atmosphere
increased, rather, her susceptibility to those characteristics of his
which were most impossible to her. He felt things with draught too deep
and with burthen too capacious for the navigability of her mind; and
here was an ever-present thing, this (in her phrase) most unsettling
war, which must be taken (in her view) on a high, brisk note that was as
impossible to him as was his own attitude towards the war to her. The
effect of the war, in this result, was but to sunder them on a new
dimension: whereas formerly he had learned not to join with her on
subjects his feelings about which he had been taught to shrink from
exposing before her, now the world contained but one subject; there was
no choice and there was no upshot but clash of incompatibility. His
feelings were daily forced to the ordeal; his ideas daily exasperated
her. The path he had set himself was not to mind her abuse of his
feelings, and he tried with some success not to mind; but (in his own
expression, brooding in his mind's solitude) they riled her and he had
nothing else to offer her; they riled her and he had set himself not to
rile her. It was like desiring to ease a querulous invalid and having in
the dispensary but a single--and a detested--palliative.

Things were not bet