at swords' points

It’s doubtful that Clinton, who was very much the candidate of the status quo and would constantly have been at swords’ points with a Republican-controlled Congress, would have had any more success in dealing with them if she had won.

Yet the Lettered and the Unlettered powers are at swords' points; and very old and bitter foemen, too, they are.

Here my father and I were at swords' points, and had it not been that notwithstanding this failing, as he called it, I had become useful to him in his business, he would have banished me long before I took into my head to be beforehand with him, and become a voluntary exile from the parental roof.

Carlotta and he were so unlike in temperament, that they were constantly at swords' points, and Mrs. Brownville was so absorbed in her own narrow interests that she had never found time to study her children.

“Milly,” he said, “I have been trying to discover what makes Mother and you always at swords’ points.