She has the history of Madame de Cintre's marriage at her fingers' ends.

She has seen the lovely Claire on her knees, with loosened tresses and streaming eyes, and the rest of them standing over her with spikes and goads and red-hot irons, ready to come down on her if she refuses the tipsy duke.
The simple truth is that they made a fuss about her milliner's bill or refused her an opera-box." Newman looked from Tristram to his wife with a certain mistrust in each direction.

"Do you really mean," he asked of Mrs.Tristram, "that your friend is being forced into an unhappy marriage ?" "I think it extremely probable.

Those people are very capable of that sort of thing." "It is like something in a play," said Newman; "that dark old house over there looks as if wicked things had been done in it, and might be done again." "They have a still darker old house in the country Madame de Cintre tells me, and there, during the summer this scheme must have been hatched." "MUST have been; mind that!" said Tristram.
"After all," suggested Newman, after a silence, "she may be in trouble about something else." "If it is something else, then it is something worse," said Mrs.
Tristram, with rich decision.
Newman was silent a while, and seemed lost in meditation.

"Is it possible," he asked at last, "that they do that sort of thing over here?
that helpless women are bullied into marrying men they hate ?" "Helpless women, all over the world, have a hard time of it," said Mrs.
Tristram.