That's how he looked, and it was odious.

I waited to see him overwhelmed, confounded, pierced through and through, squirming like an impaled beetle--and I was half afraid to see it too--if you understand what I mean.

Nothing more awful than to watch a man who has been found out, not in a crime but in a more than criminal weakness.

The commonest sort of fortitude prevents us from becoming criminals in a legal sense; it is from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of the world you suspect a deadly snake in every bush--from weakness that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one of us is safe.

We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive--survive the condemnation, survive the halter, by Jove! And there are things--they look small enough sometimes too--by which some of us are totally and completely undone.