This was the pleasantry to which his feeble resistance, his outbursts of anger, of jealousy, or of protest had but added piquancy, the ultimate sting of pleasure to the jaded palate of the performers.

This was the obsession under which she lay, the trial and persecution which she had warned him he would find it hard to witness.
Hard?
He believed her, trifling as was the thing he had seen.

For behind it he had a glimpse of other and worse things, and behind all of some shadowy brooding mystery which compelled her to suffer them and forbade her to complain.

What that was he could not conceive, what it could be he could not conceive: nor had he long to consider the question.

He found the shifty eyes of his table-fellow fixed upon him, and, though the moment his own eyes met them they were averted, he fancied that they sped a glance of intelligence to the table behind him, and he hastened to curb, if not his feelings, at least the show of them.