Nor did he dream that this was a thing most women seldom understand, or, understanding, ever forgive.
The coupe rattled over the stones or swirled through the muddy pools of the main thoroughfares.

Newspaper and telegraphic offices were still brilliantly lit, and crowds were gathered among the bulletin boards.
He knew that news had arrived from Washington that evening of the first active outbreaks of secession, and that the city was breathless with excitement.

Had he not just come from the theatre, where certain insignificant allusions in the play had been suddenly caught up and cheered or hissed by hitherto unknown partisans, to the dumb astonishment of a majority of the audience comfortably settled to money-getting and their own affairs alone?
Had he not applauded, albeit half-scornfully, the pretty actress--his old playmate Susy--who had audaciously and all incongruously waved the American flag in their faces?
Yes! he had known it; had lived for the last few weeks in an atmosphere electrically surcharged with it--and yet it had chiefly affected him in his personal homelessness.

For his wife was a Southerner, a born slaveholder, and a secessionist, whose noted prejudices to the North had even outrun her late husband's politics.

At first the piquancy and recklessness of her opinionative speech amused him as part of her characteristic flavor, or as a lingering youthfulness which the maturer intellect always pardons.