The author is weakest in unlocking the character of this detached man: a dreadful father, disloyal husband and disarming user of friends.
A friend of mine is going through a dreadful divorce -- her husband is leaving her in a hostile and unkind manner, with his new girlfriend at his side.
Even Cub, her much put-upon simpleton of a husband, and his dreadful, manipulative mother Hester, are ultimately accorded sympathy.
Shot by the director Jean de Limur in what appears to be a continuous take photographed from three angles, the scene builds to an annihilating force as Eagels, slowly realizing that her husband has a dreadful punishment planned for her, strikes back as violently as she knows how.
I turned to my husband and said, "Something dreadful has happened downtown".
It was based partly on her own experience and partly, it seems, on wishful thinking: after five unhappy years of marriage, the narrator's husband dies in a dreadful accident.
"It is too dreadful," she wrote of her slave-owning husband, Pierce, "to have those whom we love accomplices to this wickedness; it is too intolerable to find myself an involuntary accomplice to it".
And she said at the time, how these people could have turned her, i.e. her husband and poisoned his mind is dreadful.
Penelope's husband, Desmond Fitzgerald, also suffered through a dreadful war (he was an officer in the Irish Guards and saw heavy fighting in Italy), and returned "a different person from the dashing young officer Penelope had married in 1942".
After her public grace in the last dreadful year, Lisa Beamer has every right to use her husband's last recorded words.
