I wonder why, for two hours already, the normally fearless audience haven't coughed up even one measly comment?

Boys?

Possibly because it is a masculine trait to avert one's gaze, when confronted with the folly of others of our sex, no matter the form.

One suspects that Lev, like Sir Charles Ryder, may have come to a few conclusions of his own by now:

…as I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the corners of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has kept house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly. ~Waugh

Casca, you didn't disappoint me.

" Lev and I were married at City Hall. About 11 people attended, and afterward we went to Carmine’s."

Is Carmine's looking good to you about now, Karol.

Oh yeah, in a big way.

Tat, you are welcome dear.

God, I do love Waugh. His dry vivisection is without peer. "Uncongenial stranger", lmao.