to THIS, you know, and I swore that every
time she did so, I would fling it into her face again. Whereupon
back she flounced to her chamber, where she wept and stormed until
night-time."

"When you forgave her?"

"I DID forgive her, that's positive. You see I had supped at the 'Rose'
along with Tom Trippet and half-a-dozen pretty fellows; and I had eased
a great fat-headed Warwickshire landjunker--what d'ye call him?--squire,
of forty pieces; and I'm dev'lish good-humoured when I've won, and so
Cat and I made it up: but I've taught her never to bring me stale beer
again--ha, ha!"

This conversation will explain, a great deal better than any description
of ours, however eloquent, the state of things as between Count
Maximilian and Mrs. Catherine, and the feelings which they entertained
for each other. The woman loved him, that was the fact. And, as we have
shown in the previous chapter how John Hayes, a mean-spirited fellow
as ever breathed, in respect of all other passions a pigmy, was in the
passion of love a giant, and followed Mrs. Catherine with a furious
longing which might seem at the first to be foreign to his nature; in
the like manner, and playing at cross-purposes, Mrs. Hall had become
smitten of the Captain; and, as he said truly, only liked him the better
for the brutality which she received at his hands. For it is my opinion,
madam, that love is a bodily infirmity, from which humankind can no more
escape than from small-pox; and which attacks every one of us, from the
first duke in the Peerage down to Jack Ketch inclusive: which has no
respect for rank, virtue, or roguery in man, but sets each in his turn
in a fever; which breaks out the deuce knows how or why, and, raging its
appointed time, fills each individual of the one sex with a blind
fury and longing for some one of the other (who may be pure, gentle,
blue-eyed, beautiful, and good; or vile, shrewish, squinting,
hunchbacked, and hideous, according to circumstances and luck); which
dies away, perhaps, in the natural course, if left to have its way,
but which contradiction causes to rage more furiously than ever. Is not
history, from the Trojan war upwards and downwards, full of instances of
such strange inexplicable passions? Was not Helen, by the most moderate
calculation, ninety years of age when she went off with His Royal
Highness Prince Paris of Troy? Was not Madame La Valliere ill-made,
blear-eyed, tallow-complexioned, scraggy, and with hair