body once said with equal truth and profundity, knows
what a minute may bring forth, much less, therefore, does anybody know
what an evening of say two hundred and forty minutes may produce. For
instance, Harold Quaritch--though by this time he had gone so far as
to freely admit to himself that he was utterly and hopelessly in love
with Ida, in love with her with that settled and determined passion
which sometimes strikes a man or woman in middle age--certainly did
not know that before the evening was out he would have declared his
devotion with results that shall be made clear in their decent order.
When he put on his dress clothes to come up to dinner, he had no more
intention of proposing to Ida than he had of not taking them off when
he went to bed. His love was deep enough and steady enough, but
perhaps it did not possess that wild impetuosity which carries people
so far in their youth, sometimes indeed a great deal further than
their reason approves. It was essentially a middle-aged devotion, and
bore the same resemblance to the picturesque passion of five-and-
twenty that a snow-fed torrent does to a navigable river. The one
rushes and roars and sweeps away the bridges and devastates happy
homes, while the other bears upon its placid breast the argosies of
peace and plenty and is generally serviceable to the necessities of
man. Still, there is something attractive about torrents. There is a
grandeur in that first rush of passion which results from the sudden
melting of the snows of the heart's purity and faith and high
unstained devotion.

But both torrents and navigable rivers are liable to a common fate,
they may fall over precipices, and when this comes to pass even the
latter cease to be navigable for a space. Now this catastrophe was
about to overtake our friend the Colonel.

Well, Harold Quaritch had dined, and had enjoyed a pleasant as well as
a good dinner. The Squire, who of late had been cheerful as a cricket,
was in his best form, and told long stories with an infinitesimal
point. In anybody else's mouth these stories would have been wearisome
to a degree, but there was a gusto, an originality, and a kind of
Tudor period flavour about the old gentleman, which made his worst and
longest story acceptable in any society. The Colonel himself had also
come out in a most unusual way. He possessed a fund of dry humour
which he rarely produced, but when he did produce it, it was of a most
satisfactory order.