'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,