"How long is your young people's infatuation for each other going to last? If it is to be brief and evanescent, it would be absurd for me to take a black eye. But if it is to be stable and enduring, I should be ashamed to stand in the way of it. Knowing something of Lucy's history, how long do you think her fancy for you will last?"
"These things are on the lap of the gods."
"Well, then, yours for her? Now, I know that my love for her, which has been tried by fire and ice and time, will last until I die, or lose my reason. With me it is not a question of thinking, but of knowing. How long do you know that your love for her will last?"
"That is an impossible question to answer. I think it will always last."
"Thought won't do, Archie, on this all-important phase of the situation, we must have the light of definite knowledge. Now, as a man who has had many love affairs, some innocent and some not, you should have a good working knowledge of your endurance in such matters. If you were cast away on a desert island with a very pretty woman, you to whom women have always been necessary, you from whose hand there has always been some woman or other ready to eat, how long would your love for Lucy last?"
I was amazed momentarily by his question, but it was not one which I could answer.
"A week?" He rather shot this at me, and for a moment there was a satiric gleam in his eye.
I nodded.
"You know that it would last a week?"
I began to feel a little angry, and I said, quite sharply: "I know it."