Not to give away the woman one loved, but to back her up in her mistakes — once they had gone a certain length — that was perhaps chief among the ine… - Henry James

...I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of storybooks and fairy tales. Wasn't it just a storybook over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half replaced and half utilised, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!

The increasing seriousness of things, then that's the great opportunity of jokes.

I'm glad you like adverbs — I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.