The Way of the World

to you? Aye, like a leech, to suck your best blood⁠—she’ll drop off when she’s full. Madam, you shan’t pawn a bodkin, nor part with a brass counter,98 in composition for me. I defy ’em all. Let ’em prove their aspersions: I know my own innocence, and dare stand a trial. Exit. Lady Wishfort Why, if she should be innocent, if she should be wronged after all, ha?⁠—I don’t know what to think⁠—and I promise you, her education has been unexceptionable⁠—I may say it, for I chiefly made it my own care to initiate her very infancy in the rudiments of virtue, and to impress upon her tender years a young odium and aversion to the very sight of men; aye, friend, she would ha’ shrieked if she had but seen a man till she was in her teens. As I’m a person, ’tis true⁠—she was never suffered to play with a male child, though but in coats. Nay, her very babies were of the feminine gender. Oh, she never looked a man in the face but her own father or the chaplain, and him we made a shift to put upon her for a woman, by the help of his long garments, and his sleek face, till she was going in her fifteen. Mrs. Marwood ’Twas much she should be deceived so long. Lady Wishfort I warrant you, or she would never have borne to have been catechised by him, and have heard his long lectures against singing and dancing and such debaucheries, and going to filthy plays, and profane music meetings, where the lewd trebles squeak nothing but bawdy, and the basses roar blasphemy. Oh, she would have swooned at the sight or name of an obscene playbook!⁠—and can I think after all this that my daughter can be naught? What, a whore? And thought it excommunication to set her foot within the door of a playhouse. O dear friend, I can’t believe it. No, no; as she says, let him prove it, let him prove it. Mrs. Marwood Prove it, madam! What, and have your name prostituted in a public court! Yours and your daughter’s reputation worried at the bar by a pack of bawling lawyers! To be ushered in with an Oh yes of scandal; and have your case opened by an old fumbling leacher in a quoif like a man-midwife;99 to bring your daughter’s infamy to light; to be a theme for legal punsters and quibblers by the statute; and become a jest, against a rule of court, where there is no precedent for a jest in any record, not even in Doomsday Book.100 To discompose the gravity of the bench, and provoke naughty interrogatories in more naughty law Latin; while the good judge, tickled with the proceeding, simpers under a grey beard, and fidges off and on his cushion as if he had swallowed cantharides,101 or sat upon cowage!⁠— Lady Wishfort Oh, ’tis very hard! Mrs. Marwood And then to have my young revellers of the Temple102 take notes, like prentices at a conventicle; and after talk it over again in commons, or before drawers in an eating-house. Lady Wishfort Worse and worse! Mrs. Marwood Nay, this is nothing; if it would end here ’twere well. But it must after this be consigned by the shorthand writers to the public press; and from thence be transferred to the hands, nay, into the throats and lungs, of hawkers, with voices more licentious than the loud flounder-man’s. And this you must hear till you are stunned; nay, you must hear nothing else for some days. Lady Wishfort Oh ’tis insupportable. No, no, dear friend, make it up, make it up; aye, aye, I’ll compound. I’ll give up all, myself and my all, my niece and her all⁠—anything, everything, for composition. Mrs. Marwood Nay, madam, I advise nothing, I only lay before you, as a friend, the inconveniences which perhaps you have overseen. Here comes Mr. Fainall; if he will be satisfied to huddle up all in silence, I shall be glad. You must think I would rather congratulate than condole with you. Enter Fainall. Lady Wishfort Aye, aye, I do not doubt it, dear Marwood. No, no, I do not doubt it. Fainall Well, madam, I have suffered myself to be overcome by the importunity of this lady, your friend; and am content you shall enjoy your own proper estate during life, on condition you oblige yourself never to marry, under such penalty as I think convenient. Lady Wishfort Never to marry! Fainall No more Sir Rowlands; the next imposture may not be so timely detected. Mrs. Marwood That condition, I dare answer, my lady will consent to, without difficulty; she has already but too much experienced the perfidiousness of men.⁠—Besides, madam, when we retire to our pastoral solitude, we shall bid adieu to all other thoughts. Lady Wishfort Aye, that’s true; but in case of necessity, as of health, or some such emergency⁠— Fainall Oh, if you are prescribed marriage, you shall be considered; I will only reserve to myself the power to choose for you. If your physic be wholesome, it matters not who is your apothecary. Next, my wife shall settle on me the remainder of her fortune, not made over already; and for her maintenance depend entirely on my discretion. Lady Wishfort This is most inhumanly savage: exceeding the barbarity of a Muscovite husband.103 Fainall I learned it from his Czarish majesty’s retinue,104 in a winter evening’s conference over brandy and pepper, amongst other secrets of matrimony and policy, as they are at present practised in the northern hemisphere. But this must be agreed unto, and that positively. Lastly, I will be endowed, in right of my wife, with that six thousand pound, which is the moiety of Mrs. Millamant’s fortune in your possession, and which she has forfeited (as will appear by the last will and testament of your deceased husband, Sir Jonathan Wishfort) by her disobedience in contracting herself against your consent or