Lady F. My affectation, sir!

Heart. Why, I ask you nothing but what you may very well spare.

Lady F. You grow rude, sir. Come, mademoiselle, it is high time to be gone.

Madem. Allons, allons, allons!

Heart. [stopping them]. Nay, you may as well stand still: for hear me you shall, walk which way you please.

Lady F. What mean you, sir?

Heart. I mean to tell you that you are the most ungrateful woman upon earth.

Lady F. Ungrateful! To whom?

Heart. To nature.

Lady F. Why, what has nature done for me?

Heart. What you have undone by art. It made you handsome; it gave you beauty to a miracle, a shape without a fault, wit enough to make them relish, and so turned you loose to your own discretion, which has made such work with you, that you are become the pity of our sex, and the jest of your own. There is not a feature in your face, but you have found the way to teach it some affected convulsion; your feet, your hands, your very fingers’ ends, are directed never to move without some ridiculous air or other; and your language is a suitable trumpet, to draw people’s eyes upon the raree-show.

Madem. [aside]. Est ce qu’on fait l’amour en Angleterre somme çca?

Lady F. [aside]. Now I could cry for madness, but that I know he’d laugh at me for it.

Heart. Now do you hate me for telling you the truth, but that’s because you don’t believe ’tis so; for were you once convinced of that, you’d reform for your own sake.

Lady F. Every circumstance of nice breeding must needs appear ridiculous to one who has so natural an antipathy to good manners.

Heart. But suppose I could find the means to convince you that the whole world is of my opinion?

Lady F. Sir, though you, and all the world you talk of, should be so impertinently officious as to think to persuade me I don’t know how to behave myself, I should still have charity enough for my own understanding to believe myself in the right, and all you in the wrong.

Madem. Le voilà mort.

[Exit with Lady F. Heart. [gazing at her]. There her single clapper has published the sense of the whole sex. Well, this once I have endeavoured to wash the blackmoor white, but, henceforward, I’ll sooner undertake to teach sincerity to a courtier, generosity to a usurer, honesty to a lawyer, than discretion to a woman I see has once set her heart upon playing the fool.

Enter Constant. ‘Morrow, Constant.

Con. Good-morrow, Jack. What are you doing here this morning?

Heart. Doing! guess, if you can. Why, I have been endeavouring to persuade my Lady Fanciful that she’s the most foolish woman about town.