Lady. O my dear friend, how can I enumerate the benefits that I have received from your goodness? To you I owe the timely discovery of the false vows of Mirabell; to you I owe the detection of the impostor Sir Rowland. And now you are become an intercessor with my son-in-law, to save the honour of my house, and compound for the frailties of my daughter. Well, friend, you are enough to reconcile me to the bad world, or else I would retire to desarts and solitudes; and feed harmless sheep by groves and purling streams. Dear Marwood, let us leave the world, and retire by ourselves and be shepherdesses.

Mrs. Mar. Let us first dispatch the affair in hand, madam. We shall have leisure to think of retirement afterwards. Here is one who is concerned in the treaty.

Lady. O daughter, daughter, is it possible thou should’st be my child, bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh, and as I may say, another me, and yet transgress the most minute particle of severe virtue? Is it possible you should lean aside to iniquity, who have been cast in the direct mold of virtue? I have not only been a mold but a pattern for you, and a model for you, after you were brought into the world.

Mrs. Fain. I don’t understand your ladiship.

Lady. Not understand? Why, have you not been naught? Have you not been sophisticated? Not understand? Here I am ruined to compound for your caprices and your cuckoldoms. I must pawn my plate and my jewels, and ruin my niece, and all little enough—

Mrs. Fain. I am wronged and abused, and so are you. ’Tis a false accusation, as false as hell, as false as your friend there, ay, or your friend’s friend, my false husband.

Mrs. Mar. My friend, Mrs. Fainall? Your husband my friend, what do you mean?

Mrs. Fain. I know what I mean, madam, and so do you; and so shall the world at a time convenient.

Mrs. Mar. I am sorry to see you so passionate, madam. More temper would look more like innocence. But I have done. I am sorry my zeal to serve your ladiship and family should admit of misconstruction, or make me liable to affronts. You will pardon me, madam, if I meddle no more with an affair in which I am not personally concerned.

Lady. O dear friend, I am so ashamed that you should meet with such returns—You ought to ask pardon on your knees, ungrateful creature; she deserves more from you, than all your life can accomplish—O don’t leave me destitute in this perplexity;—no, stick to me, my good genius.

Mrs. Fain. I tell you, madam, you’re abused—Stick to you? ay, like a leach, 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, in composition for me. I defie ’em all. Let ’em prove their aspersions: I know my own innocence, and dare stand a trial.

SCENE V

Lady Wishfort, Marwood.

Lady. 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,—ay, 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,—O, 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. Mar. ’Twas much she should be deceived so long.