cruelty enough not to satisfy a lady’s longing, you have too much generosity not to be tender of her honour.  Yet you speak with an indifference which seems to be affected, and confesses you are conscious of a negligence.

MIRA.  You pursue the argument with a distrust that seems to be unaffected, and confesses you are conscious of a concern for which the lady is more indebted to you than is your wife.

FAIN.  Fie, fie, friend, if you grow censorious I must leave you:—I’ll look upon the gamesters in the next room.

MIRA.  Who are they?

FAIN.  Petulant and Witwoud.—Bring me some chocolate.

MIRA.  Betty, what says your clock?

BET.  Turned of the last canonical hour, sir.

MIRA.  How pertinently the jade answers me!  Ha! almost one a’ clock!  [Looking on his watch.]  Oh, y’are come!

SCENE II.

Mirabell and Footman.

MIRA.  Well, is the grand affair over?  You have been something tedious.

SERV.  Sir, there’s such coupling at Pancras that they stand behind one another, as ’twere in a country-dance.  Ours was the last couple to lead up; and no hopes appearing of dispatch, besides, the parson growing hoarse, we were afraid his lungs would have failed before it came to our turn; so we drove round to Duke’s Place, and there they were riveted in a trice.

MIRA.  So, so; you are sure they are married?

SERV.  Married and bedded, sir; I am witness.

MIRA.  Have you the certificate?

SERV.  Here it is, sir.

MIRA.  Has the tailor brought Waitwell’s clothes home, and the new liveries?

SERV.  Yes, sir.

MIRA.  That’s well.  Do you go home again, d’ye hear, and adjourn the consummation till farther order; bid Waitwell shake his ears, and Dame Partlet rustle up her feathers, and meet me at one a’ clock by Rosamond’s pond, that I may see her before she returns to her lady.  And, as you tender your ears, be secret.

SCENE III.

Mirabell, Fainall, Betty.

FAIN.  Joy of your success, Mirabell; you look pleased.

MIRA.  Ay; I have been engaged in a matter of some sort of mirth, which is not yet ripe for discovery.  I am glad this is not a cabal-night.  I wonder, Fainall, that you who are married, and of consequence should be discreet, will suffer your wife to be of such a party.

FAIN.  Faith, I am not jealous.  Besides, most who are engaged are women and relations; and for the men, they are of a kind too contemptible to give scandal.

MIRA.  I am of another opinion: the greater the coxcomb, always the more the scandal; for a woman who is not a fool can have but one reason for associating with a man who is one.

FAIN.  Are you jealous as often as you see Witwoud entertained by Millamant?

MIRA.  Of her understanding I am, if not of her person.

FAIN.  You do her wrong; for, to give her her due, she has wit.

MIRA.  She has beauty enough to make any man think so, and complaisance enough not to contradict him who shall tell her so.

FAIN.  For a passionate lover methinks you are a man somewhat too discerning in the failings of your mistress.

MIRA.  And for a discerning man somewhat too passionate a lover, for I like her with all her faults; nay, like her for her faults.  Her follies are so natural, or so artful, that they become her, and those affectations which in another woman would be odious serve but to make her more agreeable.  I’ll tell thee, Fainall, she once used me with that insolence that in revenge I took her to pieces, sifted her, and separated her failings: I studied ’em and got ’em by rote.  The catalogue was so large that I was not without hopes, one day or other, to hate her heartily.  To which end I so used myself to think of ’em, that at length, contrary to my design and expectation, they gave me every hour less and less disturbance, till in a few days it became habitual to me to remember ’em without being displeased.  They are now grown as familiar to me as my own frailties, and in all probability in a little time longer I shall like ’em as well.

FAIN.  Marry her, marry her; be half as well acquainted with her charms as you are with her defects, and, my life on’t, you are your own man again.

MIRA.  Say you so?

FAIN.  Ay, ay; I have experience.  I have a wife, and so forth.

SCENE IV.

[To them] Messenger.

MESS.  Is one Squire Witwoud here?

BET.  Yes; what’s your business?

MESS.  I have a letter for him, from his brother Sir Wilfull, which I am charged to deliver into his own hands.

BET.  He’s in the next room, friend.  That way.

SCENE V.

Mirabell, Fainall, Betty.

MIRA.  What, is the chief of that noble family in town, Sir Wilfull Witwoud?

FAIN.  He is expected to-day.  Do you know him?

MIRA.  I have seen him; he promises to be an extraordinary person.  I think you have the honour to be related to him.

FAIN.  Yes; he is half-brother to this Witwoud by a former wife, who was sister to my Lady Wishfort, my wife’s mother.  If you marry Millamant, you must call cousins too.

MIRA.  I had rather be his relation than his acquaintance.

FAIN.  He comes to town in order to equip himself for travel.

MIRA.  For travel!  Why the man that I mean is above forty.

FAIN.  No matter for that; ’tis for the honour of England that all Europe should know we have blockheads of all ages.

MIRA.  I wonder there is not an act of parliament to save the credit of the nation and prohibit the exportation of fools.

FAIN.  By no means, ’tis better as ’tis; ’tis better to trade with a little loss, than to be quite eaten up with being overstocked.

MIRA.  Pray, are the follies of this knight-errant and those of the squire, his brother, anything related?

FAIN.  Not at all: Witwoud grows by the knight like a medlar grafted on a crab.  One will melt in your mouth and t’other set your teeth on edge; one is all pulp and the other all core.

MIRA.  So one will be rotten before he be ripe, and the other will be rotten without ever being ripe at all.

FAIN.  Sir Wilfull is an odd mixture of bashfulness and obstinacy.  But when he’s drunk, he’s as loving as the monster in The Tempest, and much after the same manner.  To give bother his due, he has something of good-nature, and does not always want wit.

MIRA.  Not always: but as often as his memory fails him and his commonplace of comparisons.  He is a fool with a good memory and some few scraps of other folks’ wit.  He is one whose conversation can never be approved, yet it is now and then to be endured.  He has indeed one good quality: he is not exceptious, for he so passionately affects the reputation of understanding raillery that he will construe an affront into a jest, and call downright rudeness and ill language satire and fire.

FAIN.  If you have a mind to finish his picture, you have an opportunity to do it at full length.  Behold the original.

SCENE VI.

[To them] Witwoud.

WIT.  Afford me your compassion, my dears; pity me, Fainall, Mirabell, pity me.

MIRA.  I do from my soul.

FAIN.  Why, what’s the matter?

WIT.  No letters for me, Betty?

BET.  Did not a messenger bring you one but now, sir?

WIT.  Ay; but no other?

BET.  No, sir.

WIT.  That’s hard, that’s very hard.  A messenger, a mule, a beast of burden, he has brought me a letter from the fool my brother, as heavy as a panegyric in a