The Way of the World: Scene V.
Scene V.
LADY WISHFORT, MRS. MARWOOD.
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; 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. 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 play-book--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; 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.
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, or sate
upon cow-itch.
LADY WISHFORT
Oh, 'tis very hard!
MRS. MARWOOD
And then to have my young revellers of the Temple 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; ay, ay, 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.