Scene XII.

The Way of the World

by William Congreve

LADY WISHFORT, WAITWELL disguised as for SIR ROWLAND.

LADY WISHFORT
Dear Sir Rowland, I am confounded with
confusion at the retrospection of my own rudeness,--I have more
pardons to ask than the pope distributes in the year of jubilee. But
I hope where there is likely to be so near an alliance, we may unbend
the severity of decorum, and dispense with a little ceremony.

WAITWELL
My impatience, madam, is the effect of my
transport; and till I have the possession of your adorable person, I
am tantalised on the rack, and do but hang, madam, on the tenter of
expectation.

LADY WISHFORT
You have excess of gallantry, Sir Rowland, and
press things to a conclusion with a most prevailing vehemence. But a
day or two for decency of marriage -

WAITWELL
For decency of funeral, madam! The delay will
break my heart--or if that should fail, I shall be poisoned. My
nephew will get an inkling of my designs and poison me--and I would
willingly starve him before I die--I would gladly go out of the world
with that satisfaction. That would be some comfort to me, if I could
but live so long as to be revenged on that unnatural viper.

LADY WISHFORT
Is he so unnatural, say you? Truly I would
contribute much both to the saving of your life and the
accomplishment of your revenge. Not that I respect myself; though he
has been a perfidious wretch to me.

WAITWELL
Perfidious to you?

LADY WISHFORT
O Sir Rowland, the hours that he has died away
at my feet, the tears that he has shed, the oaths that he has sworn,
the palpitations that he has felt, the trances and the tremblings,
the ardours and the ecstasies, the kneelings and the risings, the
heart- heavings and the hand-gripings, the pangs and the pathetic
regards of his protesting eyes!--Oh, no memory can register.

WAITWELL
What, my rival? Is the rebel my rival? A dies.

LADY WISHFORT
No, don't kill him at once, Sir Rowland:
starve him gradually, inch by inch.

WAITWELL
I'll do't. In three weeks he shall be barefoot; in
a month out at knees with begging an alms; he shall starve upward and
upward, 'till he has nothing living but his head, and then go out in
a stink like a candle's end upon a save-all.

LADY WISHFORT
Well, Sir Rowland, you have the way,--you are
no novice in the labyrinth of love,--you have the clue. But as I am
a person, Sir Rowland, you must not attribute my yielding to any
sinister appetite or indigestion of widowhood; nor impute my
complacency to any lethargy of continence. I hope you do not think
me prone to any iteration of nuptials?

WAITWELL
Far be it from me -

LADY WISHFORT
If you do, I protest I must recede, or think
that I have made a prostitution of decorums, but in the vehemence of
compassion, and to save the life of a person of so much importance
-

WAITWELL
I esteem it so -

LADY WISHFORT
Or else you wrong my condescension -

WAITWELL
I do not, I do not -

LADY WISHFORT
Indeed you do.

WAITWELL
I do not, fair shrine of virtue.

LADY WISHFORT
If you think the least scruple of causality
was an ingredient -

WAITWELL
Dear madam, no. You are all camphire and
frankincense, all chastity and odour.

LADY WISHFORT
Or that -