Scene V.

The Way of the World

by William Congreve

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.