BELVIL
Childish!
MR. H. Not so. Oh, Belvil, you are blest with one which sighing virgins may repeat without a blush, and for it change the paternal. But what virgin of any delicacy (and I require some in a wife) would endure to be called Mrs.——?
BELVIL Ha! ha! ha! most absurd. Did not Clementina Falconbridge, the romantic Clementina Falconbridge, fancy Tommy Potts? and Rosabella Sweetlips sacrifice her mellifluous appellative to Jack Deady? Matilda her cousin married a Gubbins, and her sister Amelia a Clutterbuck.
MR. H.
Potts is tolerable, Deady is sufferable, Gubbins is bearable, and
Clutterbuck is endurable, but Ho—
BELVIL Hush, Jack, don't betray yourself. But you are really ashamed of the family name?
MR. H. Aye, and of my father that begot me, and my father's father, and all their forefathers that have borne it since the conquest.
BELVIL
But how do you know the women are so squeamish?
MR. H. I have tried them. I tell you there is neither maiden of sixteen nor widow of sixty but would turn up their noses at it. I have been refused by nineteen virgins, twenty-nine relicts, and two old maids.
BELVIL
That was hard indeed, Jack.
MR. H. Parsons have stuck at publishing the banns, because they averred it was a heathenish name; parents have lingered their consent, because they suspected it was a fictitious name; and rivals have declined my challenges, because they pretended it was an ungentlemanly name.