“I, unkind to you? what a brute I must be!”
“My meaning is, you justly rebuked me, only you should not tell an actress she has no heart—that is always understood. Well, Sir Charles Pomander said she married a third in two months!”
“And did she?”
“No, it was in six weeks; that man never tells the truth; and since then she has married a fourth.”
“I am glad of it!”
“So am I, since you awakened my conscience.”
Delicious flattery! and of all flattery the sweetest, when a sweet creature does flattery, not merely utters it.
After this, Vane made no more struggles; he surrendered himself to the charming seduction, and as his advances were respectful, but ardent and incessant, he found himself at the end of a fortnight Mrs. Woffington's professed lover.
They wrote letters to each other every day. On Sunday they went to church together in the morning, and spent the afternoon in the suburbs wherever grass was and dust was not.
In the next fortnight, poor Vane thought he had pretty well fathomed this extraordinary woman's character. Plumb the Atlantic with an eighty-fathom line, sir!