Syl. Pray, cousin, are not vapours a sort of air? Taste air! you might as well tell me I may feed upon air! but pr'ythee, my dear Melinda! don't put on such an air to me. Your education and mine were just the same, and I remember the time when we never troubled our heads about air, but when the sharp air from the Welsh mountains made our fingers ache in a cold morning, at the boarding-school.
Mel. Our education, cousin, was the same, but our temperaments had nothing alike; you have the constitution of an horse.
Syl. So far as to be troubled neither with spleen, cholic, nor vapours. I need no salts for my stomach, no hartshorn for my head, nor wash for my complexion; I can gallop all the morning after the hunting-horn, and all the evening after a fiddle. In short, I can do every thing with my father, but drink and shoot flying; and I am sure I can do every thing my mother could, were I put to the trial.
Mel. You are in a fair way of being put to't, for I am told your captain is come to town.
Syl. Ay, Melinda, he is come, and I'll take care he shan't go without a companion.
Mel. You are certainly mad, cousin!
Syl. "And there's a pleasure in being mad,
Which none but madmen know".
Mel. Thou poor romantic Quixote!—hast thou the vanity to imagine that a young sprightly officer, that rambles o'er half the globe in half a year, can confine his thoughts to the little daughter of a country justice, in an obscure part of the world?
Syl. Psha! what care I for his thoughts; I should not like a man with confined thoughts; it shows a narrowness of soul. In short, Melinda, I think a petticoat a mighty simple thing, and I am heartily tired of my sex.
Mel. That is, you are tired of an appendix to our sex, that you can't so handsomely get rid of in petticoats as if you were in breeches.—O'my conscience, Sylvia, hadst thou been a man, thou hadst been the greatest rake in Christendom.