Mirabell. Does that please you?
Mrs. Millamant. Infinitely; I love to give pain.
Mirabell. You wou’d affect a cruelty which is not in your nature; your true vanity is in the power of pleasing.
Mrs. Millamant. O I ask your pardon for that—one’s cruelty is in one’s power; and when one parts with one’s cruelty, one parts with one’s power; and when one has parted with that, I fancy one’s old and ugly.
Mirabell. Ay, ay, suffer your cruelty to ruin the object of your power, to destroy your lover—and then how vain, how lost a thing you’ll be! nay, ’tis true: you are no longer handsome when you’ve lost your lover; your beauty dies upon the instant; for beauty is the lover’s gift; ’tis he bestows your charms—your glass is all a cheat. The ugly and the old, whom the looking-glass mortifies, yet after commendation can be flatter’d by it, and discover beauties in it; for that reflects our praises rather than our face.
Mrs. Millamant. O the vanity of these men! Fainall, d’ye hear him? If they did not commend us, we were not handsome! now you must know they cou’d not commend one, if one was not handsome. Beauty the lover’s gift—Lord, what is a lover, that it can give? Why, one makes lovers as fast as one pleases, and they live as long as one pleases, and they die as soon as one pleases; and then if one pleases, one makes more.
Witwoud. Very pretty. Why, you make no more of making of lovers, Madam, than of making so many card-matches.
Mrs. Millamant. One no more owes one’s beauty to a lover than one’s wit to an echo; they can but reflect what we look and say; vain empty things if we are silent or unseen, and want a being.
Mirabell. Yet to those two vain empty things you owe the two greatest pleasures of your life.
Mrs. Millamant. How so?