Blandish. I should never forgive your meddling.
Prompt. Oh! never, never!
Blandish. [Aloud.] Well, dispatch——
Mrs. Blandish. Hold!—apropos, to the lying-in list—at Mrs. Barbara Winterbloom's, to inquire after the Angola kittens, and the last hatch of Java sparrows.
Prompt. [Reading his Memorandum as he goes out.] Ladies in the straw—ministers, &c.—old maids, cats, and sparrows: never had a better list of how d'ye's, since I had the honour to collect for the Blandish family.
[Exit.
Mrs. Blandish. These are the attentions that establish valuable friendships in female life. By adapting myself to the whims of one, submitting to the jest of another, assisting the little plots of a third, and taking part against the husbands with all, I am become an absolute essential in the polite world; the very soul of every fashionable party in town or country.
Blandish. The country! Pshaw! Time thrown away.
Mrs. Blandish. Time thrown away! As if women of fashion left London, to turn freckled shepherdesses.—No, no; cards, cards and backgammon, are the delights of rural life; and, slightly as you may think of my skill, at the year's end I am no inconsiderable sharer in the pin-money of my society.
Blandish. A paltry resource——Gambling is a damned trade, and I have done with it.