"But pray who is Mrs. Skerritt?" asked Irene. "Stay, she is the lady who was so kind to you. I should like to know her."
"Nay, love, I think it were better not, though there are great ladies who ask her to their houses, and pretend to adore her—Lady Mary Montagu, for instance. But my young wife must choose her friends with the utmost discretion."
"I wish for no friends whom you do not care for," said his bride; "and now, Herrick, when am I to see the new comedy? It is hard that all the town should have admired my husband's play, while I know so little about it."
"Shall we go to Drury Lane this evening?"
"I should love to go."
"Then you shall. Lavendale has hired a box for the run of my play—he always does things in a princely style—and we can have it all to ourselves this evening. 'Twill be our first public appearance as man and wife, and all the town will guess we are married, and will envy me my prize."
They dined, or pretended to dine, at four, and then Lavendale's chariot drove them to Drury Lane.
What a delight it was for Irene to sit by her lover-husband's side, and watch and listen while the story of the play unfolded itself—to hear the audience laugh and applaud at each brisk retort, each humorous or fondly tender fancy! The play was a story of love and lovers, the old, old story which has been telling itself ever since creation, and which yet seems ever new to the actors in it. There were wit and passion and freshness and manly spirit in Herrick's play, but there was not a single indecency; and the older school of wits and scribblers wondered exceedingly how so milk-and-waterish a comedy could take the town. Mrs. Manley, in a dark little box yonder, whispering behind her fan to a superannuated buck in a periwig that reached his knees, protested that the play was the tamest she had ever sat out.
"Tamer than The Conscious Lovers," she said, "though poor Dick lived in such fear of his wife that he dared never give free scope to his wit, lest Mrs. Molly should take offence at him. O, for the days of Etherege and Wycherley!"
"Nay, I protest," said the buck, adjusting a stray curl with his pocket-comb, and ogling the house with weak elderly eyes; "the play may be decent, but it is not tame. Those scenes between Nancy and Wilks are vastly fine. Stap my vitals if I have not been between laughing and crying all the evening; and this is the seventh time I have seen the piece. I wonder who that pretty creature is in my Lord Lavendale's box, in a plain gray gown and a cherry-coloured hood? She is the finest woman—present company excepted—I have ogled for a decade."