"Is your lordship so very sure 'tis poor stuff?" asked Tonia.
"If it wasn't, don't you think Garrick would have produced it? He loves Shakespeare—a vastly respectable poet whose plays he can act without paying for them. Be sure you let me know when your comedy is to be produced, madam, for I should die of vexation not to be present at the first performance."
"Alas! there is a great gulf between a written play and an acted one," sighed Tonia. "Mr. Garrick may not like it. But 'tis more my father's play than mine, my lord. He finds the ideas, and I provide the words."
"She has a spontaneous eloquence that takes my breath away. But for the machinery, the fabric of the piece, the arrangement of the scenes, the method, the taste, the scope of the characters, and their action upon one another, I confess myself the author," Thornton said, in his grandiloquent way, having assumed his company manner, a style of conversation which he kept for persons of quality.
"I doubt Miss Thornton is fonder of study than of pleasure, or I should have seen her at Mrs. Mandalay's again——"
"I hate the place," interjected Tonia; "and if women of fashion are all like the painted wretches I saw there——"
"They all paint—white lead is the rule and a clean-washed face the exception," said Kilrush; "but 'twould not be fair to judge the beau monde by the herd you saw t'other night. Mrs. Mandalay's is an olla podrida of good and bad company. Your father must initiate you in the pleasures of Ranelagh."
"I have had enough of such pleasures. I had a curiosity—like Fatima's—to see a world that was hid from me. But for pleasure I prefer the fireside, and a novel by Richardson. If he would but give us a new Clarissa!"
"You admire Clarissa?"
"I adore, I revere her!"