RAVENSBANE Cease! cease! in pity’s name. You do not know the agony of being ridiculous.
DICKON Nay, Jacky, all mortals are ridiculous. Like you, they were rummaged out of the muck; and like you, they shall return to the dunghill. I advise ’em, like you, to enjoy the interim, and smoke.
RAVENSBANE This pipe, this ludicrous pipe that I forever set to my lips and puff! Why must I, Dickon? Why?
DICKON To avoid extinction—merely. You see, ’tis just as your fellow in there [Pointing to the glass.] explained. You yourself are the subtlest of mirrors, polished out of pumpkin and pipe-smoke. Into this mirror the fair Mistress Rachel has projected her lovely image, and thus provided you with what men call a soul.
RAVENSBANE Ah! then, I have a soul—the truth of me? Mistress Rachel has indeed made me a man?
DICKON Don’t flatter thyself, cobby. Break thy pipe, and whiff—soul, Mistress Rachel, man, truth, and this pretty world itself, go up in the last smoke.
RAVENSBANE No, no! not Mistress Rachel—for she is beautiful; and the images of beauty are immutable. She told me so.
DICKON What a Platonic young lady! Nevertheless, believe me, Mistress Rachel exists for your lordship merely in your lordship’s pipe-bowl.
RAVENSBANE Wretched, niggling caricature that I am! All is lost to me—all!
DICKON “Paradise Lost” again! Always blaming it on me. There’s that gaunt fellow in England has lately wrote a parody on me when I was in the apple business.