DANGLE.
It’s a great trouble—yet, egad, it’s pleasant too.—Why, sometimes of a morning I have a dozen people call on me at breakfast-time, whose faces I never saw before, nor ever desire to see again.
SNEER.
That must be very pleasant indeed!
DANGLE.
And not a week but I receive fifty letters, and not a line in them about any business of my own.
SNEER.
An amusing correspondence!
DANGLE.
[Reading.] Bursts into tears and exit.—What, is this a tragedy?
SNEER.
No, that’s a genteel comedy, not a translation—only taken from the French: it is written in a style which they have lately tried to run down; the true sentimental, and nothing ridiculous in it from the beginning to the end.
MRS. DANGLE.
Well, if they had kept to that, I should not have been such an enemy to the stage; there was some edification to be got from those pieces, Mr. Sneer!
SNEER.
I am quite of your opinion, Mrs. Dangle: the theatre, in proper hands, might certainly be made the school of morality; but now, I am sorry to say it, people seem to go there principally for their entertainment!
MRS. DANGLE.
It would have been more to the credit of the managers to have kept it in the other line.
SNEER.
Undoubtedly, madam; and hereafter perhaps to have had it recorded, that in the midst of a luxurious and dissipated age, they preserved two houses in the capital, where the conversation was always moral at least, if not entertaining!