ROWLEY. What can have happened to trouble you since yesterday?
SIR PETER. A good—question to a married man—
ROWLEY. Nay I'm sure your Lady Sir Peter can't be the cause of your uneasiness.
SIR PETER. Why has anybody told you she was dead[?]
ROWLEY. Come, come, Sir Peter, you love her, notwithstanding your tempers do not exactly agree.
SIR PETER. But the Fault is entirely hers, Master Rowley—I am myself, the sweetest temper'd man alive, and hate a teasing temper; and so I tell her a hundred Times a day—
ROWLEY. Indeed!
SIR PETER. Aye and what is very extraordinary in all our disputes she is always in the wrong! But Lady Sneerwell, and the Set she meets at her House, encourage the perverseness of her Disposition—then to complete my vexations—Maria—my Ward—whom I ought to have the Power of a Father over, is determined to turn Rebel too and absolutely refuses the man whom I have long resolved on for her husband—meaning I suppose, to bestow herself on his profligate Brother.
ROWLEY. You know Sir Peter I have always taken the Liberty to differ with you on the subject of these two young Gentlemen—I only wish you may not be deceived in your opinion of the elder. For Charles, my life on't! He will retrieve his errors yet—their worthy Father, once my honour'd master, was at his years nearly as wild a spark.
SIR PETER. You are wrong, Master Rowley—on their Father's Death you know I acted as a kind of Guardian to them both—till their uncle Sir Oliver's Eastern Bounty gave them an early independence. Of course no person could have more opportunities of judging of their Hearts—and I was never mistaken in my life. Joseph is indeed a model for the young men of the Age—He is a man of Sentiment—and acts up to the Sentiments he professes—but for the other[,] take my word for't [if] he had any grain of Virtue by descent—he has dissipated it with the rest of his inheritance. Ah! my old Friend, Sir Oliver will be deeply mortified when he finds how Part of his Bounty has been misapplied.