Love. Can you, then, coolly ask what 'tis I mean, thou reveller, thou rambler? A fine young lady, with your midnight frolics! But what do I pretend to? I know not how with bended knees to call you Ceres; make you an offering of summer fruits, and deify your vanity! Thou art no goddess; thou'rt a very woman, with all the guile! Your barges! your treats! your fireworks!
Pen. What means the insolent? You grow insufferable!
Love. Oh, Penelope! that look, that disdainful look has pierced my soul, and ebbed my rage to penitence and sorrow. I own my fault; I'm too rash——
Pen. The imaginary enemies you raise are but mere forms of your sickly brain: so I think, and scorn 'em. A diffident, a humorous, and ungenerous man, who, without grounds, calls me inconstant, shall surely find me so. She will be very happy that takes a constant man with twenty thousand humours.
Love. Is it a fault my life's bound up in thee,
That all my powers change with thy looks,
That my eyes gloat on thee when thou'rt present,
And ache and roll for light when thou'rt absent?
Pen. A little ill-usage, I see, improves a lover. I never heard him speak so well in my life before. [Aside.
Love. Of you I am not jealous:
'Tis my own indesert[58] that gives me fears,
And tenderness forms dangers where they're not;
I doubt and envy all things that approach thee:
Not a fond mother of a long-wished-for only child beholds with such kind terrors her infant offspring, as I do her I love. She thinks its food, if she's not by, unwholesome; and all the ambient air made up of fevers and of quartan agues, except she shrouds it in her arms. Such is my unpitied, anxious care for you; and can I see another——
Pen. What other?