Hardcastle: It means that you say and unsay things at pleasure; that you can address a lady in private and deny it in public; that you have one story for us and another for my daughter.
Marlow: Daughter? This lady your daughter? Oh, the devil! Oh—!
Kate: In which of your characters may we address you? The faltering gentleman who looks on the ground and hates hypocrisy, or the bold, forward Agreeable Rattle of the ladies' club?
Marlow: Zounds, this is worse than death! I must
be gone.
Hardcastle: But you shall not! I see it was all a mistake. She'll forgive you; we'll all forgive you. Courage, man! And if she makes as good a wife as she has a daughter, I don't believe you'll ever repent your bargain. So now to supper. To-morrow we shall gather all the poor of this parish about us; the mistakes of the night shall be crowned with a merry morning.
FOOTNOTES:
[D] The Life of Goldsmith, by John Forster, may be found in Volume IX of the World's Greatest Books (see also Vol. IV, p. 275). "The Mistakes of a Night, or She Stoops to Conquer," appeared at Covent Garden, in March, 1773. So convinced was George Colman that the public would endure nothing but sentiment, that he could hardly be induced to accept the play, and was extremely nervous about its success, almost until the fall of the curtain on the first night. Nevertheless, its success was immediate and decisive, and it became established as a stock piece. The play loses nothing by the suppression of sentimental passages between Hastings and Miss Neville, without which Colman would certainly have declined it altogether. Apart from the main argument—the wooing of Kate Hardcastle—the plot turns on the points that Tony Lumpkin is the son of Mrs. Hardcastle by her first marriage, and that Constance Neville is her niece and ward, not her husband's.