Lady Plyant, Mellefont.
LADY PLYANT. Oh, such a thing! the impiety of it startles me—to wrong so good, so fair a creature, and one that loves you tenderly—’tis a barbarity of barbarities, and nothing could be guilty of it—
MEL. But the greatest villain imagination can form, I grant it; and next to the villainy of such a fact is the villainy of aspersing me with the guilt. How? which way was I to wrong her? For yet I understand you not.
LADY PLYANT. Why, gads my life, cousin Mellefont, you cannot be so peremptory as to deny it, when I tax you with it to your face? for now Sir Paul’s gone, you are corum nobus.
MEL. By heav’n, I love her more than life or—
LADY PLYANT. Fiddle faddle, don’t tell me of this and that, and everything in the world, but give me mathemacular demonstration; answer me directly. But I have not patience. Oh, the impiety of it, as I was saying, and the unparalleled wickedness! O merciful Father! How could you think to reverse nature so, to make the daughter the means of procuring the mother?
MEL. The daughter to procure the mother!
LADY PLYANT. Ay, for though I am not Cynthia’s own mother, I am her father’s wife, and that’s near enough to make it incest.
MEL. Incest! O my precious aunt, and the devil in conjunction. [Aside.]
LADY PLYANT. Oh, reflect upon the horror of that, and then the guilt of deceiving everybody; marrying the daughter, only to make a cuckold of the father; and then seducing me, debauching my purity, and perverting me from the road of virtue in which I have trod thus long, and never made one trip, not one faux pas. Oh, consider it! What would you have to answer for if you should provoke me to frailty? Alas! humanity is feeble, heav’n knows! very feeble, and unable to support itself.