The Way of the World (Act 1 Scene 3)

Mirabell, Fainall, Betty

FAINALL
Joy of your success, Mirabell; you look pleased.

MIRABELL
Ay; I have been engaged in a matter of some sort of mirth, which is not yet ripe for discovery. I am glad this is not a cabal-night. I wonder, Fainall, that you who are married, and of consequence should be discreet, will suffer your wife to be of such a party.

FAINALL
Faith, I am not jealous. Besides, most who are engaged are women and relations; and for the men, they are of a kind too contemptible to give scandal.

MIRABELL
I am of another opinion: the greater the coxcomb, always the more the scandal; for a woman who is not a fool can have but one reason for associating with a man who is one.

FAINALL
Are you jealous as often as you see Witwoud entertained by Millamant?

MIRABELL
Of her understanding I am, if not of her person.

FAINALL
You do her wrong; for, to give her her due, she has wit.

MIRABELL
She has beauty enough to make any man think so, and complaisance enough not to contradict him who shall tell her so.

FAINALL
For a passionate lover methinks you are a man somewhat too discerning in the failings of your mistress.

MIRABELL
And for a discerning man somewhat too passionate a lover, for I like her with all her faults; nay, like her for her faults. Her follies are so natural, or so artful, that they become her, and those affectations which in another woman would be odious serve but to make her more agreeable. I’ll tell thee, Fainall, she once used me with that insolence that in revenge I took her to pieces, sifted her, and separated her failings: I studied ’em and got ’em by rote. The catalogue was so large that I was not without hopes, one day or other, to hate her heartily. To which end I so used myself to think of ’em, that at length, contrary to my design and expectation, they gave me every hour less and less disturbance, till in a few days it became habitual to me to remember ’em without being displeased. They are now grown as familiar to me as my own frailties, and in all probability in a little time longer I shall like ’em as well.

FAINALL
Marry her, marry her; be half as well acquainted with her charms as you are with her defects, and, my life on’t, you are your own man again.

MIRABELL
Say you so?

FAINALL
Ay, ay; I have experience. I have a wife, and so forth.