SCENE I.—A Room in P
Enter A
Alith. Sister, what ails you? you are grown melancholy.
Mrs. Pinch. Would it not make any one melancholy to see you go every day fluttering about abroad, whilst I must stay at home like a poor lonely sullen bird in a cage?
Alith. Ay, sister; but you came young, and just from the nest to your cage: so that I thought you liked it, and could be as cheerful in’t as others that took their flight themselves early, and are hopping abroad in the open air.
Mrs. Pinch. Nay, I confess I was quiet enough till my husband told me what pure lives the London ladies live abroad, with their dancing, meetings, and junketings, and dressed every day in their best gowns; and I warrant you, play at nine-pins every day of the week, so they do.
Enter P
Pinch. Come, what’s here to do? you are putting the town-pleasures in her head, and setting her a- longing.
Alith. Yes, after nine-pins. You suffer none to give her those longings you mean but yourself.
Pinch. I tell her of the vanities of the town like a confessor.
Alith. A confessor! just such a confessor as he that, by forbidding a silly ostler to grease the horse’s teeth, taught him to do’t.
Pinch. Come, Mrs. Flippant, good precepts are lost when bad examples are still before us: the liberty you take abroad makes her hanker after it, and out of humour at home. Poor wretch! she desired not to come to London; I would bring her.
Alith. Very well.
Pinch. She has been this week in town, and never desired till this afternoon to go abroad.
Alith. Was she not at a play yesterday?
Pinch. Yes; but she ne’er asked me; I was myself the cause of her going.
Alith. Then if she ask you again, you are the cause of her asking, and not my example.
Pinch. Well, to-morrow night I shall be rid of you; and the next day, before ’tis light, she and I’ll be rid of the town, and my dreadful apprehensions.—Come, be not melancholy; for thou sha’t go into the country after to-morrow, dearest.
Alith. Great comfort!
Mrs. Pinch. Pish! what d’ye tell me of the country for?
Pinch. How’s this! what, pish at the country?
Mrs. Pinch. Let me alone; I am not well.
Pinch. O, if that be all—what ails my dearest?