Your fame I have preserved. Your fortune has been bestowed
as the prodigality of your love would have it, in pleasures which we
both have shared. Yet, had not you been false I had e'er this
repaid it. 'Tis true--had you permitted Mirabell with Millamant to
have stolen their marriage, my lady had been incensed beyond all
means of reconcilement: Millamant had forfeited the moiety of her
fortune, which then would have descended to my wife. And wherefore
did I marry but to make lawful prize of a rich widow's wealth, and
squander it on love and you?
MRS. MAR. Deceit and frivolous pretence!
FAIN. Death, am I not married? What's pretence? Am I not
imprisoned, fettered? Have I not a wife? Nay, a wife that was a
widow, a young widow, a handsome widow, and would be again a widow,
but that I have a heart of proof, and something of a constitution to
bustle through the ways of wedlock and this world. Will you yet be
reconciled to truth and me?
MRS. MAR. Impossible. Truth and you are inconsistent.
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