"Madam, I have been treated to-day with all the ceremony and kindness imaginable at my lady Autumn's. But the nauseous old woman at the upper end of her table..." "_Olivia._ Revives the old Grecian custom, of serving in a death's head with their banquets.... I detest her hollow cherry cheeks: she looks like an old coach new painted.... She is still most splendidly, gallantly ugly, and looks like an ill piece of daubing in a rich frame."[275] The scene is borrowed from Molière's "Misanthrope" and the "Critique de l'École des Femmes"; but how transformed! Our modern nerves would not endure the portrait Olivia draws of Manly, her lover: he hears her unawares; she forthwith stands before him, laughs at him to his face, declares herself to be married; tells him she means to keep the diamonds which he has given her, and defies him. Fidelia says to her: "But, madam, what could make you dissemble love to him, when 'twas so hard a thing for you; and flatter his love to you?" "_Olivia._ That which makes all the world flatter and dissemble, 'twas his money: I had a real passion for that... As soon as I had his money, I hastened his departure, like a wife, who when she has made the most of a dying husband's breath, pulls away his pillow."[276] The last phrase is rather that of a morose satirist than of an accurate observer. The woman's impudence is like a professed courtesan's. In love at first sight with Fidelia, whom she takes for a young man, she hangs upon her neck, "stuffs her with kisses," gropes about in the dark, crying, "Where are thy lips?" There is a kind of animal ferocity in her love. She sends her husband off by an Improvised comedy; then skipping about like a dancing-girl cries out: "Go, husband, and come up, friend; just the buckets in the well; the absence of one brings the other. But I hope, like them, too, they will not meet in the Way, jostle, and clash together."[277] Surprised in _flagrante delicto_, and having confessed all to her cousin, as soon as she sees a chance of safety, she swallows her avowal with the effrontery of an actress: