MRS. HARDCASTLE. Well! I vow, Mr. Hastings, you are very entertaining. There’s nothing in the world I love to talk of so much as London, and the fashions, though I was never there myself. HASTINGS. Never there! You amaze me! From your air and manner, I concluded you had been bred all your life either at Ranelagh, St. James’s, or Tower Wharf. MRS. HARDCASTLE. O! sir, you’re only pleased to say so. We country persons can have no manner at all. I’m in love with the town, and that serves to raise me above some of our neighbouring rustics; but who can have a manner, that has never seen the Pantheon, the Grotto Gardens, the Borough, and such places where the nobility chiefly resort? All I can do is to enjoy London at second-hand. I take care to know every tete-a-tete from the Scandalous Magazine, and have all the fashions, as they come out, in a letter from the two Miss Rickets of Crooked Lane. Pray how do you like this head, Mr. Hastings? HASTINGS. Extremely elegant and degagee, upon my word, madam. Your friseur is a Frenchman, I suppose? MRS. HARDCASTLE. I protest, I dressed it myself from a print in the Ladies’ Memorandum-book for the last year. HASTINGS. Indeed! Such a head in a side-box at the play-house would draw as many gazers as my Lady Mayoress at a City Ball. MRS. HARDCASTLE. I vow, since inoculation began, there is no such thing to be seen as a plain woman; so one must dress a little particular, or one may escape in the crowd. HASTINGS. But that can never be your case, madam, in any dress. (Bowing.) MRS. HARDCASTLE. Yet, what signifies my dressing when I have such a piece of antiquity by my side as Mr. Hardcastle: all I can say will never argue down a single button from his clothes. I have often wanted him to throw off his great flaxen wig, and where he was bald, to plaster it over, like my Lord Pately, with powder. HASTINGS. You are right, madam; for, as among the ladies there are none ugly, so among the men there are none old. MRS. HARDCASTLE. But what do you think his answer was? Why, with his usual Gothic vivacity, he said I only wanted him to throw off his wig, to convert it into a tete for my own wearing. HASTINGS. Intolerable! At your age you may wear what you please, and it must become you. MRS. HARDCASTLE. Pray, Mr. Hastings, what do you take to be the most fashionable age about town? HASTINGS. Some time ago, forty was all the mode; but I’m told the ladies intend to bring up fifty for the ensuing winter. MRS. HARDCASTLE. Seriously. Then I shall be too young for the fashion. HASTINGS. No lady begins now to put on jewels till she’s past forty. For instance, Miss there, in a polite circle, would be considered as a child, as a mere maker of samplers. MRS. HARDCASTLE. And yet Mrs. Niece thinks herself as much a woman, and is as fond of jewels, as the oldest of us all. HASTINGS. Your niece, is she? And that young gentleman, a brother of yours, I should presume?