LADY TOUCH. Again provoke me! Do you wind me like a larum, only to rouse my own stilled soul for your diversion? Confusion! MASK. Nay, madam, I'm gone, if you relapse. What needs this? I say nothing but what you yourself, in open hours of love, have told me. Why should you deny it? Nay, how can you? Is not all this present heat owing to the same fire? Do you not love him still? How have I this day offended you, but in not breaking off his match with Cynthia? which, ere to-morrow, shall be done, had you but patience. LADY TOUCH. How, what said you, Maskwell? Another caprice to unwind my temper? MASK. By heav'n, no; I am your slave, the slave of all your pleasures; and will not rest till I have given you peace, would you suffer me. LADY TOUCH. O Maskwell! in vain I do disguise me from thee, thou know'st me, knowest the very inmost windings and recesses of my soul. O Mellefont! I burn; married to morrow! Despair strikes me. Yet my soul knows I hate him too: let him but once be mine, and next immediate ruin seize him. MASK. Compose yourself, you shall possess and ruin him too,--will that please you? LADY TOUCH. How, how? Thou dear, thou precious villain, how? MASK. You have already been tampering with my Lady Plyant. LADY TOUCH. I have: she is ready for any impression I think fit. MASK. She must be throughly persuaded that Mellefont loves her. LADY TOUCH. She is so credulous that way naturally, and likes him so well, that she will believe it faster than I can persuade her. But I don't see what you can propose from such a trifling design, for her first conversing with Mellefont will convince her of the contrary. MASK. I know it. I don't depend upon it. But it will prepare something else, and gain us leisure to lay a stronger plot. If I gain a little time, I shall not want contrivance. One minute gives invention to destroy, What to rebuild will a whole age employ. ACT II. SCENE I. LADY FROTH _and_ CYNTHIA. CYNT. Indeed, madam! Is it possible your ladyship could have been so much in love? LADY FROTH. I could not sleep; I did not sleep one wink for three weeks together. CYNT. Prodigious! I wonder want of sleep, and so much love and so much wit as your ladyship has, did not turn your brain. LADY FROTH. Oh, my dear Cynthia, you must not rally your friend. But really, as you say, I wonder too. But then I had a way. For, between you and I, I had whimsies and vapours, but I gave them vent. CYNT. How, pray, madam? LADY FROTH. Oh, I writ, writ abundantly. Do you never write? CYNT. Write what? LADY FROTH. Songs, elegies, satires, encomiums, panegyrics, lampoons, plays, or heroic poems? CYNT. O Lord, not I, madam; I'm content to be a courteous reader. LADY FROTH. Oh, inconsistent! In love and not write! If my lord and I had been both of your temper, we had never come together. Oh, bless me! What a sad thing would that have been, if my lord and I should never have met!