FAULKLAND Again, Julia, you raise ideas that feed and justify my doubts. I would not have been more free--no--I am proud of my restraint. Yet--yet--perhaps your high respect alone for this solemn compact has fettered your inclinations, which else had made a worthier choice. How shall I be sure, had you remained unbound in thought and promise, that I should still have been the object of your persevering love? JULIA Then try me now. Let us be free as strangers as to what is past: my heart will not feel more liberty! FAULKLAND There now! so hasty, Julia! so anxious to be free! If your love for me were fixed and ardent, you would not lose your hold, even though I wished it! JULIA Oh! you torture me to the heart! I cannot bear it. FAULKLAND I do not mean to distress you. If I loved you less I should never give you an uneasy moment. But hear me. All my fretful doubts arise from this. Women are not used to weigh and separate the motives of their affections: the cold dictates of prudence, gratitude, or filial duty, may sometimes be mistaken for the pleadings of the heart. I would not boast--yet let me say, that I have neither age, person, nor character, to found dislike on; my fortune such as few ladies could be charged with indiscretion in the match. O Julia! when love receives such countenance from prudence, nice minds will be suspicious of its birth. JULIA I know not whither your insinuations would tend:--but as they seem pressing to insult me, I will spare you the regret of having done so.--I have given you no cause for this! [Exit in tears.] FAULKLAND In tears! Stay, Julia: stay but for a moment.--The door is fastened!--Julia!--my soul--but for one moment!--I hear her sobbing!--'Sdeath! what a brute am I to use her thus! Yet stay!--Ay--she is coming now:--how little resolution there is in a woman!--how a few soft words can turn them!--No, faith!--she is not coming either.--Why, Julia--my love--say but that you forgive me--come but to tell me that--now this is being too resentful. Stay! she is coming too--I thought she would--no steadiness in anything: her going away must have been a mere trick then--she shan't see that I was hurt by it.--I'll affect indifference--[Hums a tune; then listens.] No--zounds! she's not coming!--nor don't intend it, I suppose.--This is not steadiness, but obstinacy! Yet I deserve it.--What, after so long an absence to quarrel with her tenderness!--'twas barbarous and unmanly!--I should be ashamed to see her now.--I'll wait till her just resentment is abated--and when I distress her so again, may I lose her for ever! and be linked instead to some antique virago, whose gnawing passions, and long hoarded spleen, shall make me curse my folly half the day and all the night. [Exit.] * * * * * * * Scene III--Mrs. MALAPROP's Lodgings. [Mrs. MALAPROP, with a letter in her hand, and CAPTAIN ABSOLUTE.]