now better where pity is due.

MELLEFONT.

And where then?

NORTON.

Ah, let me dress you and don't ask.

MELLEFONT.

Confound it! Are _your_ reproofs then to awaken together with my
conscience? I understand you; I know on whom you expend your pity. But
I will do justice to her and to myself. Quite right, do not have any
pity on me! Curse me in your heart; but--curse yourself also!

NORTON.

Myself also?

MELLEFONT.

Yes, because you serve a miserable wretch, whom earth ought not to
bear, and because you have made yourself a partaker in his crimes.

NORTON.

I made myself a partaker in your crimes? In what way?

MELLEFONT.

By keeping silent about them.

NORTON.

Well, that is good! A word would have cost me my neck in the heat of
your passions. And, besides, did I not find you already so bad, when I
made your acquaintance, that all hope of amendment was vain? What a
life I have seen you leading from the first moment! In the lowest
society of gamblers and vagrants--I call them what they were without
regard to their knightly titles and such like--in this society you
squandered a fortune which might have made a way for you to an
honourable position. And your culpable intercourse with all sorts of
women, especially with the wicked Marwood----

MELLEFONT.

Restore me--restore me to that life. It was virtue compared with the
present one. I spent my fortune; well! The punishment follows, and I
shall soon enough feel all the severity and humiliation of want. I
associated with vicious women; that may be. I was myself seduced more
often than I seduced others; and those whom I did seduce wished it.
But--I still had no ruined virtue upon my conscience. I had carried off
no Sara from the house of a beloved father and forced her to follow a
scoundrel, who was no longer free. I had----who comes so early to me?

Scene IV.

Betty, Mellefont, Norton.

NORTON.

It is Betty.

MELLEFONT.

Up already, Betty? How is your mistress?

BETTY.

How is she? (_sobbing_.) It was long after