Will you slander poor Elvira? Elvira, whom you have known from her cradle—whom you have loved and fondled as your own child?"
"Patience! patience! my good friend."
"I have no patience, I can have no patience, when I hear my daughter scandalized—my poor motherless girl. Remember, if she should err, she lost her mother in her childhood—she has been always brought up with me, and as she has been the playfellow of your sons, from her earliest infancy, perhaps she may not act according to those rigid restraints imposed upon her sex, by those who have been always secluded from the society of men. But she means well, Sir Ambrose, she means well always, and I'd answer for her virtue with my life. Besides, you know, she has always been used to have an intimate friend of the other sex;—You know Edmund—"
"No one ever blamed her whilst Edmund was her friend."
"And who dares blame her now? No one, I trust, whilst I have an arm and a sword ready to defend her."
"My good friend, you reason like a fond
