[ANSELM advances.

ANS.  Fair mistress, God save you!

FUL.  What a circumstance
Doth he begin with; what an ass is he,
To tell her at the first that she is fair;
The only means to make her to be coy! 
He should have rather told her she was foul,
And brought her out of love quite with herself;
And, being so, she would the less have car’d,
Upon whose secrets she had laid her love. 
He hath almost marr’d all with that word fair. [Aside.[8]]

ANS.  Mistress, God save you!

FUL.  What a block is that,
To say, God save you! is the fellow mad? 
Once to name God in his ungodly suit.

MRS ART.  You are welcome, sir.  Come you to speak with me
Or with my husband? pray you, what’s your will?

FUL.  She answers to the purpose; what’s your will? 
O zounds, that I were there to answer her.

ANS.  Mistress, my will is not so soon express’d
Without your special favour, and the promise
Of love and pardon, if I speak amiss.

FUL.  O ass!  O dunce!  O blockhead! that hath left
The plain broad highway and the readiest path,
To travel round about by circumstance: 
He might have told his meaning in a word,
And now hath lost his opportunity. 
Never was such a truant in love’s school;
I am asham’d that e’er I was his tutor.

MRS ART.  Sir, you may freely speak, whate’er it be,
So that your speech suiteth with modesty.

FUL.  To this now could I answer passing well.

ANS.  Mistress, I, pitying that so fair a creature—­

FUL.  Still fair, and yet I warn’d the contrary.

ANS.  Should by a villain be so foully us’d,
As you have been—­

FUL. As you have been—­ay, that was well put in!

ANS.  If time and place were both convenient[9]—­
Have made this bold intrusion, to present
My love and service to your sacred self.

FUL.  Indifferent, that was not much amiss.

MRS ART.  Sir, what you mean by service and by love,
I will not know; but what you mean by villain,
I fain would know.

ANS.  That villain is your husband,
Whose wrongs towards you are bruited through the land. 
O, can you suffer at a peasant’s hands,
Unworthy once to touch this silken skin,
To be so rudely beat and buffeted? 
Can you endure from such infectious breath,
Able to blast your beauty, to have names
Of such impoison’d hate flung in your face?

FUL.  O, that was good, nothing was good but that;
That was the lesson that I taught him last.

ANS.  O, can you hear your never-tainted fame
Wounded with words of shame and infamy? 
O, can you see your pleasures dealt away,
And you to be debarr’d all part of them,
And bury it in deep oblivion? 
Shall your true right be still contributed
’Mongst hungry bawds, insatiate courtesans? 
And can you love that villain, by whose deed
Your soul doth sigh, and your distress’d heart bleed?