FLINT I have uses for those jewels.  Send Marian to me. (Exit William.) I know no other trade that is expected to depart from its fair advantages but ours.  I do not see the baker, the butcher, the shoemaker, or, to go higher, the lawyer, the physician, the divine, give up any of their legitimate gains, even when the pretences of their art had failed; yet we are to be branded with an odious name, stigmatized, discountenanced even by the administrators of those laws which acknowledge us; scowled at by the lower sort of people, whose needs we serve!

Enter Marian.

Come hither, Marian.  Come, kiss your father.  The report runs that he is full of spotted crime.  What is your belief, child?

MARIAN That never good report went with our calling, father.  I have heard you say, the poor look only to the advantages which we derive from them, and overlook the accommodations which they receive from us.  But the poor are the poor, father, and have little leisure to make distinctions.  I wish we could give up this business.

FLINT
You have not seen that idle fellow, Davenport?

MARIAN
No, indeed, father, since your injunction.

FLINT
I take but my lawful profit.  The law is not over favourable to us.

MARIAN
Marian is no judge of these things.

FLINT
They call me oppressive, grinding.—­I know not what—­

MARIAN
Alas!

FLINT
Usurer, extortioner.  Am I these things?

MARIAN
You are Marian’s kind and careful father.  That is enough for a child to
know.

FLINT Here, girl, is a little box of jewels, which the necessities of a foolish woman of quality have transferred into our true and lawful possession.  Go, place them with the trinkets that were your mother’s.  They are all yours, Marian, if you do not cross me in your marriage.  No gentry shall match into this house, to flout their wife hereafter with her parentage.  I will hold this business with convulsive grasp to my dying day.  I will plague these poor, whom you speak so tenderly of.

MARIAN
You frighten me, father.  Do not frighten Marian.

FLINT
I have heard them say, There goes Flint—­Flint, the cruel pawnbroker!

MARIAN
Stay at home with Marian.  You shall hear no ugly words to vex you.

FLINT
You shall ride in a gilded chariot upon the necks of these poor,
Marian.  Their tears shall drop pearls for my girl.  Their sighs shall be
good wind for us.  They shall blow good for my girl.  Put up the jewels,
Marian. [Exit.]

Enter Lucy.

LUCY
Miss, miss, your father has taken his hat, and is slept out, and Mr.
Davenport is on the stairs; and I came to tell you—­

MARIAN
Alas! who let him in?

Enter Davenport.

DAVENPORT
My dearest girl—­