after commendation can be flattered by it, and discover beauties in
it: for that reflects our praises rather than your face.

MILLA. Oh, the vanity of these men! Fainall, d'ye hear him? If
they did not commend us, we were not handsome! Now you must know
they could not commend one if one was not handsome. Beauty the
lover's gift! Lord, what is a lover, that it can give? Why, one
makes lovers as fast as one pleases, and they live as long as one
pleases, and they die as soon as one pleases; and then, if one
pleases, one makes more.

WIT. Very pretty. Why, you make no more of making of lovers,
madam, than of making so many card-matches.

MILLA. One no more owes one's beauty to a lover than one's wit to
an echo. They can but reflect what we look and say: vain empty
things if we are silent or unseen, and want a being.

MIRA. Yet, to those two vain empty things, you owe two the greatest
pleasures of your life.

MILLA. How so?

MIRA. To your lover you owe the pleasure of hearing yourselves
praised, and to an echo the pleasure of hearing yourselves talk.

WIT. But I know a lady that loves talking so incessantly, she won't
give an echo fair play; she has that everlasting rotation of tongue
that an echo must wait till she dies before it can catch her last
words.