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Let her talk, and trust to me for your happiness.

Let me talk indeed! I shall talk and do too, I assure you. You are a pretty one to be sure, with your wisdom, your familiar demon, your irony, and all your nonsense that signifies nothing, to trouble yourself about matrimony: you are a good sort of a man, but you really know nothing of the world; happy is it for you that I am able to govern you. Come, Aglae, I must settle you as soon as possible: And you, sir, there, that seem as if you were thunderstruck, I have taken care of you too: Drixa is the woman for you: you will both of you thank me by and by: I shall have done it all in a minute: I am very expeditious: let us lose no time therefore, by rights it should have been all over before this.

My children, don't thwart or provoke her, but pay her all kind of deference: we must comply with since we can't mend her: it is the triumph of reason to live well with those who have none.

Divine Socrates, I know not how to believe my own happiness: how can Aglae, whose father died in