LADY WISHFORT. Why, if she should be innocent, if she should be wronged after all, ha? I don’t know what to think, and I promise you, her education has been unexceptionable. I may say it, for I chiefly made it my own care to initiate her very infancy in the rudiments of virtue, and to impress upon her tender years a young odium and aversion to the very sight of men; ay, friend, she would ha’ shrieked if she had but seen a man till she was in her teens. As I’m a person, ’tis true. She was never suffered to play with a male child, though but in coats. Nay, her very babies were of the feminine gender. Oh, she never looked a man in the face but her own father or the chaplain, and him we made a shift to put upon her for a woman, by the help of his long garments, and his sleek face, till she was going in her fifteen.
–William Congreve, “The Way of the World,” V.v

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