The Way of the World: Act 2, Scene 5 Summary & Analysis

As he stands with Mrs. Fainall, Mirabell spots Millamant from afar. He compares the outfit she is wearing to a ship in “full sail,” while he describes her companions, Witwoud and Mincing, her lady-in-waiting, as a “shoal of fools.” Mrs. Fainall also describes Millamant’s company with a nautical metaphor, describing Witwoud as an “empty sculler” who tows Mincing along.

Mirabell greets Millamant by remarking on the diminished number of friends she has following her these days. He teases her that she used to have the “Beau Monde” around her.

Witwoud, not Millamant, responds to Mirabell’s teasing. He quips that Millamant’s male admirers used to gather around her “like moths about a candle.” He also says that he is winded to the point that he almost “lost his comparison for want of breath.”

Millamant says she has denied herself “airs” today. She begins to set up her own simile, remarking that she walked “as fast through the crowd” but Witwoud cuts her off, completing her sentence by saying “as a favorite just disgraced, and with as few followers.”

Millamant is annoyed with him for interrupting her and asks him for a “truce” with his “similitudes” because she is “as sick of ‘em…” but is again cut off by Witwoud’s simile: “as a physician of good air.” Then Witwoud apologizes by saying that he cannot stop himself from completing her similes, though he admits that doing so is hurting Millamant’s opinion of him.

Millamant asks Mincing to stand between her and Witwoud’s “wit” and Witwoud encourages Mincing to follow Millamant’s command. For he is “like a screen before a great fire.” He compliments his own wit, remarking that he “blaze[s] today” and is “too bright.”

Mrs. Fainall changes the topic, asking Millamant, why she took so long to meet her at the park. Millamant complains that she did hurry to meet her but couldn’t find her.

Mrs. Fainall enquires again what took Millamant so long to arrive at the park. Mincing reminds her that she stayed to look through a packet of letters. Millamant then explains that she was “persecuted” with letters sent by admirers. However, she says that she hates receiving them because no one knows how to write good letters anymore. She also says that she uses the letters to curl her hair.

Witwoud, interested, asks Millamant if pinning her hair with letters is the best way to curl hair. He also asks her if she uses all her letters to pin her hair, adding that he keeps copies of his letters. Millamant explains that she only uses letters composed of poetry to pin her hair, as prose letters never produce the perfect curls.

Mincing swears by using poetry to pin her lady’s hair: it makes her curls “so pure and so crips.” Feigning interest in her hair styling technique, Witwoud makes fun of Mincing’s grammar by repeating her mispronunciation of the word “crisp.” “Indeed, so crips?” he asks her to which she retorts that he’s “such a critic.”

Millamant, who up to this point has ignored Mirabell, finally addresses him. She asks him whether he was upset about being asked to leave the cabal last night. At first, she tells him that just thinking about last night makes her angry but then changes her mind and tells him that she’s pleased that she asked him to leave because she gave him “some pain.”

Mirabell asks if it pleases her to give him pain. Millamant admits that it does – she “love[s] to give pain.” Mirabell responds that she’s pretending to be cruel in a way that isn’t “in her nature.” He tells her that her “true vanity” is “in the power of pleasing” rather than causing people pain.

Millamant asks him to forgive her for being a people pleaser because she thinks that “one’s cruelty is one’s power.” She adds that when a person loses the ability to be cruel that person loses power. Without one’s power, she concludes, “one’s old and ugly.”

Mirabell critiques her philosophy arguing that if she persists in being cruel, she will actually ruin the object of her power, her lover, and then will be nothing but a “vain,” “lost thing.” He continues that she won’t be “handsome” once she’s lost her lover because without her lover, her beauty “dies upon the instant.” He reminds her that it is the lover that makes a woman beautiful and not the mirror. He argues that even an ugly, old woman could discover her beauty in her mirror after a lover flattered her because it is the lover’s suggestion that allows the woman to discover her own beautiful features.

Mirabell’s outlook annoys Millamant, who exclaims to Mrs. Fainall about the “vanity of these men,” who believe that feminine beauty comes from the compliments of men. Millamant argues that men would not flatter women if they weren’t already beautiful and also that women can replace their old lovers with new ones as “fast as one pleases.”

Mirabell sarcastically compliments Millamant’s confidence in her power to create her lovers, but Millamant remarks that women owe their beauty to a lover no more than one owes one’s wit to an echo. Lovers, like echoes, she explains, can only “reflect” what’s already there. Lovers and an echo are, therefore, she remarks, “vain empty things.”

Mirabell retorts that women owe “those two vain empty things” the “greatest pleasures of [her] life.” Millamant asks him how this is so. Mirabell explains that women owe their lovers the pleasure of hearing themselves praised and an echo the pleasure of hearing themselves talk.

Witwoud, again interrupts the conversation, to tell a silly story about a woman who talked so much without stopping that her echo has to wait until her death to repeat her. Millamant dismisses Witwoud story as “fiction” and urges Mrs. Fainall to depart with. But at Mirabell’s discreet request, Mrs. Fainall asks to speak with Witwoud so that Mirabell can have a moment to speak with Millamant alone.