Peg Woffington looked off her epilogue.
"Bad as we are," said she coolly, "we might be worse." Mr.Cibber turned round, slightly raised his eyebrows.
"Indeed!" said he.

"Madam!" added he, with a courteous smile, "will you be kind enough to explain to me how you could be worse!" "If, like a crab, we could go backward!" At this the auditors tittered; and Mr.Cibber had recourse to his spy-glass.
This gentleman was satirical or insolent, as the case might demand, in three degrees, of which the snuff-box was the comparative, and the spy-glass the superlative.

He had learned this on the stage; in annihilating Quin he had just used the snuff weapon, and now he drew his spy-glass upon poor Peggy.
"Whom have we here ?" said he.

Then he looked with his spy-glass to see.
"Oh, the little Irish orange-girl!" "Whose basket outweighed Colley Cibber's salary for the first twenty years of his dramatic career," was the delicate reply to the above delicate remark.

It staggered him for a moment; however, he affected a most puzzled air, then gradually allowed a light to steal into his features.
"Eh! ah! oh! how stupid I am; I understand; you sold something besides oranges!" "Oh!" said Mr.Vane, and colored up to the temples, and cast a look on Cibber, as much as to say, "If you were not seventy-three!" His ejaculation was something so different from any tone any other person there present could have uttered that the actress's eye dwelt on him for a single moment, and in that moment he felt himself looked through and through.
"I sold the young fops a bargain, you mean," was her calm reply; "and now I am come down to the old ones.