<P> By Act 5, Lady Wishfort has found out the plot, and Fainall has had Waitwell arrested . Mrs. Fainall tells Foible that her previous affair with Mirabell is now public knowledge . Lady Wishfort appears with Mrs. Marwood, whom she thanks for unveiling the plot . Fainall then appears and uses the information of Mrs. Fainall's previous affair with Mirabell and Millamant's contract to marry him to blackmail Lady Wishfort, telling that she should never marry and that she is to transfer her fortune to him . Lady Wishfort offers Mirabell her consent to the marriage if he can save her fortune and honour . Mirabell calls on Waitwell who brings a contract from the time before the marriage of the Fainalls in which Mrs. Fainall gives all her property to Mirabell . This neutralises the blackmail attempts, after which Mirabell restores Mrs. Fainall's property to her possession and then is free to marry Millamant with the full £ 6000 inheritance . </P> <P> The epigraph found on the title page of the 1700 edition of The Way of the World contains two Latin quotations from Horace's Satires . In their wider contexts they read in English: </P> <Ol> <Li> "It is worthwhile, for those of you who wish adulterers no success, to hear how much misfortune they suffer, and how often their pleasure is marred by pain and, though rarely achieved, even then fraught with danger ." </Li> <Li> "I have no fear in her company that a husband may rush back from the country, the door burst open, the dog bark, the house shake with the din, the woman, deathly pale, leap from her bed, her complicit maid shriek, she fearing for her limbs, her guilty mistress for her dowry and I for myself ." </Li> </Ol> <Li> "It is worthwhile, for those of you who wish adulterers no success, to hear how much misfortune they suffer, and how often their pleasure is marred by pain and, though rarely achieved, even then fraught with danger ." </Li>

Summary of the play the way of the world