How the mother is to be pitied who hath handsome daughters! Locks, bolts, bars, and lectures of morality are nothing to them: they break through them all. They have as much pleasure in cheating a father and mother, as in cheating at cards.

The speaker adopts a satiric, moralizing tone to mock both social anxieties about female sexuality and the futility of coercive “virtue” enforced by surveillance. The “handsome daughters” are portrayed as socially powerful precisely because beauty gives them leverage to evade parental control; the list—“locks, bolts, bars, and lectures”—ridicules the idea that physical restraint or pious instruction can govern desire. The comparison to cheating at cards sharpens the satire: courtship becomes a game of deception, and the parents’ attempt to police it is treated as naïve. The passage also exposes a double standard: daughters are blamed for “cheating,” while the social system that commodifies beauty and marriage is left implicitly indicted.