In the climactic scene of Aphra Behn's sex intrigue comedy, The Luckey Chance, or an Alderman's Bargain (1686), the worried old alderman Sir Cautious Fulbank, frustrated over losing £100 in a dice game to the ‘young Stallion’ Gayman, commits to a game-changing idea — he answers Gayman's next wager of £300 by agreeing to use as his stakes a night of sex with his wife:

Sir Cautious suspects his opponent has already been pursuing his wife, but neither man is aware that, just the previous night, it was Lady Julia Fulbank who had her servants lure the nearly bankrupt Gayman to her darkened bedroom, offering him gold she had stolen from her husband's counting house. Sir Cautious thinks his opponent is a Mr. Wastall, the name Gayman assumed when he mortgaged and then miraculously reclaimed his property from Sir Cautious—paying him with the proceeds he received the night before from Julia.

Gayman, a young and well bred, sexually adroit man of wit, is the sort of rake who critiques society's grosser hypocrisies and pleasurable pursuits, even as he revels in them.