FRANKLYN [gently] Also, perhaps, because you have never been troubled much by vision of the future.

BURGE [with intense conviction] The future does not exist for Henry Hopkins Lubin.

LUBIN.  If by the future you mean the millennial delusions which you use as a bunch of carrots to lure the uneducated British donkey to the polling booth to vote for you, it certainly does not.

SURGE.  I can see the future not only because, if I may say so in all humility, I have been gifted with a certain power of spiritual vision, but because I have practised as a solicitor.  A solicitor has to advise families.  He has to think of the future and know the past.  His office is the real modern confessional.  Among other things he has to make people’s wills for them.  He has to shew them how to provide for their daughters after their deaths.  Has it occurred to you, Lubin, that if you live three hundred years, your daughters will have to wait a devilish long time for their money?

FRANKLYN.  The money may not wait for them.  Few investments flourish for three hundred years.

SAVVY.  And what about before your death?  Suppose they didn’t get married!  Imagine a girl living at home with her mother and on her father for three hundred years!  Theyd murder her if she didn’t murder them first.

LUBIN.  By the way, Barnabas, is your daughter to keep her good looks all the time?

FRANKLYN.  Will it matter?  Can you conceive the most hardened flirt going on flirting for three centuries?  At the end of half the time we shall hardly notice whether it is a woman or a man we are speaking to.

LUBIN [not quite relishing this ascetic prospect] Hm! [He rises].  Ah, well:  you must come and tell my wife and my young people all about it; and you will bring your daughter with you, of course. [He shakes hands with Savvy].  Goodbye. [He shakes hands with Franklyn].  Goodbye, Doctor. [He shakes hands with Conrad].  Come on, Burge:  you must really tell me what line you are going to take about the Church at the election?

BURGE.  Havnt you heard?  Havnt you taken in the revelation that has been vouchsafed to us?  The line I am going to take is Back to Methuselah.

LUBIN [decisively] Dont be ridiculous, Burge.  You don’t suppose, do you, that our friends here are in earnest, or that our very pleasant conversation has had anything to do with practical politics!  They have just been pulling our legs very wittily.  Come along. [He goes out, Franklyn politely going with him, but shaking his head in mute protest].