BURGE-LUBIN.  How can any really vivid color go wrong with a black satin skin?  It is our women’s wretched pale faces that have to be matched and lighted.  Yours is always right.

THE NEGRESS.  Yes:  it is a pity your white beauties have all the same ashy faces, the same colorless drab, the same age.  But look at their beautiful noses and little lips!  They are physically insipid:  they have no beauty:  you cannot love them; but how elegant!

BURGE-LUBIN.  Cant you find an official pretext for coming to see me?  Isnt it ridiculous that we have never met?  It’s so tantalizing to see you and talk to you, and to know all the time that you are two hundred miles away, and that I cant touch you?

THE NEGRESS.  I cannot live on the East Coast:  it is hard enough to keep my blood warm here.  Besides, my friend, it would not be safe.  These distant flirtations are very charming; and they teach self-control.

BURGE-LUBIN.  Damn self-control!  I want to hold you in my arms—­to—­[the negress snatches out the peg from the switchboard and vanishes.  She is still heard laughing].  Black devil! [He snatches out his peg furiously:  her laugh is no longer heard].  Oh, these sex episodes!  Why can I not resist them?  Disgraceful!

Confucius returns.

CONFUCIUS.  I forgot.  There is something for you to do this morning.  You have to go to the Record Office to receive the American barbarian.

BURGE-LUBIN.  Confucius:  once for all, I object to this Chinese habit of describing white men as barbarians.

CONFUCIUS [standing formally at the end of the table with his hands palm to palm] I make a mental note that you do not wish the Americans to be described as barbarians.

BURGE-LUBIN.  Not at all.  The Americans are barbarians.  But we are not.  I suppose the particular barbarian you are speaking of is the American who has invented a means of breathing under water.

CONFUCIUS.  He says he has invented such a method.  For some reason which is not intelligible in China, Englishmen always believe any statement made by an American inventor, especially one who has never invented anything.  Therefore you believe this person and have given him a public reception.  Today the Record Office is entertaining him with a display of the cinematographic records of all the eminent Englishmen who have lost their lives by drowning since the cinema was invented.  Why not go to see it if you are at a loss for something to do?

BURGE-LUBIN.  What earthly interest is there in looking at a moving picture of a lot of people merely because they were drowned?  If they had had any sense, they would not have been drowned, probably.

CONFUCIUS.  That is not so.  It has never been noticed before; but the Record Office has just made two remarkable discoveries about the public men and women who have displayed extraordinary ability during the past century.  One is that they retained unusual youthfulness up to an advanced age.  The other is that they all met their death by drowning.