BURGE-LUBIN.  Well, I’m dashed!  One of my secretaries was remarking only this morning how well and young I am looking.  Barnabas:  I have an absolute conviction that I am one of the—­the—­shall I say one of the victims?—­of this strange destiny.

THE ARCHBISHOP.  Your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather formed the same conviction when he was between sixty and seventy.  I knew him.

BURGE-LUBIN [depressed] Ah!  But he died.

THE ARCHBISHOP.  No.

BURGE-LUBIN [hopefully] Do you mean to say he is still alive?

THE ARCHBISHOP.  No.  He was shot.  Under the influence of his belief that he was going to live three hundred years he became a changed man.  He began to tell people the truth; and they disliked it so much that they took advantage of certain clauses of an Act of Parliament he had himself passed during the Four Years War, and had purposely forgotten to repeal afterwards.  They took him to the Tower of London and shot him.

The apparatus rings.

CONFUCIUS [answering] Yes? [He listens].

A WOMAN’S VOICE.  The Domestic Minister has called.

BURGE-LUBIN [not quite catching the answer] Who does she say has called?

CONFUCIUS.  The Domestic Minister.

BARNABAS.  Oh, dash it!  That awful woman!

BURGE-LUBIN.  She certainly is a bit of a terror.  I don’t exactly know why; for she is not at all bad-looking.

BARNABAS [out of patience] For Heaven’s sake, don’t be frivolous.

THE ARCHBISHOP.  He cannot help it, Mr Accountant General.  Three of his sixteen great-great-great-grandfathers married Lubins.

BURGE-LUBIN.  Tut tut!  I am not frivolling. I did not ask the lady here.  Which of you did?

CONFUCIUS.  It is her official duty to report personally to the President once a quarter.

BURGE-LUBIN.  Oh, that.  Then I suppose it’s my official duty to receive her.  Theyd better send her in.  You don’t mind, do you?  She will bring us back to real life.  I don’t know how you fellows feel; but I’m just going dotty.

CONFUCIUS [into the telephone] The President will receive the Domestic Minister at once.

They watch the door in silence for the entrance of the Domestic Minister.

BURGE-LUBIN [suddenly, to the Archbishop] I suppose you have been married over and over again.

THE ARCHBISHOP.  Once.  You do not make vows until death when death is three hundred years off.

They relapse into uneasy silence.  The Domestic Minister enters.  She is a handsome woman, apparently in the prime of life, with elegant, tense, well held-up figure, and the walk of a goddess.  Her expression and deportment are grave, swift, decisive, awful, unanswerable.  She wears a Dianesque tunic instead of a blouse, and a silver coronet instead of a gold fillet.  Her dress otherwise is not markedly different from that of the men, who rise as she enters, and incline their heads with instinctive awe.  She comes to the vacant chair between Barnabas and Confucius.