BURGE-LUBIN.  Why!  Well—.  Well, er—.  Well, er er—.  Well! [he gives it up].

THE ARCHBISHOP.  He means that you might have married.  Curious, how little they understand our position.

MRS LUTESTRING.  I did marry.  I married again on my hundred and first birthday.  But of course I had to marry an elderly man:  a man over sixty.  He was a great painter.  On his deathbed he said to me ’It has taken me fifty years to learn my trade, and to paint all the foolish pictures a man must paint and get rid of before he comes through them to the great things he ought to paint.  And now that my foot is at last on the threshold of the temple I find that it is also the threshold of my tomb.’  That man would have been the greatest painter of all time if he could have lived as long as I. I saw him die of old age whilst he was still, as he said himself, a gentleman amateur, like all modern painters.

BURGE-LUBIN.  But why had you to marry an elderly man?  Why not marry a young one? or shall I say a middle-aged one?  If my own affections were not already engaged; and if, to tell the truth, I were not a little afraid of you—­for you are a very superior woman, as we all acknowledge—­I should esteem myself happy in—­er—­er—­

MRS LUTESTRING.  Mr President:  have you ever tried to take advantage of the innocence of a little child for the gratification of your senses?

BURGE-LUBIN.  Good Heavens, madam, what do you take me for?  What right have you to ask me such a question?

MRS LUTESTRING.  I am at present in my two hundred and seventy-fifth year.  You suggest that I should take advantage of the innocence of a child of thirty, and marry it.

THE ARCHBISHOP.  Can you shortlived people not understand that as the confusion and immaturity and primitive animalism in which we live for the first hundred years of our life is worse in this matter of sex than in any other, you are intolerable to us in that relation?

BURGE-LUBIN.  Do you mean to say, Mrs Lutestring, that you regard me as a child?

MRS LUTESTRING.  Do you expect me to regard you as a completed soul?  Oh, you may well be afraid of me.  There are moments when your levity, your ingratitude, your shallow jollity, make my gorge rise so against you that if I could not remind myself that you are a child I should be tempted to doubt your right to live at all.

CONFUCIUS.  Do you grudge us the few years we have? you who have three hundred!

BURGE-LUBIN.  You accuse me of levity!  Must I remind you, madam, that I am the President, and that you are only the head of a department?

BARNABAS.  Ingratitude too!  You draw a pension for three hundred years when we owe you only seventy-eight; and you call us ungrateful!