BURGE-LUBIN.  Thats very true.  After all, the whole thing is confounded nonsense, isnt it?

CONFUCIUS [raising his head to look at him] You have decided not to believe it now that you realize its inconveniences.  That is the English method.  It may not work in this case.

BURGE-LUBIN.  English be hanged!  It’s common sense.  You know, those two people got us hypnotized:  not a doubt of it.  They must have been kidding us.  They were, werent they?

CONFUCIUS.  You looked into that woman’s face; and you believed.

BURGE-LUBIN.  Just so.  Thats where she had me.  I shouldn’t have believed her a bit if she’d turned her back to me.

CONFUCIUS [shakes his head slowly and repeatedly]???

BURGE-LUBIN.  You really think—? [he hesitates].

CONFUCIUS.  The Archbishop has always been a puzzle to me.  Ever since I learnt to distinguish between one English face and another I have noticed what the woman pointed out:  that the English face is not an adult face, just as the English mind is not an adult mind.

BURGE-LUBIN.  Stow it, John Chinaman.  If ever there was a race divinely appointed to take charge of the non-adult races and guide them and train them and keep them out of mischief until they grow up to be capable of adopting our institutions, that race is the English race.  It is the only race in the world that has that characteristic.  Now!

CONFUCIUS.  That is the fancy of a child nursing a doll.  But it is ten times more childish of you to dispute the highest compliment ever paid you.

BURGE-LUBIN.  You call it a compliment to class us as grown-up children.

CONFUCIUS.  Not grown-up children, children at fifty, sixty, seventy.  Your maturity is so late that you never attain to it.  You have to be governed by races which are mature at forty.  That means that you are potentially the most highly developed race on earth, and would be actually the greatest if you could live long enough to attain to maturity.

BURGE-LUBIN [grasping the idea at last] By George, Confucius, youre right!  I never thought of that.  That explains everything.  We are just a lot of schoolboys:  theres no denying it.  Talk to an Englishman about anything serious, and he listens to you curiously for a moment just as he listens to a chap playing classical music.  Then he goes back to his marine golf, or motoring, or flying, or women, just like a bit of stretched elastic when you let it go. [Soaring to the height of his theme] Oh, youre quite right.  We are only in our infancy.  I ought to be in a perambulator, with a nurse shoving me along.  It’s true:  it’s absolutely true.  But some day we’ll grow up; and then, by Jingo, we’ll shew em.

CONFUCIUS.  The Archbishop is an adult.  When I was a child I was dominated and intimidated by people whom I now know to have been weaker and sillier than I, because there was some mysterious quality in their mere age that overawed me.  I confess that, though I have kept up appearances, I have always been afraid of the Archbishop.