ZOO [interrupts him by laughing heartily at him]!!!!!!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [with offended dignity] May I ask what I have said that calls for this merriment?

ZOO.  Oh, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, you are a funny little man, with your torches, and your flames, and your bricks and edifices and pages and volumes and chapters and coral insects and bees and acorns and stones and mountains.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN.  Metaphors, madam.  Metaphors merely.

ZOO.  Images, images, images.  I was talking about men, not about images.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN.  I was illustrating—­not, I hope, quite infelicitously—­the great march of Progress.  I was shewing you how, shortlived as we orientals are, mankind gains in stature from generation to generation, from epoch to epoch, from barbarism to civilization, from civilization to perfection.

ZOO.  I see.  The father grows to be six feet high, and hands on his six feet to his son, who adds another six feet and becomes twelve feet high, and hands his twelve feet on to his son, who is full-grown at eighteen feet, and so on.  In a thousand years you would all be three or four miles high.  At that rate your ancestors Bilge and Bluebeard, whom you call giants, must have been about quarter of an inch high.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN.  I am not here to bandy quibbles and paradoxes with a girl who blunders over the greatest names in history.  I am in earnest.  I am treating a solemn theme seriously.  I never said that the son of a man six feet high would be twelve feet high.

ZOO.  You didn’t mean that?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN.  Most certainly not.

ZOO.  Then you didn’t mean anything.  Now listen to me, you little ephemeral thing.  I knew quite well what you meant by your torch handed on from generation to generation.  But every time that torch is handed on, it dies down to the tiniest spark; and the man who gets it can rekindle it only by his own light.  You are no taller than Bilge or Bluebeard; and you are no wiser.  Their wisdom, such as it was, perished with them:  so did their strength, if their strength ever existed outside your imagination.  I do not know how old you are:  you look about five hundred—­

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN.  Five hundred!  Really, madam—­

ZOO [continuing]; but I know, of course, that you are an ordinary shortliver.  Well, your wisdom is only such wisdom as a man can have before he has had experience enough to distinguish his wisdom from his folly, his destiny from his delusions, his—­

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN.  In short, such wisdom as your own.