MARTELLUS [a silent and meditative listener, shudders and shakes his head, but says nothing].

ARJILLAX [quarrelsomely] I was taken in by your talk.

ECRASIA.  I discovered your genius before anyone else did.  Is that true, or is it not?

ARJILLAX.  Everybody knew I was an extraordinary person.  When I was born my beard was three feet long.

ECRASIA.  Yes; and it has shrunk from three feet to two.  Your genius seems to have been in the last foot of your beard; for you have lost both.

MARTELLUS [with a short sardonic cachinnation] Ha!  My beard was three and a half feet long when I was born; and a flash of lightning burnt it off and killed the ancient who was delivering me.  Without a hair on my chin I became the greatest sculptor in ten generations.

ECRASIA.  And yet you come to us today with empty hands.  We shall actually have to crown Arjillax here because no other sculptor is exhibiting.

ACIS [returning from the temple steps to behind the curved seat on the right of the three] Whats the row, Ecrasia?  Why have you fallen out with Arjillax?

ECRASIA.  He has insulted us! outraged us! profaned his art!  You know how much we hoped from the twelve busts he placed in the temple to be unveiled today.  Well, go in and look at them.  That is all I have to say. [She sweeps to the curved seat, and sits down just where Acis is leaning over it].

ACIS.  I am no great judge of sculpture.  Art is not my line.  What is wrong with the busts?

ECRASIA.  Wrong with them!  Instead of being ideally beautiful nymphs and youths, they are horribly realistic studies of—­but I really cannot bring my lips to utter it.

The Newly Born, full of curiosity, runs to the temple, and peeps in.

ACIS.  Oh, stow it, Ecrasia.  Your lips are not so squeamish as all that.  Studies of what?

THE NEWLY BORN [from the temple steps] Ancients.

ACIS [surprised but not scandalized] Ancients!

ECRASIA.  Yes, ancients.  The one subject that is by the universal consent of all connoisseurs absolutely excluded from the fine arts. [To Arjillax] How can you defend such a proceeding?

ARJILLAX.  If you come to that, what interest can you find in the statues of smirking nymphs and posturing youths you stick up all over the place?

ECRASIA.  You did not ask that when your hand was still skilful enough to model them.

ARJILLAX.  Skilful!  You high-nosed idiot, I could turn such things out by the score with my eyes bandaged and one hand tied behind me.  But what use would they be?  They would bore me; and they would bore you if you had any sense.  Go in and look at my busts.  Look at them again and yet again until you receive the full impression of the intensity of mind that is stamped on them; and then go back to the pretty-pretty confectionery you call sculpture, and see whether you can endure its vapid emptiness. [He mounts the altar impetuously] Listen to me, all of you; and do you, Ecrasia, be silent if you are capable of silence.