MARTELLUS.  Wait, my friend.  I do not come empty-handed today, as you imagined.  On the contrary, I bring with me such a work of art as you have never seen, and an artist who has surpassed both you and me further than we have surpassed all our competitors.

ECRASIA.  Impossible.  The greatest things in art can never be surpassed.

ARJILLAX.  Who is this paragon whom you declare greater than I?

MARTELLUS.  I declare him greater than myself, Arjillax.

ARJILLAX [frowning] I understand.  Sooner than not drown me, you are willing to clasp me round the waist and jump overboard with me.

ACIS.  Oh, stop squabbling.  That is the worst of you artists.  You are always in little squabbling cliques; and the worst cliques are those which consist of one man.  Who is this new fellow you are throwing in one another’s teeth?

ARJILLAX.  Ask Martellus:  do not ask me.  I know nothing of him. [He leaves Martellus, and sits down beside Ecrasia, on her left].

MARTELLUS.  You know him quite well.  Pygmalion.

ECRASIA [indignantly] Pygmalion!  That soulless creature!  A scientist! 
A laboratory person!

ARJILLAX.  Pygmalion produce a work of art!  You have lost your artistic senses.  The man is utterly incapable of modelling a thumb nail, let alone a human figure.

MARTELLUS.  That does not matter:  I have done the modelling for him.

ARJILLAX.  What on earth do you mean?

MARTELLUS [calling] Pygmalion:  come forth.

Pygmalion, a square-fingered youth with his face laid out in horizontal blocks, and a perpetual smile of eager benevolent interest in everything, and expectation of equal interest from everybody else, comes from the temple to the centre of the group, who regard him for the most part with dismay, as dreading that he will bore them.  Ecrasia is openly contemptuous.

MARTELLUS.  Friends:  it is unfortunate that Pygmalion is constitutionally incapable of exhibiting anything without first giving a lecture about it to explain it; but I promise you that if you will be patient he will shew you the two most wonderful works of art in the world, and that they will contain some of my own very best workmanship.  Let me add that they will inspire a loathing that will cure you of the lunacy of art for ever. [He sits down next the Newly Born, who pouts and turns a very cold right shoulder to him, a demonstration utterly lost on him].

Pygmalion, with the smile of a simpleton, and the eager confidence of a fanatical scientist, climbs awkwardly on to the altar.  They prepare for the worst.

PYGMALION.  My friends:  I will omit the algebra—­

ACIS.  Thank God!

PYGMALION [continuing]—­because Martellus has made me promise to do so.  To come to the point, I have succeeded in making artificial human beings.  Real live ones, I mean.