PYGMALION.  Not at all.  That was a great advance.  It encouraged me so much that I put aside the eyes and ears, and made a brain.  It wouldn’t take the Life Force at all until I had altered its constitution a dozen times; but when it did, it took a much higher potential, and did not dissolve; and neither did the eyes and ears when I connected them up with the brain.  I was able to make a sort of monster:  a thing without arms or legs; and it really and truly lived for half-an-hour.

THE NEWLY BORN.  Half-an-hour!  What good was that?  Why did it die?

PYGMALION.  Its blood went wrong.  But I got that right; and then I went ahead with a complete human body:  arms and legs and all.  He was my first man.

ARJILLAX.  Who modelled him?

PYGMALION.  I did.

MARTELLUS.  Do you mean to say you tried your own hand before you sent for me?

PYGMALION.  Bless you, yes, several times.  My first man was the ghastliest creature:  a more dreadful mixture of horror and absurdity than you who have not seen him can conceive.

ARJILLAX.  If you modelled him, he must indeed have been a spectacle.

PYGMALION.  Oh, it was not his shape.  You see I did not invent that.  I took actual measurements and moulds from my own body.  Sculptors do that sometimes, you know; though they pretend they don’t.

MARTELLUS.  Hm!

ARJILLAX.  Hah!

PYGMALION.  He was all right to look at, at first, or nearly so.  But he behaved in the most appalling manner; and the subsequent developments were so disgusting that I really cannot describe them to you.  He seized all sorts of things and swallowed them.  He drank every fluid in the laboratory.  I tried to explain to him that he must take nothing that he could not digest and assimilate completely; but of course he could not understand me.  He assimilated a little of what he swallowed; but the process left horrible residues which he had no means of getting rid of.  His blood turned to poison; and he perished in torments, howling.  I then perceived that I had produced a prehistoric man; for there are certain traces in our own bodies of arrangements which enabled the earlier forms of mankind to renew their bodies by swallowing flesh and grains and vegetables and all sorts of unnatural and hideous foods, and getting rid of what they could not digest.

ECRASIA.  But what a pity he died!  What a glimpse of the past we have lost!  He could have told us stories of the Golden Age.

PYGMALION.  Not he.  He was a most dangerous beast.  He was afraid of me, and actually tried to kill me by snatching up things and striking at me with them.  I had to give him two or three pretty severe shocks before I convinced him that he was at my mercy.

THE NEWLY BORN.  Why did you not make a woman instead of a man?  She would have known how to behave herself.

MARTELLUS.  Why did you not make a man and a woman?  Their children would have been interesting.