PYGMALION.  I intended to make a woman; but after my experience with the man it was out of the question.

ECRASIA.  Pray why?

PYGMALION.  Well, it is difficult to explain if you have not studied prehistoric methods of reproduction.  You see the only sort of men and women I could make were men and women just like us as far as their bodies were concerned.  That was how I killed the poor beast of a man.  I hadnt provided for his horrible prehistoric methods of feeding himself.  Suppose the woman had reproduced in some prehistoric way instead of being oviparous as we are?  She couldn’t have done it with a modern female body.  Besides, the experiment might have been painful.

ECRASIA.  Then you have nothing to shew us at all?

PYGMALION.  Oh yes I have.  I am not so easily beaten as that.  I set to work again for months to find out how to make a digestive system that would deal with waste products and a reproductive system capable of internal nourishment and incubation.

ECRASIA.  Why did you not find out how to make them like us?

STREPHON [crying out in his grief for the first time] Why did you not make a woman whom you could love?  That was the secret you needed.

THE NEWLY BORN.  Oh yes.  How true!  How great of you, darling Strephon! [She kisses him impulsively].

STREPHON [passionately] Let me alone.

MARTELLUS.  Control your reflexes, child.

THE NEWLY BORN.  My what!

MARTELLUS.  Your reflexes.  The things you do without thinking.  Pygmalion is going to shew you a pair of human creatures who are all reflexes and nothing else.  Take warning by them.

THE NEWLY BORN.  But wont they be alive, like us?

PYGMALION.  That is a very difficult question to answer, my dear.  I confess I thought at first I had created living creatures; but Martellus declares they are only automata.  But then Martellus is a mystic:  I am a man of science.  He draws a line between an automaton and a living organism.  I cannot draw that line to my own satisfaction.

MARTELLUS.  Your artificial men have no self-control.  They only respond to stimuli from without.

PYGMALION.  But they are conscious.  I have taught them to talk and read; and now they tell lies.  That is so very lifelike.

MARTELLUS.  Not at all.  If they were alive they would tell the truth.  You can provoke them to tell any silly lie; and you can foresee exactly the sort of lie they will tell.  Give them a clip below the knee, and they will jerk their foot forward.  Give them a clip in their appetites or vanities or any of their lusts and greeds, and they will boast and lie, and affirm and deny, and hate and love without the slightest regard to the facts that are staring them in the face, or to their own obvious limitations.  That proves that they are automata.

PYGMALION [unconvinced] I know, dear old chap; but there really is some evidence that we are descended from creatures quite as limited and absurd as these.  After all, the baby there is three-quarters an automaton.  Look at the way she has been going on!