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of the young woman you were in love with? The Archbishop Making a wry face. Is that the reality? How these things grow in our imagination! But may I say, Mrs. Lutestring, that the transfiguration of a parlor maid to an angel is not more amazing than her transfiguration to the very dignified and able Domestic Minister I am addressing. I recognize the angel in you. Frankly, I do not recognize the parlor maid. Burge-Lubin What’s a parlor maid? Mrs. Lutestring An extinct species. A woman in a black dress and white apron, who opened the house door when people knocked or rang, and was either your tyrant or your slave. I was a parlor maid in the house of one of the Accountant General’s remote ancestors. To Confucius. You asked me my age, Mr. Chief Secretary, I am two hundred and seventy-four. Burge-Lubin Gallantly. You don’t look it. You really don’t look it. Mrs. Lutestring Turning her face gravely towards him. Look again, Mr. President. Burge-Lubin Looking at her bravely until the smile fades from his face, and he suddenly covers his eyes with his hands. Yes: you do look it. I am convinced. It’s true. Now call up the Lunatic Asylum, Confucius; and tell them to send an ambulance for me. Mrs. Lutestring To the Archbishop. Why have you given away your secret? our secret? The Archbishop They found it out. The cinema records betrayed me. But I never dreamt that there were others. Did you? Mrs. Lutestring I knew one other. She was a cook. She grew tired, and killed herself. The Archbishop Dear me! However, her death simplifies the situation, as I have been able to convince these gentlemen that the matter had better go no further. Mrs. Lutestring What! When the President knows! It will be all over the place before the end of the week. Burge-Lubin Injured. Really, Mrs. Lutestring! You speak as if I were a notoriously indiscreet person. Barnabas: have I such a reputation? Barnabas Resignedly. It can’t be helped. It’s constitutional. Confucius It is utterly unconstitutional. But, as you say, it cannot be helped. Burge-Lubin Solemnly. I deny that a secret of State has ever passed my lips⁠—except perhaps to the Minister of Health, who is discretion personified. People think, because she is a negress⁠— Mrs. Lutestring It does not matter much now. Once, it would have mattered a great deal. But my children are all dead. The Archbishop Yes: the children must have been a terrible difficulty. Fortunately for me, I had none. Mrs. Lutestring There was one daughter who was the child of my very heart. Some years after my first drowning I learnt that she had lost her sight. I went to her. She was an old woman of ninety-six, blind. She asked me to sit and talk with her because my voice was like the voice of her dead mother. Burge-Lubin The complications must be frightful. Really I hardly know whether I do want to live much longer than other people. Mrs. Lutestring You can always kill yourself, as cook did; but that was influenza. Long life is complicated, and even terrible; but it is glorious all the same. I would no more change places with an ordinary woman than with a mayfly that lives only an hour. The Archbishop What set you thinking of it first? Mrs. Lutestring Conrad Barnabas’s book. Your wife told me it was more wonderful than Napoleon’s Book of Fate and Old Moore’s Almanac, which cook and I used to read. I was very ignorant: it did not seem so impossible to me as to an educated woman. Yet I forgot all about it, and married and drudged as a poor man’s wife, and brought up children, and looked twenty years older than I really was, until one day, long after my husband died and my children were out in the world working for themselves, I noticed that I looked twenty years younger than I really was. The truth came to me in a flash. Burge-Lubin An amazing moment. Your feelings must have been beyond description. What was your first thought? Mrs. Lutestring Pure terror. I saw that the little money I had laid up would not last, and that I must go out and work again. They had things called Old Age Pensions then: miserable pittances for worn-out old laborers to die on. I thought I should be found out if I went on drawing it too long. The horror of facing another lifetime of drudgery, of missing my hard-earned rest and losing my poor little savings, drove everything else out of my mind. You people nowadays can have no conception of the dread of poverty that hung over us then, or of the utter tiredness of forty years’ unending overwork and striving to make a shilling do the work of a pound. The Archbishop I wonder you did not kill yourself. I often wonder why the poor in those evil old times did not kill themselves. They did not even kill other people. Mrs. Lutestring You never kill yourself, because you always may as well wait until tomorrow. And you have not energy or conviction enough to kill the others. Besides, how can you blame them when you would do as they do if you were in their place? Burge-Lubin Devilish poor consolation, that. Mrs. Lutestring There were other consolations in those days for people like me. We drank preparations of alcohol to relieve the strain of living and give us an artificial happiness. All together, making wry faces. Burge-Lubin Alcohol! Confucius Pfff⁠ ⁠… ! Barnabas Disgusting. Mrs. Lutestring A little alcohol would improve your temper and manners, and make you much easier to live with, Mr. Accountant General. Burge-Lubin Laughing. By George, I believe you! Try it, Barnabas. Confucius No. Try tea. It is the more civilized poison of the two. Mrs. Lutestring You, Mr. President, were born intoxicated with your own well-fed natural exuberance. You cannot imagine what alcohol was to an underfed poor woman. I had carefully arranged my little savings so that I could get