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drunk, as we called it, once a week; and my only pleasure was looking forward to that poor little debauch. That is what saved me from suicide. I could not bear to miss my next carouse. But when I stopped working, and lived on my pension, the fatigue of my life’s drudgery began to wear off, because, you see, I was not really old. I recuperated. I looked younger and younger. And at last I was rested enough to have courage and strength to begin life again. Besides, political changes were making it easier: life was a little better worth living for the nine-tenths of the people who used to be mere drudges. After that, I never turned back or faltered. My only regret now is that I shall die when I am three hundred or thereabouts. There was only one thing that made life hard; and that is gone now. Confucius May we ask what that was? Mrs. Lutestring Perhaps you will be offended if I tell you. Burge-Lubin Offended! My dear lady, do you suppose, after such a stupendous revelation, that anything short of a blow from a sledgehammer could produce the smallest impression on any of us? Mrs. Lutestring Well, you see, it has been so hard on me never to meet a grown-up person. You are all such children. And I never was very fond of children, except that one girl who woke up the mother passion in me. I have been very lonely sometimes. Burge-Lubin Again gallant. But surely, Mrs. Lutestring, that has been your own fault. If I may say so, a lady of your attractions need never have been lonely. Mrs. Lutestring Why? Burge-Lubin Why! Well⁠—. Well, er⁠—. Well, er er⁠—. Well! He gives it up. The Archbishop He means that you might have married. Curious, how little they understand our position. Mrs. Lutestring I did marry. I married again on my hundred and first birthday. But of course I had to marry an elderly man: a man over sixty. He was a great painter. On his deathbed he said to me “It has taken me fifty years to learn my trade, and to paint all the foolish pictures a man must paint and get rid of before he comes through them to the great things he ought to paint. And now that my foot is at last on the threshold of the temple I find that it is also the threshold of my tomb.” That man would have been the greatest painter of all time if he could have lived as long as I. I saw him die of old age whilst he was still, as he said himself, a gentleman amateur, like all modern painters. Burge-Lubin But why had you to marry an elderly man? Why not marry a young one? or shall I say a middle-aged one? If my own affections were not already engaged; and if, to tell the truth, I were not a little afraid of you⁠—for you are a very superior woman, as we all acknowledge⁠—I should esteem myself happy in⁠—er⁠—er⁠— Mrs. Lutestring Mr. President: have you ever tried to take advantage of the innocence of a little child for the gratification of your senses? Burge-Lubin Good Heavens, madam, what do you take me for? What right have you to ask me such a question? Mrs. Lutestring I am at present in my two hundred and seventy-fifth year. You suggest that I should take advantage of the innocence of a child of thirty, and marry it. The Archbishop Can you short-lived people not understand that as the confusion and immaturity and primitive animalism in which we live for the first hundred years of our life is worse in this matter of sex than in any other, you are intolerable to us in that relation? Burge-Lubin Do you mean to say, Mrs. Lutestring, that you regard me as a child? Mrs. Lutestring Do you expect me to regard you as a completed soul? Oh, you may well be afraid of me. There are moments when your levity, your ingratitude, your shallow jollity, make my gorge rise so against you that if I could not remind myself that you are a child I should be tempted to doubt your right to live at all. Confucius Do you grudge us the few years we have? you who have three hundred! Burge-Lubin You accuse me of levity! Must I remind you, madam, that I am the President, and that you are only the head of a department? Barnabas Ingratitude too! You draw a pension for three hundred years when we owe you only seventy-eight; and you call us ungrateful! Mrs. Lutestring I do. When I think of the blessings that have been showered on you, and contrast them with the poverty! the humiliations! the anxieties! the heartbreak! the insolence and tyranny that were the daily lot of mankind when I was learning to suffer instead of learning to live! when I see how lightly you take it all! how you quarrel over the crumpled leaves in your beds of roses! how you are so dainty about your work that unless it is made either interesting or delightful to you you leave it to negresses and Chinamen, I ask myself whether even three hundred years of thought and experience can save you from being superseded by the Power that created you and put you on your trial. Burge-Lubin My dear lady: our Chinese and colored friends are perfectly happy. They are twenty times better off here than they would be in China or Liberia. They do their work admirably; and in doing it they set us free for higher employments. The Archbishop Who has caught the infection of her indignation. What higher employments are you capable of? you that are superannuated at seventy and dead at eighty! Mrs. Lutestring You are not really doing higher work. You are supposed to make the decisions and give the orders; but the negresses and the Chinese make up your minds for you and tell you what orders to give, just as my brother, who was