tary, 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 cant 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 yo