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 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
sledge-hammer 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 pa