ments
should amuse them. They are the amusements of boys and girls. They
are pardonable up to the age of fifty or sixty: after that they are
ridiculous. I tell you, what is wrong with us is that we are a non-adult
race; and the Irish and the Scots, and the niggers and Chinks, as you
call them, though their lifetime is as short as ours, or shorter, yet do
somehow contrive to grow up a little before they die. We die in boyhood:
the maturity that should make us the greatest of all the nations lies
beyond the grave for us. Either we shall go under as greybeards with
golf clubs in our hands, or we must will to live longer.

MRS LUTESTRING. Yes: that is it. I could not have expressed it in words;
but you have expressed it for me. I felt, even when I was an ignorant
domestic slave, that we had the possibility of becoming a great nation
within us; but our faults and follies drove me to cynical hopelessness.
We all ended then like that. It is the highest creatures who take the
longest to mature, and are the most helpless during their immaturity. I
know now that it took me a whole century to grow up. I began my serious
life when I was a hundred and twenty. Asiatics cannot control me: I am
not a child in their hands, as you are, Mr President. Neither, I am
sure, is the Archbishop. They respect me. You are not grown up enough
even for that, though you were kind enough to say that I frighten you.

BURGE-LUBIN. Honestly, you do. And will you think me very rude if I
say that if I must choose between a white woman old enough to be my
great-grandmother and a black woman of my own age, I shall probably find
the black woman more sympathetic?

MRS LUTESTRING. And more attractive in color, perhaps?

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes. Since you ask me, more--well, not more attractive:
I do not deny that you have an excellent appearance--but I will say,
richer. More Venetian. Tropical. 'The shadowed livery of the burnished
sun.'

MRS LUTESTRING. Our women, and their favorite story writers, begin
already to talk about men with golden complexions.

CONFUCIUS [_expanding into a smile all across both face and body_]
A-a-a-a-a-h!

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, what of it, madam? Have you read a very interesting
book by the librarian of the Biological Society suggesting that the
future of the world lies with the Mulatto?

MRS LUTESTRING [_rising_] Mr Archbishop: if the white race is to be
saved, our destiny is apparent.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes: our duty is pretty clea