done it with a modern
female body. Besides, the experiment might have been painful.

ECRASIA. Then you have nothing to shew us at all?

PYGMALION. Oh yes I have. I am not so easily beaten as that. I set to
work again for months to find out how to make a digestive system that
would deal with waste products and a reproductive system capable of
internal nourishment and incubation.

ECRASIA. Why did you not find out how to make them like us?

STREPHON [_crying out in his grief for the first time_] Why did you not
make a woman whom you could love? That was the secret you needed.

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh yes. How true! How great of you, darling Strephon!
[_She kisses him impulsively_].

STREPHON [_passionately_] Let me alone.

MARTELLUS. Control your reflexes, child.

THE NEWLY BORN. My what!

MARTELLUS. Your reflexes. The things you do without thinking. Pygmalion
is going to shew you a pair of human creatures who are all reflexes and
nothing else. Take warning by them.

THE NEWLY BORN. But wont they be alive, like us?

PYGMALION. That is a very difficult question to answer, my dear. I
confess I thought at first I had created living creatures; but Martellus
declares they are only automata. But then Martellus is a mystic: _I_
am a man of science. He draws a line between an automaton and a living
organism. I cannot draw that line to my own satisfaction.

MARTELLUS. Your artificial men have no self-control. They only respond
to stimuli from without.

PYGMALION. But they are conscious. I have taught them to talk and read;
and now they tell lies. That is so very lifelike.

MARTELLUS. Not at all. If they were alive they would tell the truth. You
can provoke them to tell any silly lie; and you can foresee exactly the
sort of lie they will tell. Give them a clip below the knee, and they
will jerk their foot forward. Give them a clip in their appetites or
vanities or any of their lusts and greeds, and they will boast and lie,
and affirm and deny, and hate and love without the slightest regard to
the facts that are staring them in the face, or to their own obvious
limitations. That proves that they are automata.

PYGMALION [_unconvinced_] I know, dear old chap; but there really is
some evidence that we are descended from creatures quite as limited
and absurd as these. After all, the baby there is three-quarters an
automaton. Look at the way she has been going on!

THE NEWLY BORN [_indignantly_] What do you mean? How have