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They must move and speak. THE SHE-ANCIENT. They must love and hate. THE HE-ANCIENT. They must think that they think. THE SHE-ANCIENT. They must have soft flesh and warm, blood.
ACIS. Of course we are always delighted to see you; but still, if it tries you very severely, we could manage pretty well by ourselves, you know. THE SHE-ANCIENT. Tell me, Acis: do you ever think of yourself as having to live perhaps for thousands of years? ACIS. Oh, don't talk about it.
ECRASIA. I say that if the ancients had thoroughly grasped the theory of fine art they would understand that the difference between a beautiful nose and an ugly one is of supreme importance: that it is indeed the only thing that matters. THE SHE-ANCIENT. That is, they would understand something they could not believe, and that you do not believe. ACIS. Just so, mam.
THE HE-ANCIENT. You will also learn that when the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him. THE SHE-ANCIENT. And so I perceived that I had made myself the slave of a slave.
Is it not true? THE SHE-ANCIENT. Speak, Martellus: you who have travelled the whole path. MARTELLUS. It is true. With fierce joy I turned a temperature of a million degrees on those two things I had modelled, and saw them vanish in an instant into inoffensive dust. THE SHE-ANCIENT. Speak, Arjillax: you who have advanced from imitating the lightly living child to the intensely living ancient.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. There was a time when children were given the world to play with because they promised to improve it. They did not improve it; and they would have wrecked it had their power been as great as that which you will wield when you are no longer a child. Until then your young companions will instruct you in whatever is necessary. THE NEWLY BORN. Wait.
But you need not die until your accident comes. THE NEWLY BORN. What is my accident? THE SHE-ANCIENT. Sooner or later you will fall and break your neck; or a tree will fall on you; or you will be struck by lightning. Something or other must make an end of you some day. THE NEWLY BORN. But why should any of these things happen to me? THE SHE-ANCIENT. There is no why. They do.
THE HE-ANCIENT. Not now perhaps. But prehistoric men thought they could not live without tails. I can live without a tail. Why should I not live without a head? THE NEWLY BORN. What is a tail? THE HE-ANCIENT A habit of which your ancestors managed to pure themselves. THE SHE-ANCIENT. None of us now believe that all this machinery of flesh and blood is necessary. It dies.
Or you dress yourselves up as dolls and act plays about them. THE SHE-ANCIENT. And, to deceive yourself the more completely, you take them so very very seriously that Ecrasia here declares that the making of dolls is the holiest work of creation, and the words you put into the mouths of dolls the sacredest of scriptures and the noblest of utterances. ECRASIA. Tush! ARJILLAX. Tosh!
THE SHE-ANCIENT. So did I; and for five more years I made myself into all sorts of fantastic monsters. I walked upon a dozen legs: I worked with twenty hands and a hundred fingers: I looked to the four quarters of the compass with eight eyes out of four heads.
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