FRANKLYN.  Your turn now, Conrad.  Go ahead.

CONRAD.  I don’t think it’s any good.  I don’t think they want to live longer than usual.

LUBIN.  Although I am a mere child of 69, I am old enough to have lost, the habit of crying for the moon.

BURGE.  Have you discovered the elixir of life or have you not?  If not, I agree with Lubin that you are wasting our time.

CONRAD.  Is your time of any value?

SURGE [unable to believe his ears] My time of any value!  What do you mean?

LUBIN [smiling comfortably] From your high scientific point of view, I daresay, none whatever, Professor.  In any case I think a little perfectly idle discussion would do Burge good.  After all, we might as well hear about the elixir of life as read novels, or whatever Burge does when he is not playing golf on Walton Heath.  What is your elixir, Dr Barnabas?  Lemons?  Sour milk?  Or what is the latest?

SURGE.  We were just beginning to talk seriously; and now you snatch at the chance of talking rot. [He rises].  Good evening. [He turns to the door].

CONRAD [rudely] Die as soon as you like.  Good evening.

BURGE [hesitating] Look here.  I took sour milk twice a day until Metchnikoff died.  He thought it would keep him alive for ever; and he died of it.

CONRAD.  You might as well have taken sour beer.

BURGE.  You believe in lemons?

CONRAD.  I wouldn’t eat a lemon for ten pounds.

BURGE [sitting down again] What do you recommend?

CONRAD [rising with a gesture of despair] Whats the use of going on, Frank?  Because I am a doctor, and because they think I have a bottle to give them that will make them live for ever, they are listening to me for the first time with their mouths open and their eyes shut.  Thats their notion of science.

SAVVY.  Steady, Nunk!  Hold the fort.

CONRAD [growls and sits down]!!!

LUBIN.  You volunteered the consultation, Doctor.  I may tell you that, far from sharing the credulity as to science which is now the fashion, I am prepared to demonstrate that during the last fifty years, though the Church has often been wrong, and even the Liberal Party has not been infallible, the men of science have always been wrong.

CONRAD.  Yes:  the fellows you call men of science.  The people who make money by it, and their medical hangers-on.  But has anybody been right?

LUBIN.  The poets and story tellers, especially the classical poets and story tellers, have been, in the main, right.  I will ask you not to repeat this as my opinion outside; for the vote of the medical profession and its worshippers is not to be trifled with.

FRANKLYN.  You are quite right:  the poem is our real clue to biological science.  The most scientific document we possess at present is, as your grandmother would have told you quite truly, the story of the Garden of Eden.