ACIS.  Not a bit of it.  You and Arjillax are just as hard as two stones.

ECRASIA.  You did not always think so, Acis.

ACIS.  Oh, I know.  I offered you my love once, and asked for yours.

ECRASIA.  And did I deny it to you, Acis?

ACIS.  You didn’t even know what love was.

ECRASIA.  Oh!  I adored you, you stupid oaf, until I found that you were a mere animal.

ACIS.  And I made no end of a fool of myself about you until I discovered that you were a mere artist.  You appreciated my contours!  I was plastic, as Arjillax says.  I wasn’t a man to you:  I was a masterpiece appealing to your tastes and your senses.  Your tastes and senses had overlaid the direct impulse of life in you.  And because I cared only for our life, and went straight to it, and was bored by your calling my limbs fancy names and mapping me into mountains and valleys and all the rest of it, you called me an animal.  Well, I am an animal, if you call a live man an animal.

ECRASIA.  You need not explain.  You refused to be refined.  I did my best to lift your prehistoric impulses on to the plane of beauty, of imagination, of romance, of poetry, of art, of—­

ACIS.  These things are all very well in their way and in their proper places.  But they are not love.  They are an unnatural adulteration of love.  Love is a simple thing and a deep thing:  it is an act of life and not an illusion.  Art is an illusion.

ARJILLAX.  That is false.  The statue comes to life always.  The statues of today are the men and women of the next incubation.  I hold up the marble figure before the mother and say, ‘This is the model you must copy.’  We produce what we see.  Let no man dare to create in art a thing that he would not have exist in life.

MARTELLUS.  Yes:  I have been through all that.  But you yourself are making statues of ancients instead of beautiful nymphs and swains.  And Ecrasia is right about the ancients being inartistic.  They are damnably inartistic.

ECRASIA [triumphant] Ah!  Our greatest artist vindicates me.  Thanks, Martellus.

MARTELLUS.  The body always ends by being a bore.  Nothing remains beautiful and interesting except thought, because the thought is the life.  Which is just what this old gentleman and this old lady seem to think too.

THE SHE-ANCIENT.  Quite so.

THE HE-ANCIENT.  Precisely.

THE NEWLY BORN [to the He-Ancient] But you cant be nothing.  What do you want to be?

THE HE-ANCIENT.  A vortex.

THE NEWLY BORN.  A what?

THE SHE-ANCIENT.  A vortex.  I began as a vortex:  why should I not end as one?

ECRASIA.  Oh!  That is what you old people are, Vorticists.

ACIS.  But if life is thought, can you live without a head?

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?