u thinking of it first?

MRS LUTESTRING. Conrad Barnabas's book. Your wife told me it was more
wonderful than Napoleon's Book of Fate and Old Moore's Almanac, which
cook and I used to read. I was very ignorant: it did not seem so
impossible to me as to an educated woman. Yet I forgot all about it, and
married and drudged as a poor man's wife, and brought up children, and
looked twenty years older than I really was, until one day, long after
my husband died and my children were out in the world working for
themselves, I noticed that I looked twenty years younger than I really
was. The truth came to me in a flash.

BURGE-LUBIN. An amazing moment. Your feelings must have been beyond
description. What was your first thought?

MRS LUTESTRING. Pure terror. I saw that the little money I had laid up
would not last, and that I must go out and: work again. They had things
called Old Age Pensions then: miserable pittances for worn-out old
laborers to die on. I thought I should be found out if I went on drawing
it too long. The horror of facing another lifetime of drudgery, of
missing my hard-earned rest and losing my poor little savings, drove
everything else out of my mind. You people nowadays can have no
conception of the dread of poverty that hung over us then, or of the
utter tiredness of forty years' unending overwork and striving to make a
shilling do the work of a pound.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I wonder you did not kill yourself. I often wonder why
the poor in those evil old times did not kill themselves. They did not
even kill other people.

MRS LUTESTRING. You never kill yourself, because you always may as well
wait until tomorrow. And you have not energy or conviction enough to
kill the others. Besides, how can you blame them when you would do as
they do if you were in their place?

BURGE-LUBIN. Devilish poor consolation, that.

MRS LUTESTRING. There were other consolations in those days for people
like me. We drank preparations of alcohol to relieve the strain of
living and give us an artificial happiness.

BURGE-LUBIN {[[_all together,_]} Alcohol! CONFUCIUS {[_making_] } Pfff
...! BARNABAS {[_wry faces_]] } Disgusting.

MRS LUTESTRING. A little alcohol would improve your temper and manners,
and make you much easier to live with, Mr Accountant General.

BURGE-LUBIN [_laughing_] By George, I believe you! Try it, Barnabas.

CONFUCIUS. No. Try tea. It is the more civilized poison of the two.

MRS LUTESTRING. You, Mr