ACIS. Yes: inhuman. Why don't you fall in love with someone?
ECRASIA. I! I have been in love all my life. I burned with it even in the egg.
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—