Mr. Melchizidek possessed the strange gift of condescending majestically to Mr. Prohack while licking his boots.  He listened to Mr. Prohack as to an autocrat while giving Mr. Prohack to understand that Mr. Prohack knew not the first elements of sartorial elegance.  At intervals he gazed abstractedly at the gold framed and crowned portraits that hung on the walls and at the inscriptions similarly framed and crowned and hung, and it was home in upon Mr. Prohack that the inscriptions in actual practice referred to Mr. Melchizidek, and that this same Melchizidek, fawning and masterful, had seen monarchs in their shirt sleeves and spoken to princes with pins in his mouth, and made marks in white chalk between the shoulder-blades of grand-dukes; and that revolutions and cataclysms were nothing to Mr. Melchizidek.

When Mr. Melchizidek had decided by hypnotic suggestion and magic power what Mr. Prohack desired in the way of stuffs and patterns, he led Mr. Prohack mysteriously to a small chamber, and a scribe followed them carrying pencil and paper, and Mr. Prohack removed, with assistance, his shabby coat and his waistcoat, and Mr. Melchizidek measured him in unexampled detail and precision, and the scribe, writing, intoned aloud all Mr. Prohack’s dimensions.  And all the time Mr. Prohack was asking in his heart:  “How much will these clothes cost?” And he, once the Terror of the departments, who would have held up the war to satisfy his official inquisitiveness on a question of price,—­he dared not ask how much the clothes would cost.  He felt that in that unique establishment money was simply not mentioned,—­it could never be more than the subject of formal and stately correspondence.

During the latter part of the operation Mr. Prohack heard, outside in the shop, the sharp sounds of an imperial and decisive voice, and he was thereby well-nigh thunderstruck.  And even Mr. Melchizidek seemed to be similarly affected by the voice,—­so much so that the intimate of sovereigns unaffectedly hastened the business of enduing Mr. Prohack into the shameful waistcoat and coat, and then, with a gesture of apology, passed out of the cubicle, leaving Mr. Prohack with the attendant scribe.

Mr. Prohack, pricked by a fearful curiosity, followed Mr. Melchizidek; and the voice was saying: 

“Oh!  You’re there, Melchizidek.  Just come and look at this crease.”

Mr. Melchizidek, pained, moved forward.  Three acolytes were already standing in shocked silence round about a young man who stretched forth one leg so that all might see.

“I ask you,” the young man proceeded, “is it an inch out or isn’t it?  And how many times have I tried these things on?  I’m a busy man, and here I have to waste my time coming here again and again to get a thing right that ought to have been right the first time.  And you call yourselves the first tailors in Europe....  Correct me if I’m inaccurate in any of my statements.”