Now all this began to weigh upon the mind of Mrs. Merillia, despite the amazing cheerfulness of disposition which she had inherited from two long lines of confirmed optimists—­her ancestors on the paternal and maternal sides.  She did not know how to brood, but, if she had, she might well have been led to do so.  And even as it was she had been reduced to so unusual a condition of dejection that, a week before the evening we are describing, she had been obliged to order a box at the Gaiety Theatre, she, who, like all optimists, habitually frequented those playhouses where she could behold gloomy tragedies, awful melodramas, or those ironic pieces called farces, in which the ultimate misery of which human nature is capable is drawn to its farthest point.

In the beginning of this new dejection of hers, Mrs. Merillia was now seated in a stage box at the “Gaiety,” with an elderly General of Life Guards, a Mistress of the Robes, and the grandfather of the Central American Ambassador at the Court of St. James, and all four of them were smiling at a neat little low comedian, who was singing, without any voice and with the utmost precision, a pathetic romance entitled, “De Coon Wot Got de Chuck.”

Meanwhile the Prophet was engaged for the twentieth time in considering whether Mrs. Merillia, on her return from this festival, would have to be carried to bed by hired menials.

Why?

This brings us to the great turning point in our hero’s life, to the point when first he began to respect the strange powers stirring within him.

Until he encountered Sir Tiglath Butt in the dining-room of the Colley Cibber Club Hennessey had been but a dilettante fellow.  He had written a play, but airily, and without the twenty years of arduous and persistent study declared by the dramatic critics to be absolutely necessary before any intelligent man can learn how to get a bishop on, or a chambermaid off, the stage.  He had nearly proposed to a clergyman’s daughter, but thoughtlessly, and without any previous examination into the clericalism of rectory females, any first-hand knowledge of mothers’ meetings, devoid of which he must be a stout-hearted gentleman who would rush in where even curates often fear to tread.  He had been to the Derby, but without wearing a bottle-green veil or carrying a betting-book.  In fact, he had not taken life very seriously, or fully appreciated the solemn duties it brings to all who bear its yoke.  Only when the plump red hand of Sir Tiglath—­holding a bumper of thirty-four port—­pointed the way to the heavens, did Hennessey begin—­through his telescope—­to see the great possibilities that foot it about the existence of even the meanest man who eats, drinks and suffers.  For through his telescope he saw that he might be a prophet.  Malkiel read the future in the stars.  Why not he?