"The people who know him? What was the good of that? You should have said it to the people who don't know him—to the world."
"You mean I should have posed as a prophet?"
"I mean that what you said you might have written."
"Ah, litera scripta manet. It isn't safe to prophesy. Remember, I saw him a very long way off. Nobody had a notion there was anybody there."
"You could have given them a notion."
"I couldn't. The world, Lucia, is not like you or me. It has no imagination. It wouldn't have seen, and it wouldn't have believed. I should have been a voice crying in the wilderness; a voice and nothing behind it. And as I said prophecy is a dangerous game. In the first place, there is always a chance that your prediction may be wrong; and the world, my dear cousin, has a nasty way of stoning its prophets even when they're right."
"Oh, I thought it provided them with bread and butter, plenty of butter."
"It does, on the condition that they shall prophesy buttery things. When it comes to hard things, if they ask for bread the world retaliates and offers them a stone. And that stone, I need not tell you, has no butter on it."
"I see. You were afraid. You haven't the courage of your opinion."
"And I haven't much opinion of my courage. I own to being afraid."