But at this Madame’s temper—already somewhat upset by her prolonged communion with the mighty dead—showed symptoms of giving way altogether.
“Rubbish, Mr. Vivian!” she said, clicking loudly and passing with an almost upheaving jerk to her upper register! “I’m a mother and was once a child. Rubbish! I must insist upon knowing the number of the rashes.”
“I assure you there are none.”
“D’you wish me to believe that the old lady has gone about all her life in the Berkeley Square in long clothes and her hair down, with her lips to the bottle and never had a rash? Do you wish me to believe that, Mr. Vivian?”
“Yes, sir, do you wish Madame, a lady of deep education, sir, to believe that?” cried Mr. Sagittarius.
“I can only adhere to what I have said,” answered the Prophet. “My grandmother has never been removed from the bottle, has never worn a short coat, has never put her hair up and has never had an epidemic in Berkeley Square.”
“Then all I can say is that she’s an unnatural old lady,” cried Madame, with obvious temper, tossing her head and kicking out the kid boots, as if seized with the sudden desire to use them upon a human football. “And there’s not many like her.”
“There is no one like her, no one at all,” said the Prophet with fervour.
“So I should suppose,” cried Madame, forgetting the other questions as to the day of marriage, etc., in the vexation of the moment. “She must certainly be the bird of whom Phoenix wrote that rose from ashes in the days of the classics. Rarum avis indeed! Eh, Jupiter?”
“Very rarum, my dear, very indeed!” responded her husband, with imitative sarcasm. “An avis indeed, not a doubt of it.”