“Your wife?”
“My honoured lady,” said Malkiel, with pride. “More to me almost than any lunar guide or starry monitor. What, oh, what would she say to a prophet from the Berkeley Square?”
He burst into hollow laughter, shaking upon the cane chair till its very foundations seemed threatened as by an earthquake, and was obliged to apply the flight of storks to his eyes before he could in any degree recover his equanimity. At length he glanced up with tears rolling down his cheeks.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said. “But what can you know of prophecy in such a fashionable neighbourhood, close to Grosvenor Square and within sight, as one may say, of Piccadilly? Oh, dear, oh, dear!”
“But really,” said the Prophet, who had flushed red, but who still spoke with pleasant mildness, “what influence can neighbourhood have upon such a superterrestrial matter?”
“Did Isaiah reside in the Berkeley Square, sir?”
“I fancy not. Still—”
“I fancy not, too,” rejoined Malkiel. “Nor Bernard Wilkins either, or any prophet that ever I heard of. Why, even Jesse Jones lives off Perkin’s Road, Wandsworth Common, though he does keep a sitting-room in Berners Street just to see his clients in, and he is a very low-class person, even for a prophet. No, no, sir, Madame is quite right. She married me despite the damning—yes, I say, sir, the damning fact that I was a prophet—” here Malkiel the Second brought down one of the dogskin gloves with violence upon the rickety parlour table—“but before ever we went to the Registrar’s she made me take a solemn oath. What was it, do you say?”
“Yes, I do,” said Hennessey, leaning forward and gazing into Malkiel’s long and excited face round which the heavy mat of pomaded hair vibrated.
“It was this, sir—to mix with no prophets so long as we both should live. Prophets, she truly said, are low-class, even dirty, persons. Their parties, their ‘at homes’ are shoddy. They live in fourth-rate neighbourhoods. They burn gas and sit on horsehair. Only in rare cases do they have any bathroom in their houses. Their influence would be bad for the children when they begin to grow up. How could Corona make her debut”—Malkiel pronounced it debbew—“in prophetic circles? How could she come out in Drakeman’s Villas, Tooting, or dance with such young fellers as frequent Hagglin’s Buildings, Clapham Rise? How could she do it, sir?”