never."

"You mean to say that your grandmother goes about in long clothes
with her hair down in the central districts?" cried Madame in blank
amazement.

"She has never put her hair up," answered the Prophet, with almost
obstinate determination.

"Oh, well--if she prefers! But I wonder what the police are about!"
retorted Madame. "And now the rashes?"

"There are none."

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."

"De Queechy should have known her," continued Madame. "He always loved
everything out of the common. Well, and now for the prophecy. What is
all this, Mr. Vivian?"

"The result of last night's observation," said the Prophet.

"Do you call that a cycloidal curve?" asked Madame, with a contralto
laugh that shook the library. "Look, Jupiter!"

Mr. Sagittarius glanced over his wife's heaving shoulder.