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.