ty things such as I have
never seen in a healthy frame. The body is but the tenement of the soul,
and just as we find righteous men and sinners, wise men and fools, alike
in the palace and the hovel--nay, and often see truer worth in a cottage
than in the splendid mansions of the great--so we may discover noble
souls both in the ugly and the fair, in the healthy and the infirm, and
most frequently, perhaps, in the least vigorous. We should be careful
how we go about repeating such false axioms, for they can only do harm
to those who have a heavy burthen to bear through life as it is. In my
opinion a hunchback's thoughts are as straightforward as an athlete's;
or do you imagine that if a mother were to place her new-born children
in a spiral chamber and let them grow up in it, they could not tend
upwards as all men do by nature?"

"Your comparison limps," cried Rufinus, "and needs setting to rights. If
we are not to find ourselves in open antagonism...."

"You must keep the peace," Joanna put in addressing her husband; and
before Rufinus could retort, Paula had asked him with frank simplicity:

"How old are you, my worthy host?"

"Your arrival at my house blessed the second day of my seventieth year,"
replied Rufinus with a courteous bow. His wife shook her finger at him,
exclaiming:

"I wonder whether you have not a secret hump? Such fine phrases..."

"He is catching the style from his cripples," said Paula laughing at
him. "But now it is your turn, friend Philippus. Your exposition was
worthy of an antique sage, and it struck me--for the sake of Rufinus
here I will not say convinced me. I respect you--and yet I should like
to know how old...."

"I shall soon be thirty-one," said Philippus, anticipating her question.

"That is an honest answer," observed Dame Joanna. "At your age many a
man clings to his twenties."

"Why?" asked Pulcheria.

"Well," said her mother, "only because there are some girls who think a
man of thirty too old to be attractive."

"Stupid creatures," answered Pulcheria. "Let them find me a young
man who is more lovable than my father; and if Philippus--yes you,
Philippus--were ten or twenty years over nine and twenty, would that
make you less clever or kind?"

"Not less ugly, at any rate," said the physician. Pulcheria laughed, but
with some annoyance, as though she had herself been the object of the
remark. "You are not a bit ugly!" she exclaimed. "Any one who says so
has no eyes. A