“They are grateful to you,” cried Paula.

“Grateful?” asked the old man.  “That is true sometimes, no doubt; still, gratitude is a tribute on which no wise man ever reckons.  Now I have told you enough; for the sake of Philippus we will let the rest pass.”

“No, no,” said Paula putting up entreating hands, and Rufinus answered gaily: 

“Who can refuse you anything?  I will cut it short, but you must pay good heed.—­Well then Man is the standard of all things.  Do you understand that?”

“Yes, I often hear you say so.  Things you mean are only what they seem to us.”

“To us, you say, because we—­you and I and the rest of us here—­are sound in body and mind.  And we must regard all things—­being God’s handiwork—­ as by nature sound and normal.  Thus we are justified in requiring that man, who gives the standard for them shall, first and foremost, himself be sound and normal.  Can a carpenter measure straight planks properly with a crooked or sloping rod?”

“Certainly not.”

“Then you will understand how I came to ask myself:  ’Do sickly, crippled, and deformed men measure things by a different standard to that of sound men?  And might it not be a useful task to investigate how their estimates differ from ours?’”

“And have your researches among your cripples led to any results?”

“To many important ones,” the old man declared; but Philippus interrupted him with a loud:  “Oho!” adding that his friend was in too great a hurry to deduce laws from individual cases.  Many of his observations were, no doubt, of considerable interest...  Here Rufinus broke in with some vehemence, and the discussion would have become a dispute if Paula had not intervened by requesting her zealous host to give her the results, at any rate, of his studies.

“I find,” said Rufinus very confidently, as he stroked down his long beard, “that they are not merely shrewd because their faculties are early sharpened to make up by mental qualifications for what they lack in physical advantages; they are also witty, like AEesop the fabulist and Besa the Egyptian god, who, as I have been told by our old friend Horus, from whom we derive all our Egyptian lore, presided among those heathen over festivity, jesting, and wit, and also over the toilet of women.  This shows the subtle observation of the ancients; for the hunchback whose body is bent, applies a crooked standard to things in general.  His keen insight often enables him to measure life as the majority of men do, that is by a straight rule; but in some happy moments when he yields to natural impulse he makes the straight crooked and the crooked straight; and this gives rise to wit, which only consists in looking at things obliquely and—­setting them askew as it were.  You have only to talk to my hump-backed gardener Gibbus, or listen to what he says.  When he is sitting with the rest of our people in an evening, they all laugh as soon as he opens his mouth.—­And why?  Because his conformation makes him utter nothing but paradoxes.—­You know what they are?”