“Because she looks into her own heart,” replied Rufinus.  “She knows herself; and, because she knows how painful pain is, she treats others tenderly.  Do you remember, Philippus, how we disputed after that anatomical lecture we heard together at Caesarea?”

“Perfectly well,” said the leech, “and later life has but confirmed the opinion I then held.  There is no less true or less just saying than the Latin motto:  ‘Mens sana in corpore sano,’ as it is generally interpreted to mean that a healthy soul is only to be found in a healthy body.  As the expression of a wish it may pass, but I have often felt inclined to doubt even that.  It has been my lot to meet with a strength of mind, a hopefulness, and a thankfulness for the smallest mercies in the sickliest bodies, and at the same time a delicacy of feeling, a wise reserve, and an undeviating devotion to lofty 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.”