This was the difference which drew the two together; each, felt the deepest interest in the point where the other diverged, and yearned to convert him to his own way of thought. Mr. Price would have had the clergyman know the world; Mr. St. John would have taught Mr. Price to ignore it, "to look up!" as he called it, or, in other words, to sit and sigh for heaven while the heathen raged, and the wicked went their way here undisturbed--although he had not realized up to the present that that was practically what his system amounted to. He belonged by birth to the caste which is vowed to the policy of ignoring, and was as sensitive as a woman about delicate matters. Nationally, Mr. Price was the Englishman's son, and had advanced a generation. Men are what women choose to make them. Mr. St. John's mother was the best kind of woman of the old order, Mr. Price was the product of the new; and the two were typical representatives of the chivalry of the past, high-minded, ill-informed, unforeseeing--and the chivalry of the present, which reaches on always into futurity with the long arm of knowledge, not deceiving itself with romantic misrepresentations of things by the way, but fully recognizing what is wrong from the outset, and making direct for the root of the evil instead of contenting itself by lopping a branch here and there. "I think you said you were going to winter here?" Mr. Price remarked, as they stepped into the street. "Yes--if the place suits me," Mr. St. John answered; "and so far,--that is to say for the last month,--it has done so very well. Are you a resident?" "Well, no, not exactly," the old gentleman answered; "but I have been in the habit of coming here for years." "It is an interesting place," said Mr. St. John, "teeming with historical associations." "Yes, it is an interesting place," Mr. Price agreed, making a little pause before he added--"full of food for reflection. Life at large is represented at Malta during the winter season, and in a little place like this humanity is under the microscope as it were, which makes it a happy hunting ground for those who have to know the world." "Ah!" Mr. St. John ejaculated deliberately. "I should think there are some very nice people here." "Yes--and some very nasty ones," Mr. Price rejoined. "But, of course, one must know both." "Oh, I differ from you there!" Mr. St. John answered, smiling. "Walk not in sinners' way, you know!" "On the contrary, I should say," Mr. Price rejoined, smiling responsively, and twitching his nose as if a gnat had tickled it; "but I allow you have got to have a good excuse when you do." Mr. St. John smiled again slightly, but said nothing. "There were elephants once in Malta, I am told," he began after a little pause, changing the subject adroitly, "but they dwindled down from the size which makes them so useful by way of comparison, till they were no bigger than Shetland ponies, before they finally became extinct."