As Ishmael drove him from Penzance through the warm, clear May afternoon Killigrew waxed enthusiastic with appreciation of what he saw.

“Anyone living here should be perfectly happy,” he declared.  “I don’t wonder you’ve never wanted to leave.  It has more to it, so to speak, than our old country round St. Renny.”

For a moment Ishmael made no reply; it was the first time it had occurred to him it would be possible to leave Cloom, and though he knew that up to now he had not wanted to, yet he was not quite pleased that Killigrew should take it so for granted.  He sent his mind back over the years since he had seen his friend, comparing what had happened to himself with all that happened to Killigrew as far as he could imagine it—­which was not very far.  Killigrew was the more changed; his beard and the lines of humour—­and other things—­round his eyes, made him seem older than his twenty-two years, but it was more the growth in him mentally that had been so marked as to suggest that he had changed.  This was not so, as the alterations had all marched in inevitable directions—­it could not have been otherwise in one who lived so by his instincts as Killigrew, and held them so sacred.  He had not changed, but he had developed so far that to Ishmael he seemed disconcertingly altered.

“It’s all right for me,” said Ishmael at last, “but I expect you’ll find it dull after Paris.  It must all be so different over there.”

“Oh, Paris is Paris, of course, and unlike anything else on earth.  It is not a place as much as a state, which is one of its resemblances to heaven.  You see I haven’t forgotten all my theology.”

“I sometimes think,” announced Ishmael, firmly believing what he was saying, “that it’s time I went about a bit.  To London and Paris ... the place can get on quite well without me for a bit.”

“My son, be advised by me,” said Killigrew gaily; “for good little boys like you this is a better place than gay, wicked cities.  Of course, I’m not good—­or bad either; it’s a distinction that doesn’t mean anything to me—­but I have to be in Paris for my painting.  Can you imagine it, I’ve been with Diaz and Rousseau?  And there’s a young fellow who’s coming on now that I’ve seen a lot of called Lepage—­Bastien Lepage, who’s going to be a wonder.  I can tell you, sometimes when I think of the dear old Guv’nor’s business, and how he had set his heart on my going into it, I can hardly believe it’s true that I’ve been there, free to do my own work, with those men....”

Killigrew’s voice sounded younger in its enthusiasm, more as it had in the old days when he used to speak of Turner.

“I’ll bet you’re going to be as great as any,” cried Ishmael, the old sense of potencies that Killigrew’s bounding vitality had always stirred in him awaking again.  “How we all used to talk at St. Renny about what we’d do ... d’you remember?”

“Rather.  And it’s most of it coming true.  I was to be a painter and old Carminow a surgeon.  I’ve just heard he’s at the Charing Cross hospital.”