The sentence stirred Julian to a surprise warmer than seemed reasonable, for he had really known that Cuckoo had some feeling for him.  But he had always at the back of his mind the idea, common to so many, that such a girl as Cuckoo could not be capable of the real love, the love ascetic, not the love Bacchanalian.  Love among the roses is easy, but not many can welcome love among the nettles; and, moreover, Julian, despite his knowledge of the thorny paths along which Cuckoo walked habitually, along which all her poor sisterhood walked incessantly, had not entirely disabused himself of the fallacy that a life such as hers was, in some vague, undefined and indefinable way, a life of pleasure.  Even when we know a thing to be, we often cannot feel it to be.  Knowledge in the mind does not inevitably bring to the birth sensation in the heart, or even the mental apprehension, half reasonable and half emotional, on the base and foundation of which it is comparatively easy to ground acts that indicate an understanding.

From Valentine’s remark Julian understood him to mean that Cuckoo’s anger was entirely caused by jealousy, not at all by a fine desire of protecting some one stronger than herself from that which she knew so well through her own original weakness.  Yet that was what Julian had been led to believe, not by any hint of Cuckoo’s, but by something within himself.

“I don’t see why she should love me,” he said, presently.

“You’re well off, Julian,” Valentine rejoined.

Almost for the first time in his life Julian felt angry with Valentine.

“You don’t know her at all,” he said, hotly.

“I know her class.”

Julian looked at him, and his anger died, as his mind sailed off on a new tack.

“Her class!  Then you must have been studying it lately, Val.  Not long ago you could not have studied it.  Your nature would not have let you.”

“That is true enough.”

“Were you studying it when we met you the other night?”

“Yes.”

“With what result?” Julian asked with eager curiosity.

“That I understand something I never understood before—­the charm of sin.”

Julian was greatly surprised at this deliverance of his friend, who uttered it in his coldly pure voice, looking serenely high-minded and even loftily intellectual.

“You find the charm of sin in Piccadilly?”

“I begin to find it everywhere, in every place in which human beings gather together.”

“You no longer feel yourself aloof from the average man, then?”

Valentine pressed his right hand slowly upon Julian’s shoulder.

“No longer,” he answered quietly.  “Julian, you and I are emerging together from the hermitage in which we have dwelt retired for so long.  I always thought you would emerge some day.  I never thought I should.  But so it is.  Don’t think that I am standing still while you are travelling.  It is not so.”