The strength of his hand’s grip upon Julian’s shoulder seemed to indicate a violence of feeling which the tones of his voice did not imply.  Julian listened, and then said, in a hesitating, irresolute manner: 

“Yes, I see, Val; but I say, where are we travelling? or, at least, where shall we travel if we don’t pull up, if we keep on?  That’s the thing, I suppose.”

As he spoke he did not tell himself that it was nothing less than the disconnected and ungrammatical remarks of the lady of the feathers which prompted this consideration, this prophetic movement of his mind.  Yet so it was.  And when Valentine replied he, the saint, was fighting against her, the sinner, and surely in the cause of evil.  For he said lightly: 

“After all, do human souls travel?  I often think they are like eyes looking at a whirling zoetrope.  It is the zoetrope that travels.”

“You think souls don’t go up or down?”

“I think that none of us knows really much about souls, and that, after all, it is best not to bother ourselves too much about them.”

“Marr thought a great deal about them.  I used to fancy that as some maniacs have been known to murder people in order to tear out their hearts, he could have murdered them to tear out their souls.”

Valentine took his hand from Julian’s shoulder.

“Marr is dead and forgotten,” he said almost sternly.

“I can’t quite forget him, Val; and I still feel as if he had had some influence over both of us.  We have changed since those days of the sittings, since that night of your trance and his death.”

Julian was looking at Valentine in a puzzled way while he spoke.  Valentine met his eyes calmly.

“If I have changed,” he said slowly, “it cannot be in essentials.  Look at me.  Is my face altered?  Is my expression different?”

“No, Valentine.”

Julian said the words with a sort of return to confidence and to greater happiness.  To look into the face of his friend set all his doubts at rest.  No man with eyes like that could ever fall into anything which was really and radically evil.  Valentine perhaps was playing with life as a boy plays with a dog, making life jump up at him, dance round him, just to see the strength and grace of the creature, its possibilities of quick motion, its powers of varied movement.  Where could be the harm of that?  And what Valentine could do safely he began to think he might do safely too.  He gave expression to his thought with his usual frankness.

“You mean you are beginning to play with life?” he said.

“That is it exactly.  I am putting life through its paces.  After all, no man is worth his salt if he shuts himself up from that which is placed in the world for him to see, to know, and perhaps—­but only after he has seen and known it—­to reject.  To do that is like living in the midst of a number of people who may be either very agreeable or the reverse, and declining ever to be introduced to them on the ground that they must all be horrible and certain to do one an infinity of harm.”