For, absurdly enough, that was the name his world gave to Valentine.  This is not an age of romance, and he did not dwell, like the saints of old centuries, in the clear solitudes of the great desert, but in what the advertisement writer calls a “commodious flat” in Victoria Street.  No little jackals thronged about him in sinful circle by night.  No school of picturesque disciples surrounded him by day.  If he peeped above his blinds he could see the radiant procession of omnibuses on their halting way towards Westminster.  The melodies of wandering organs sang in his ascetic ears, not once, nor twice, but many times a week.  The milk-boy came, it must be presumed, to pay his visit in the morning; and the sparrows made the air alive, poising above the chimneys, instead of the wild eagles, whose home is near the sun.  Valentine was a modern young man of twenty-four, dealt at the Army and Navy Stores, was extremely well off, and knew everybody.  He belonged to the best clubs and went occasionally to the best parties.  His tailor had a habitation in Sackville Street, and his gloves came from the Burlington Arcade.  He often lunched at the Berkeley and frequently dined at Willis’s.  Also he had laughed at the antics of Arthur Roberts, and gazed through a pair of gold-mounted opera-glasses at Empire ballets and at the discreet juggleries of Paul Cinquevalli.  The romance of cloistered saintliness was not his.  If it had been he might never have rebelled.  For how often it is romance which makes a home for religion in the heart of man, romance which feathers the nest of purity in which the hermit soul delights to dwell!  Is it not that bizarre silence of the Algerian waste which leads many a Trappist to his fate, rather than the strange thought of God calling his soul to heavenly dreams and ecstatic renunciations?  Is it not the wild poetry of the sleeping snows by night that gives to the St. Bernard monk his holiest meditations?  When the organ murmurs, and he kneels in that remote chapel of the clouds to pray, is it not the religion of his wonderful earthly situation and prospect that speaks to him loudly, rather than the religion of the far-off Power whose hands he believes to hold the threads of his destinies?  Even the tonsure is a psalm to some, and the robe and cowl a litany.  The knotted cord is a mass and the sandal a prayer.

But Valentine had been a saint by temperament, it seemed, and would be a saint by temperament to the end.  He had not been scourged to a prayerful attitude by sorrow or by pain.  Tears had not made a sea to float him to repentance or to purity.  Apparently he had been given what men call goodness as others are given moustaches or a cheerful temper.  When his contemporaries wondered at him, he often found himself wondering still more at them.  Why did they love coarse sins? he thought.  Why did they fling themselves down, like dogs, to roll in offal?  He could not understand, and for a long time he did not wish to understand.  But one night the wish came to him, and he expressed it to his bosom friend, Julian Addison.