And society heard their cries, held the door a little more ajar, and listened with that passion of attention which virtue accords to vice.  But society, having heard a good deal, shook its head over Julian.  He had acquired such a taste for low company that he ought to have been born a peer.  Certainly, he had money.  That made his errors chink rather pleasantly, and filled the bosoms of many mothers with an expansive charity towards him.  Still, the general opinion was that he was sinking very low.  In fact, the legend of Julian’s shame was now written on his face in such legible and vital characters that the most short-sighted eyes could not fail to read it.  The eager beauty of untarnished youth had faded into the dull, and often sulky, languors of the utterly indulged body.  Julian was often exhausted and passing through those leaden-footed dreams that fitfully entrance the vicious,—­those dreams that are colourless and sombre, that press upon all the faculties, and yet have no real meaning, that stifle all intentions, and put an end, for the moment, to all active desires.  People talk of the vicious as “living,” but half their time they are curiously dead, for their sins blunt their energies and lull them into a condition that resembles rather paralysis than slumber.

Since the night on which he had supped with Valentine at the Savoy, Julian had given himself up to the company and influence of his friend more than ever, and London, which had once nicknamed Valentine the Saint of Victoria Street, began to dub him with quite another name.  For it gradually became apparent to those who only knew the two young men slightly that Valentine exerted an extraordinarily powerful influence over Julian, and that the influence was imperatively evil.  At first many were deceived by the clear beauty of Valentine’s face, but that was beginning to fade.  A thin line, pencilled here and there with a fairylike delicacy, a slight puffiness beneath the blue eyes, a looseness of the cheeks, a droop of the lips, all very demure, as it were, and furtive, shed alteration upon his fair beauty.  He himself noticed it, as he looked in a mirror one night, and silently cursed the inevitable effect which mind produces upon matter.  No man’s face can forever remain an entirely deceptive mask.  The saintly expression of Valentine’s was rapidly becoming a thing of the past.  He wondered whether Julian noticed it.  But Julian was too much preoccupied with his own energies of dreary action and lacerating fatigues of subsequent thought, or it would be truer to say moodiness, to notice anything.  He was self-centred, as are all sinners, immersed in his own downfall, like a man in an ocean.  He was unconscious that he was the subject of battle, that four wills were to contend for his soul’s sake.  Four wills, yet one expressed itself in no outward form.  It was in exile, till the day of its redemption should dawn.

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