days of his life.  All that he did bored him, and the more decidedly because he came to know that there was something which did not bore, which even excited him, something which he had resolved to give up.  He was, in fact, strangely pursued by an unreasonable desire to fly in the face of Doctor Levillier’s advice, and of his own secondary antagonistic desire, and to sit again with Julian.  Everything in which he sought to find distraction, lacked savour.  As he sat watching a ballet that glittered with electricity, and was one twinkle of coloured movement, he found himself longing for the silence, the gloom, the live expectation of the tentroom, night, and Julian.  At White’s the conversation of the men struck him as even more scrappy, more desultorily scandalous, than usual.  His morning ride was an active ennui, an ennui revolving, like a horse in a circus, round and round the weariness of the park.

Yet he had made up his mind quite fully that it would be better not to sit any more.  It was not merely Doctor Levillier’s urgency that had impressed him thus.  A personal conviction had gradually forced itself upon him that if anything resulted from such apparently imbecile proceedings it would certainly not be of an agreeable nature.  But, too, this very sense that a secret danger might be lurking against him and Julian, if only they would consent together to give it power by the united action of sitting, spurred him on to restless desire.  It is not only the soldier who has a bizarre love of peril.  Many of those who sit at home in apparent calmness of safety seek perils with a maniacal persistence, perils to the intricate scheme of bodily health, perils to the mind.  More human mules than the men of the banner and the sword delight in journeying at the extreme edge of the precipice.  And Valentine now had to the full this secret hankering after danger.  As he knew it, he despised himself for it, for this attitude of the schoolboy in which he held himself.  Until now he had believed that he was free from such a preposterous and morbid bondage, free on account of his constitutional indifference towards vice, his innate love of the brooding calms of refinement and of the upper snowfields of the intellect.  The discovery of his mistake irritated him, but the irritation could not conquer its cause, and each day the longing to sit once more grew upon him until it became almost painful.  It was this longing which occasioned Valentine’s avoidance of Julian.  He knew that if they were together he would yield to this foolish, witless temptation, and at any rate try to persuade Julian into an act which might be attended with misfortune, if not with disaster.  And then Valentine’s profound respect for Doctor Levillier, a respect which the doctor inspired without effort in every one who knew him, was a chain almost of steel to hold the young man back from gratification of his longing.  Valentine never sought any one’s advice except the little doctor’s, and he had a strong feeling of the obligation laid upon him by such sought advice.  To ask it and to reject it was a short course to insult.