“I always feel it.”

“Tragically or comically?”

“I don’t know that I could say truly either.  Calmly or contemptuously would rather be the word.”

“You are always a philosopher.  I can’t be a philosopher when I see those hordes of women standing hour after hour in the rain, and those boys searching among them.  I should be one of those boys probably but for you.”

“If you were, I doubt whether I should feel horrified.”

“Not morally horrified, I dare say, but intellectually disgusted.  Eh?”

“I am not sure whether I shall permit my intellect quite so much license in the future as I have permitted it in the past,” Valentine said thoughtfully.

His blue eyes were on Julian, but Julian was gazing out on Oxford Street, which they were crossing at that moment.  Julian, who had apparently continued dwelling on the train of thoughts waked in him by the sight of the painted cross, ignored this remark and said: 

“It is not my moral sense which shuddered just now, I believe, but my imagination.  Sin is so full of prose, although many clever writers have represented it as splendidly decorated with poetry.  Don’t you think so, Val?  And it is the prose of sin I realized so vividly just now.”

“The wet flowers on the waiting hats, the cold raindrops on the painted faces, the damp boots trudging to find sin, the dark clouds pouring a benediction on it.  I know what you mean.  But the whole question is one of weather, I think.  Vanity Fair on a hot, sweet summer night, with a huge golden moon over Westminster, soft airs and dry pavements, would make you see this city in a different light.  And which of the lights is the true one?”

“I dare say neither.”

“Why not both?  The smartest coat has a lining, you know.  I dare say there are velvet sins as well as plush sins, and the man who can find the velvet is the lucky fellow.  Sins feel like plush to me, however, and I dislike plush.  So I am not the lucky fellow.”

“No, Valentine; you are wrong.  I’m pretty sure all virtue is velvet and all vice is plush.  So you stick to velvet.”

“I don’t know.  Ask the next pretty dressmaker you meet.  Bloomsbury is a genteel inferno on a wet night.”

They traversed it smoothly on asphalt ways.  All the time Valentine was watching Julian with a fixed and narrow scrutiny, which Julian failed to notice.  The rows of dull houses seemed endless, and endlessly alike.

“I am sure all of them are full of solicitors,” said Valentine.

Presently in many fanlights they saw the mystic legend, “Apartments.”  Then there were buildings that had an aged air and sported broken windows.  Occasionally, on a background of red glass lit by a gas-jet from behind, sat the word “Hotel.”  A certain grimy degradation swam in the atmosphere of these streets.  Their aspect was subtly different from the Bloomsbury thoroughfares, which look actively