He was sitting in a low chair, and as he spoke he slowly stretched his limbs.  It was as if all his body yawned, waking from sleep.

“But how?” Julian asked.

Already he looked rather interested than troubled.  At Valentine’s words he too became violently conscious of his own strength, and stirred by the wonder of youth dwelling in him.

“How?  That is what I wish to find out by going into the world with different eyes.  I have been living in the arts, Julian.  But is that living at all?”

Julian got up and stood by the fire.  Valentine excited him.  He leaned one arm on the mantelpiece.  His right hand kept closing and unclosing as he talked.

“Such a life is natural to you,” he said.  “And you have made me love it.”

“I sometimes wonder,” responded Valentine, “whether I have not trained my head to slay my heart.  Men of intellect are often strangely inhuman.  Besides, what you call my purity and my refinement are due perhaps to my cowardice.  I am called the Saint of Victoria Street because I live in a sort of London cloister with you for my companion, and in the cloister I read or I give myself up to music, and I hang my walls with pictures, and I wonder at the sins of men, and I believe I am that deadly thing, a Pharisee.”

“But you are perfectly tolerant.”

“Am I?  I often find myself sneering at the follies of others, at what I call their coarsenesses, their wallowing in the mire.”

“It is wallowing.”

“And which is most human, the man who drives in a carriage, or the man who walks sturdily along the road, and gets the mud on his boots, and lets the rain fall on him and the wind be his friend?  I suspect it is a fine thing to be out unsheltered in a storm, Julian.”

Julian’s dark eyes were glowing.  Valentine spoke with an unusual, almost with an electric warmth, and Julian was conscious of drawing very near to him tonight.  Always in their friendship, hitherto, he had thought of Valentine as of one apart, walking at a distance from all men, even from him.  And he had believed most honestly that this very detachment had drawn him to Valentine more than to any other human being.  But to-night he began suddenly to feel that to be actually side by side with his friend would be a very glorious thing.  He could never hope to walk perpetually upon the vestal heights.  If Valentine did really come down towards the valley, what then?  Just at first the idea had shocked him.  Now he began almost to wish that it might be so, to feel that he was shaking hands with Valentine more brotherly than ever before.

“Extremes are wrong, desolate, abominable, I begin to think,” Valentine went on.  “Angel and devil, both should be scourged—­the one to be purged of excessive good, the other of excessive evil, and between them, midway, is man, natural man.  Julian, you are natural man, and you are more right than I, who, it seems, have been educating you by presenting to you for contemplation my own disease.”