“But you must know.  You must have a reason,” said Valentine.

“If I have I don’t know what it is.  I wish you would tell me, old fellow.”

“I can’t supply you with reasons for all your actions.”

“And I can’t supply myself with reasons for any of them,” Julian said slowly.  The words were leading him to a dawning wonder at his own way of life, a dawning desire to know if there were really any reasons for the things he did.  But Valentine did not accept the reply as satisfactory.  On the contrary, it evidently irritated him still more, for he said with unusual warmth: 

“Your reason for dropping your engagements, throwing me over and wasting my evenings is quite obvious.  The blessed damozel of the feathers is attractive to you.  Her freshness captivates you.  Her brilliant conversation entertains you.  She is the powdered and painted reason of these irrelevant escapades.”

“Don’t sneer at her, Val.”

The words came quickly, like a bolt.  Valentine frowned, and a deepening suspicion flashed in his eyes.

“I did not think you were so easily flattered,” he continued.

“Flattered?”

“Yes.  Cuckoo Bright admires you, and you go to number 400 to smell the rather rank fumes of the incense which she burns at your shrine.”

“Nonsense!” Julian cried warmly.

“What other reason can you have?  She has no beauty; she has no conversation, no gaiety, no distinction, no manners—­she has nothing.  She is nothing.”

“Ah, it’s there you’re wrong.”

“Wrong!”

“When you say she is nothing.”

“I say it again,” Valentine reiterated almost fiercely.

“The lady of the feathers is nothing, nothing at all.  God and the devil—­they have completely forgotten her.  A creature like that is neither good, nor would I call her really evil, for she is evil merely that she may go on living, not because she has a fine pleasure in sin.  But if you sell your will for bread and butter, you slip out of the world, the world that must be reckoned with.  I say, Cuckoo Bright is nothing.”

“And I tell you she is something extraordinary.”

As Julian spoke the words the cab stopped at the Savoy.  Valentine sprang out and paid the man.  His face was flushed as if with heat, despite the piercing cold of the night.

“A private room and supper for two,” he said to the man in the vestibule.  “Take my coat,” and he drew himself with obvious relief from the embrace of his huge coat.  Julian and he said nothing more until they were sitting opposite to one another at a small oval table in a small and strongly decorated room, whose windows faced the Thames Embankment.  The waiter uncorked a bottle of champagne with the air of one performing a religious rite.  The electric light gleamed and a fire chased the frost from recollection.  Julian had already forgotten what they had been talking about in the cab.  The first sip of champagne swept the heavy meditativeness from him.  But Valentine, unfolding his napkin slowly, and with his eyes on the menu, said: