Valentine sat considering.

“Well,” he replied at length, “I think it is my inhumanity, which robs me of many things.  I don’t desire the pleasures that most men desire, as you know.  But lately I have often wished to desire them.”

“Rather an elaborate state of mind.”

“Yet a state easy to understand, surely.  Julian, emotions pass me by.  Why is that?  Deep love, deep hate, despair, desire, won’t stop to speak to me.  Men tell me I am a marvel because I never do as they do.  But I am not driven as they are evidently driven.  The fact of the matter is that desire is not in me.  My nature shrinks from sin; but it is not virtue that shrinks:  it is rather reserve.  I have no more temptation to be sensual, for instance, than I have to be vulgar.”

“Hang it, Val, you don’t want to have the temptation, do you?”

Valentine looked at Julian curiously.

“You have the temptation, Julian?” he said.

“You know I have—­horribly.”

“But you fight it and conquer it?”

“I fight it, and now I am beginning to conquer it, to get it under.”

“Now?  Since when?”

Julian replied by asking another question.

“Look here, how long have we known each other?”

“Let me see.  I’m twenty-four, you twenty-three.  Just five years.”

“Ah!  For just five years I’ve fought, Val, been able to fight.”

“And before then?”

“I didn’t fight; I revelled in the enemy’s camp.”

“You have never told me this before.  Did you suddenly get conversion, as Salvationists say?”

“Something like it.  But my conversion had nothing to do with trumpets and tambourines.”

“What then?  This is interesting.”

A certain confusion had come into Julian’s expression, even a certain echoing awkwardness into his attitude.  He looked away into the fire and lighted another cigarette before he answered.  Then he said rather unevenly: 

“I dare say you’ll be surprised when I tell you.  But I never meant to tell you at all.”

“Don’t, if you would rather not.”

“Yes, I think I will.  I must stop you from disliking yourself at any cost, dear old boy.  Well, you converted me, so far as I am converted; and that’s not very far, I’m afraid.”

“I?” said Valentine, with genuine surprise.  “Why, I never tried to.”

“Exactly.  If you had, no doubt you’d have failed.”

“But explain.”

“I’ve never told you all you do for me, Val.  You are my armour against all these damned things.  When I’m with you, I hate the notion of being a sinner.  I never hated it before I met you.  In fact, I loved it.  I wanted sin more than I wanted anything in heaven or earth.  And then—­just at the critical moment when I was passing from boyhood into manhood, I met you.”

He stopped.  His brown cheeks were glowing, and he avoided Valentine’s gaze.