“Well, but is natural man worth much?  That is the question!  I don’t know.”

“He fights, and drinks, and loves, and, oftener than the renowned philosopher thinks, he knows how to die.  And then he lives thoroughly, and that is probably what we were sent into the world to do.”

“Can’t we live thoroughly without, say, the fighting and the drinking, Val?”

Valentine got up, too, as if excited, and stood by the fire by Julian’s side.

“Battle calls forth heroism,” he said, “which else would sleep.”

“And drinking?”

“Leads to good fellowship.”

This last remark was so preposterously unlike Valentine that Julian could not for a moment accept it as uttered seriously.  His mood changed, and he burst out suddenly into a laugh.

“You have been taking me in all the time,” he exclaimed, “and I actually was fool enough to think you serious.”

“And to agree with what I was saying?”

Valentine still spoke quite gravely and earnestly, and Julian began to be puzzled.

“You know I can never help agreeing with you when you really mean anything,” he began.  “I have proved so often that you are always right in the end.  So your real theory of life must be the true one:  but your real theory, I know, is to reject what most people run after.”

“No longer that, I fancy, Julian.”

“But, then, what has changed you?”

Valentine met his eyes calmly.

“I don’t know,” he said.  “Do you?”

“I?  How should I?”

“Perhaps this change has been growing within me for a long while.  It is difficult to say; but to-night my nature culminates.  I am at a point, Julian.”

“Then you have climbed to it.  Don’t you want to stay there?”

“No mere man can face the weather on a mountain peak forever, and life lies rather in the plains.”

Valentine went over to the window and touched the blind.  It shot up, leaving the naked window, through which the gas-lamps of Victoria Street stared in the night.

“I wish,” he said, “that we, in England, had the flat roofs of the East.”

He thrust up the glass, and the night air pushed in.

“Come here, Julian,” he said.

Julian obeyed, wondering rather.  Valentine leaned a little out on the sill and made Julian lean beside him.  It was early in the night and the hum of London was yet loud, for the bees did not sleep, but were still busy in their monstrous hive.  There was already a gentleness of spring among the discoloured houses.  Spring will not be denied, even among men who dwell in flats.  The cabs hurried past, and pedestrians went by in twos and threes or solitary; soldiers walking vaguely, seeking cheap pleasures, or more gaily with adoring maidens; tired business men; journeying towards Victoria Station; a desolate shop-girl, in dreary virtue defiant of mankind, but still unblessed; the Noah’s ark figure of a policeman, tramping emptily, standing wearily by turns, to keep public order.  Lights starred here and there the long line of mansions opposite.