And, as if under the influence of a spell, Julian found himself thinking of the wandering ruffians as fine fellows, full of warmth of heart and generous feeling.  A boy and girl went by.  Neither could have been more than sixteen years old.  They paused by a lamp-post, and the girl openly kissed the boy.  He sturdily endured the compliment, staring firmly at her pale cheeks and tired eyes.  Then the girl walked away, and he stood alone till she was out of sight.  Eventually he walked off slowly, singing a plantation song:  “I want you, my honey; yes, I do!” Valentine and Julian had watched and listened, and now Valentine, moving round on the window-ledge till he faced Julian, said: 

“That is it, Julian, put in the straightforward music-hall way.  People are happy because they want things; yes, they do.  It is a philosophy of life.  That boy has a life because he wants that girl, and she wants him.  And you, Julian, you want a thousand things—­”

“Not since I have known you,” Julian said.

He felt curiously excited and troubled.  His arm was still linked in Valentine’s.  Slowly he withdrew it.  Valentine shut down the window and they came back to the fire.

“You know,” Valentine said, “that it is possible for two influences to work one upon the other, and for each to convert the other.  I begin to think that your nature has triumphed over mine.”

“What?” Julian said, in frank amazement.  The Philistines could not have been more astounded when Samson pulled down the pillars.

“I have taught you, as you say, to die to the ordinary man’s life, Julian.  But what if you have taught me to live to it?”

Julian did not answer for a moment.  He was wondering whether Valentine could possibly be serious.  But his face was serious, even eager.  There was an unwonted stain of red on his smooth, usually pale cheeks.  A certain wild boyishness had stolen over him, a reckless devil danced in his blue eyes.  Julian caught the infection of his mood.

“And what’s my lesson?” Julian said.

His voice sounded thick and harsh.  There was a surge of blood through his brain and a prickly heat behind his eyeballs.  Suddenly a notion took him that Valentine had never been so magnificent as now,—­now when a new fierceness glittered in his expression, and a wild wave of humanity ran through him like a surging tide.

“What’s my lesson, Valentine?”

“I will show you, this spring.  But it is the lesson the spring teaches, the lesson of fulfilling your nature, of waking from your slumbers, of finding the air, of giving yourself to the rifling fingers of the sun, of yielding all your scent to others, and of taking all their scent to you.  That’s the lesson of your strength, Julian, and of all the strength of the spring.  Lie out in the showers, and let the clouds cover you with shadows, and listen to the song of every bird, and—­and—­ah!” he suddenly broke off in a burst of laughter, “I am rhapsodizing.  The spring has got into my veins even among these chimneypots of London.  The spring is in me, and, who knows? your soul, Julian.  For don’t you feel wild blood in your veins sometimes?”