Julian began to wonder what was coming, and silently got ready for the defence, as he always did instinctively when Valentine was the subject of attack.
"What have you got to say about Cresswell?" he asked curtly.
"My dear chap, now don't you get your frills out. Nothing that I should mind being said about me, I assure you. Only Cresswell will soon lose his nickname if he goes on as he's going now."
"I'm in the dark."
"That's what he likes being, if what they say is true. Quite a night-bird, I'm told."
"You'd better be more explicit."
But the man glanced at Julian's face and seemed to think better of it. He moved off muttering:
"Damned rot, minding a little chaff. And when we're all in the same boat too."
Julian sat pondering over his veiled remarks. They surprised him, but at first he was inclined to consider them as meaningless and unfounded as so much of the gossip of the clubs. Men like Valentine must always be a target for the arrows of the cynical. Julian had heard his sanctity laughed at in billiard-rooms and in bars many times, and had simply felt an easy contempt for the laughers, who could not understand that any nature could be finer than their own. But to-day his own faint change of life—as yet in its gentle beginnings—led him presently to wonder, literally for the first time, whether there was a side of Valentine's life that was not merely a side of feeling, but of action, and that he knew nothing of. If it were so, Julian felt an inward conviction that the very nearest weeks of the past had seen its birth. He remembered once more Valentine's idle remark about his weariness of goodness, and wondered whether—in violation of his nature, in violent revolt against his own nobility—he was living at last that commonplace, theatrical puppet-play of the world, a double life.
Valentine a night-bird! What did that mean?