"No, Valentine."
Julian said the words with a sort of return to confidence and to greater happiness. To look into the face of his friend set all his doubts at rest. No man with eyes like that could ever fall into anything which was really and radically evil. Valentine perhaps was playing with life as a boy plays with a dog, making life jump up at him, dance round him, just to see the strength and grace of the creature, its possibilities of quick motion, its powers of varied movement. Where could be the harm of that? And what Valentine could do safely he began to think he might do safely too. He gave expression to his thought with his usual frankness.
"You mean you are beginning to play with life?" he said.
"That is it exactly. I am putting life through its paces. After all, no man is worth his salt if he shuts himself up from that which is placed in the world for him to see, to know, and perhaps—but only after he has seen and known it—to reject. To do that is like living in the midst of a number of people who may be either very agreeable or the reverse, and declining ever to be introduced to them on the ground that they must all be horrible and certain to do one an infinity of harm."
"Yes, yes, I see. Then you think that Cuckoo is jealous of me?—that that was all she meant?"
Julian again returned to the old question. Valentine replied:
"I feel sure of it. Women are always governed by their hearts. So much so that my last sentence is a truism, scarcely worthy the saying. Besides, my dear Julian, what would it matter if she were not? What could the attitude of such a woman on any subject under the sun matter to you?"
The words were not spoken without intentional sarcasm. They stung Julian a little, but did not lead him, from any sense of false shame, to a feeble concealment of his real feeling.
"It does seem absurd, I dare say," he said. "But she's—well, she's not an ordinary woman, Val."
"Let us hope not."