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."