it decides what regiment it will join. Valentine had never decided to
join any regiment. The trumpets of vice rang in his ears in vain, mingled
with the more classical music of his life as the retreat from the
barracks of Seville mingled with the click of Carmen's castanets. But he
heeded them not. If he listened to them sometimes, it was only to wonder
at the harsh and blatant nature of their voices, only to pity the poor
creatures who hastened to the prison, which youth thinks freedom and old
age protection, at their shrieking summons. He preferred to be master of
his soul, and had no desire to set it drilling at the command of painted
women, or to drown it in wine, or to suffocate it in the smoke at
which the voluptuary tries to warm his hands, mistaking it for fire.
Intellectuality is to some men what religion is to many women, a trellis
of roses that bars out the larger world. Valentine loved to watch the
roses bud and bloom as he sat in his flower-walled cell, a deliberate and
rejoicing prisoner. For a long time he loved to watch them. And he
thought that it must always be so, for he was not greatly given to moods,
and therefore scarcely appreciated the thrilling meaning of the word
change, that is the key-word of so many a life cipher. He loved the
pleasures of the intellect so much that he made the mistake of opposing
them, as enemies, to the pleasures of the body. The reverse mistake is
made by the generality of men; and those who deem it wise to mingle the
sharply contrasted ingredients that form a good recipe for happiness
are often dubbed incomprehensible, or worse. But there were moments at
a period of Valentine's life when he felt discontented at his strange
inability to long for sin; when he wondered, rather wearily, why he was
rapt from the follies that other men enjoyed; why he could refuse,
without effort, the things that they clamoured after year by year with
an unceasing gluttony of appetite. The saint quarrelled mutely with his
holiness of intellectuality, and argued, almost fiercely, with his cold
and delicate purity.