he had laughed at the antics of Arthur Roberts, and gazed through a pair
of gold-mounted opera-glasses at Empire ballets and at the discreet
juggleries of Paul Cinquevalli. The romance of cloistered saintliness
was not his. If it had been he might never have rebelled. For how often
it is romance which makes a home for religion in the heart of man,
romance which feathers the nest of purity in which the hermit soul
delights to dwell! Is it not that bizarre silence of the Algerian waste
which leads many a Trappist to his fate, rather than the strange thought
of God calling his soul to heavenly dreams and ecstatic renunciations? Is
it not the wild poetry of the sleeping snows by night that gives to the
St. Bernard monk his holiest meditations? When the organ murmurs, and he
kneels in that remote chapel of the clouds to pray, is it not the
religion of his wonderful earthly situation and prospect that speaks to
him loudly, rather than the religion of the far-off Power whose hands he
believes to hold the threads of his destinies? Even the tonsure is a
psalm to some, and the robe and cowl a litany. The knotted cord is a mass
and the sandal a prayer.

But Valentine had been a saint by temperament, it seemed, and would be a
saint by temperament to the end. He had not been scourged to a prayerful
attitude by sorrow or by pain. Tears had not made a sea to float him to
repentance or to purity. Apparently he had been given what men call
goodness as others are given moustaches or a cheerful temper. When his
contemporaries wondered at him, he often found himself wondering still
more at them. Why did they love coarse sins? he thought. Why did they
fling themselves down, like dogs, to roll in offal? He could not
understand, and for a long time he did not wish to understand. But one
night the wish came to him, and he expressed it to his bosom friend,
Julian Addison.