There are
men who can vary the fine monotony of virtue by an occasional deliberate
error, and who return from such an excursion into dangerous by-paths
drilled and comforted, as it appears, for further journeying along the
main road of their respectability. But Julian was not such a man. He
resembled rather the morphia victim, or the inebriate, who must at
all hazards abstain from any indulgence, even the smallest, in drug
or draught, lest the demon who has such charm for him clasp him in
imperturbable arms, and refuse with the steadfastness of a once-tricked
Venus ever to let him go again.
Valentine's empire of five years was broken in one night.
At first Julian was scarcely conscious that his descent was not
momentary, but rather tending to the permanent. Certainly, at the first,
he was inclined to have the schoolboy outlook upon it, and the schoolboy
outlook is as a glance through the wrong end of a telescope, dwindling
giant sins to the stature of pigmies, and pigmy sins to mere points of
darkness which equal nothingness. But, strangely enough, it was his
interview with the weeping Cuckoo, that Magdalen of the streets, which
drove the schoolboy to limbo, and set virtue and vice for the moment
rightly on the throne and in the gutter.
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