But to-day his own faint change of
life--as yet in its gentle beginnings--led him presently to wonder,
literally for the first time, whether there was a side of Valentine's
life that was not merely a side of feeling, but of action, and that he
knew nothing of. If it were so, Julian felt an inward conviction that the
very nearest weeks of the past had seen its birth. He remembered once
more Valentine's idle remark about his weariness of goodness, and
wondered whether--in violation of his nature, in violent revolt against
his own nobility--he was living at last that commonplace, theatrical
puppet-play of the world, a double life.
Valentine a night-bird! What did that mean?
And then Julian thought of the great wheeling army of the bats, whose
evolutions every night of creation witnesses. In the day they do not
sleep, but they are hidden. Their wings are folded so closely as to be
invisible. Nobody could tell that they ever flew through shadowy places,
seeking that which never satiates, although it may transform, the
appetite. Nobody could tell how the twilight affects them when it comes;
how, in their obscurity, they have to keep a guard lest the involuntary
fluttering of a half-spread pinion betray them.
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