The saint quarrelled mutely with his holiness of intellectuality, and argued, almost fiercely, with his cold and delicate purity.
"Why am I like some ivory statue ?" he thought sometimes, "instead of like a human being, with drumming pulses, and dancing longings, and voices calling forever in my ears, like voices of sirens, 'Come, come, rest in our arms, sleep on our bosoms, for we are they who have given joy to all men from the beginning of time.

We are they who have drawn good men from their sad goodness, and they have blessed us.

We are they who have been the allegory of the sage and the story of the world.

In our soft arms the world has learned the glory of embracing.

On our melodious hearts the hearts of men have learned the sweet religion of singing.' Why cannot I be as other men are, instead of the Saint--the saint of Victoria Street--that I am ?" For, absurdly enough, that was the name his world gave to Valentine.
This is not an age of romance, and he did not dwell, like the saints of old centuries, in the clear solitudes of the great desert, but in what the advertisement writer calls a "commodious flat" in Victoria Street.
No little jackals thronged about him in sinful circle by night.