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. Despite his comparatively dull mood and tendency to a calm of self-satisfaction in the Marylebone Road, Julian could not be wholly unmoved by the passion of Cuckoo's regret, nor entirely unaware that it was a passion in which he must have some share, whether now or at some more distant time, when the thrall of recently moved senses was weakened, and the numbness really born of excitement melted in the quiet expansion of a manly and a reasonable calm. His understanding of her passion, none too definite at first, gave him a moment's wonder, both at her and at himself. It seemed strange that the shattered influence of Valentine should be of less account to him who had known and loved it than to her who had never known it. It seemed stranger still that the streets--those wolves which tear one by one the rags of good from human nature, till it stands naked and tearless beneath the lamps, which are the eyes of the wolves--stranger that those streets should have left to one of their children a veil so bridal and so beautiful as that which hung round Cuckoo when she wept. Julian was almost driven to believe that sin and purity can dwell together in one woman, yet never have intercourse. Yet he knew that to be impossible. The fact remained that the tarnished Cuckoo, in the first moments of regret, was more conscious of his sin for him than he was conscious of it for himself; that she led him, with her dingy hands, to such repentance as he experienced, and that she, too, guarded him against repetition of the sin, so far as she was concerned. Julian considered these circumstances; and there was a time when they were not without effect upon him, and when, with the assistance of a word from Valentine, they might have worked upon him an easy salvation. But Valentine did not speak that word. His peculiar purity had saved Julian in the past by its mere existence. Its presence was enough. That _satis_ was dead now. Julian did not ask why. Nor did he find himself troubled by its decease. There is nothing like action for making man unobservant. Julian was no longer a ship in dock, nor even a ship riding at anchor. The anchor was up, the sails were set, the water ran back from the vessel's prow.