“Why, Cuckoo,” he said, “you look like a young judge about to deliver a sentence on somebody.”

And indeed that was just how her expression and pose behind the marble-topped table affected him.  Just then the waiter brought the stout and the other things.  Cuckoo removed her cheap kid gloves, took the tumbler in her thin fingers and sipped at it.  After a sip or two she put the glass down, and said to Julian: 

“I say.”

“Well?”

“What are you about to-night?”

The question came from her painted lips very sternly.  It seemed addressed by one who had a right to condemn, and who was going to exercise that right.  Julian was astonished by her tone, and had an instant’s inclination to resent it.  But then he thought that there was nothing in the words themselves, and that the odd manner probably sprang simply from fatigue or some other womanish, undivined cause.  So he answered: 

“Just taking a stroll.  It’s so fine,” and began to drink his coffee.

But Cuckoo quickly showed that her manner meant all that it had seemed to say.

“That ain’t it,” she said, with emphatic excitement, though she spoke in a low voice because of the people all round them.  “You know it ain’t.”

Julian was just lighting a cigarette.  The match was flaming in his hand.  He let it go out as he looked at her.

“What do you mean?” he asked.  “What’s the matter?”

“What are you doin’?” she retorted.  “That’s what I want to know.  Not as I need to ask, though,” she added, bitterly.

Julian was distinctly taken aback by the emotion in her manner, and the passion that she tried to keep quiet in her voice.  He flushed rather red, a boyish trick which he could never quite get over.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, lighting another match, and this time making it do its office on his cigarette.

Cuckoo tossed her head in a way that was not wholly free from vulgarity, but that was certainly wholly unconscious and expressive of real feeling.

“Oh yes, you do,” she rejoined.  Then after a moment’s silence, she added, with bitter emphasis, and a movement of her hand in the direction of the door: 

“You out in that crowd, and doing the same as all of them?”

As she said the words tears started under her blackened eyelashes.  If Julian had been taken aback before she spoke the last sentence, he was ten times more astonished now.  The whole situation struck him as unexampled, and but for something so passionate in the girl’s manner that it overrode the natural feeling of the moment, his sense of humour must have moved him to a smile.  It was strange indeed to sit at midnight under the electric moons of the Monico, and to be passionately condemned for dissipation by a girl with a painted face, dyed hair, and that terribly unmistakable imprint of the streets.  But Julian could not smile.  Something in Cuckoo’s demeanour, something so vehement and so unconscious as to be not far from dignity, impressed him and took him well beyond the gates of laughter.