“Why—­but you were out in the crowd too,” he said.

“I!” she said sharply, and with a touch of scathing contempt for herself, yet impatient, too, of any introduction of her entity into the discussion; “of course I’ve got to be there.  What’s that to do with it?”

“Really, Cuckoo,” Julian began, but she interrupted him.

“I ain’t you,” she said.

“No, of course, but—­”

“I’m different.  It’s nothing to me where I go of a night, or what I do.  But you ain’t got to be there.  You needn’t go, need you?”

“Nobody need,” he said.  “But—­”

“Then what d’you do it for?” she reiterated, still in the same tone of one sitting on high in condemnation, and moved by her own utterance to an increasing excitement.  This time she paused for a reply, and set her rouged lips together with the obvious intention of not speaking until Julian had plainly put forward his defence.  Strange to say, her manner had impressed him with a ridiculous feeling that defence of some kind was actually necessary.  It was a case of one denizen of the dock putting on the black cap to sentence another.  Julian glanced at Cuckoo before he made any reply to her last question.  If he had had any intention of not answering it at all, of calmly disposing, in a word or two, of her right to interrogate him on his proceedings, her fixed and passionate eyes killed it instantly.  He moved his coffee-cup round uneasily in the saucer.

“Men do many things they needn’t do, as well as women,” he began.  “I must have my amusements.  Why not?”

At the word “amusements” she drew in her breath with a little hiss of contempt.  Julian flushed again.

“You’re the last person,” he began, and then caught himself up short.  It must be confessed that she was very aggravating, and that the position she took up was wholly untenable.  Having checked himself, he said more calmly: 

“What’s the good of talking about it?  I live as other men do, naturally.”

“Are you a beast too, then?” she asked.

She still kept her voice low, and the sentence came with all the more effect on this account.

“I don’t see that,” Julian exclaimed, evidently stung.  “Women are always ready to say that about men.”

Cuckoo broke into a laugh.  She picked up her glass, and drank all that was in it.  Putting it down empty, she laughed again, with her eyes on Julian.  That sound of mirth chilled him utterly.

“Why d’you laugh?” he said.

“I don’t know—­thinkin’ that you’re to be like all the rest, I suppose,” she answered.  “Like all them brutes out there, and him too.”

“Him,” said Julian.  “Whom are you speaking of?”

She had not meant to say those last words, and tried to get out of an answer by asking for something more to drink.

“Chartreuse,” she said, with the oddest imaginable accent.

Julian ordered it hastily, and then immediately repeated his question.