No doubt he understood what Julian did not entirely understand, the subtleties of such a nature as Cuckoo’s, a nature hammered out thin by cruel circumstance, drilled till it found the unspeakable ordinary and the loathsome inevitable, worn as a stone by dropping water till the water, ceasing to fall, must have left a loneliness of surprise.  Julian did not fully realize that Cuckoo’s life might well lead her to display real affection, if she possessed it, by ways the reverse of those naturally sought and gloried in by pure and protected women.  To give is the act natural to the love of such women.  It is at least their impulse, although restrained within strict limits, perhaps, by exigencies of conscience or of religion.  But to give is the impulse, giving being the unusual act, the strange new act in them.  Cuckoo’s profession being an ordered routine of giving, how could she show her love better than by withholding?  To be to Julian as she was to all men could prove nothing, either to him or to herself.  To be to him as she was not to any other man whom she knew must mean something, argue something.  So, at least, dimly and without mental self-consciousness, her mind reasoned rather instinctively, for the lady of the feathers was, above all things, instinctive.  Instead of logic, ethics, morals, the equipment of sage, philosopher, good women, she had instinct only.  Instinct told her the secret meaning of reticence in her relations with Julian.  When she said good-bye to him, the hand-shake that passed between them had become something more to her than a kiss.  She kissed so many whom she hated, so many who were dolls of vice to her, who were walking sins, incarnate lust shadows, scarcely men.  To be to Julian what another woman might have been would be to seem to make him as all those dolls of horrible London.  So Cuckoo set him apart by her relations towards him, as she had previously set him apart in her heart.  She pushed the chair of her beloved from the heart where the dolls sat night after night warming their expressive hands at the cheap and ever-burning fire.  She pushed it out into a circle of cold that was the only sacred thing she could supply.  The world and her situation in it had bereft her of the power of even proving the simplicity of love by simplicity of natural action.  She had to find a new way to show an old worship.  She found it in refusal, where others find it in assent.

But, after all, she was a woman, and perhaps she wished Julian to be an anchorite.  That was what Valentine meant when, after Julian’s account of Cuckoo’s anger on finding him in Piccadilly, he simply said: 

“That girl loves you.”