“How indeed?” said Valentine, who had been watching him all through this outburst with a scrutiny that seemed almost uneasy, so narrow and so determined was it.

“Julian, listen to me; you trust me, don’t you, and think my opinion worth something?”

“Worth everything.”

“Well, I believe you’re getting into an unnatural, if you weren’t a man I should say a hysterical—­habit of mind.  If you can’t throw it off by yourself, I must help you to do so.”

“Perhaps you’re right.  But how will you help me?”

Valentine seemed to think and consider for a moment.  Then he exclaimed: 

“I’ll tell you.  By making you join with me in putting this life, this old life—­new enough to both of us—­through its paces.  Why should each of us do it alone?  We are friends.  We can trust one another.  You know me through and through.  You know the—­chilliness I’ll call it—­of my nature, my natural bookishness—­my bias towards contemning people too readily, and avoiding what all men ought to know.  And I know you.  Without you I believe I should never go any distance.  Without me you might go too far.  Together we will strike the happy medium.  For us life shall go through all his paces, but he shall never lame us with a kick, like a vicious horse, or give us a furtive bite when we’re not looking.  Men carry such bites and kicks, the wounds from them, to their graves.  We’ll be more careful.  But we’ll see the great play in all—­all its acts.  And, when we’ve seen it, we’ll be as we were, only we’ll be no longer blind.  And we’ll never forget our grand power of rejecting and refusing.”

“Ah!” said Julian.  “Perhaps I haven’t that power.”

“But I have.”

“Yes, you have.”

“And I’ll share my power with you.  We are friends and comrades.  We ought to share everything.”

“Yes,” exclaimed Julian, carried away.  “Yes, by Jove, yes!”

“And as to this flame—­”

“Ah!”

“We’ll soon know if it’s a vision or a reality.  But it’s a vision.  You saw it in a woman’s eyes.”

“I’ll swear I did.”

“Then that proves it’s a fraud.  The flame in a woman’s eyes never burnt true yet—­never, Julian, since the days of Delilah.”

CHAPTER V

JULIAN FEARS THE FLAME

Although Cuckoo knew well that Julian carried out his intention of going home after he left her in Piccadilly, the fact of his being there, of his making one of that crowd, that slowly-moving crowd, troubled her.  Valentine and Julian had argued the question of her real feeling about the matter.  Cuckoo did not argue it.  She never deliberately thought to herself, “I feel this or that.  Why do I feel it?” She knew as much about astronomy as introspection, and that was simply nothing at all.  Instead of diving into the depths of her mind and laboriously tracing every labelled and tabulated subtlety to its source, she sat in the squalid Marylebone Road sitting-room, with the folding doors open into the bedroom to temper the heat of summer with draughts from the frigid zone of the back area, and babbled her sensations to Jessie, who riggled in response to every passing shadow that stole across the heart of her mistress.