The mention of Marr always woke terror in her.  She sat, her eyes fixed on Valentine, her memory fixed on Marr.  Perhaps for this reason what her memory saw and what her eyes saw seemed gradually to float together, and fuse and mingle, till eyes and memory mingled, too, into one sense, observant of one being only, neither wholly Marr nor wholly Valentine, but both in one.  She had linked them together vaguely before, but never as now.  Yet even now the clouds were floating round her and the vapours.  She might think she saw, but she could not understand, and what she saw was rather a phantom standing in a land of mirage than a man standing in the world of men.

“Some day, perhaps, I will prove to you that he is not,” Valentine said.

“Eh, how?”

She had lost all self-consciousness now, and in her eagerness of fear, wonder, and curiosity seemed tormented by the veil of yellow hair that was flopping in frizzy strands round her face and over her eyes.  She seized it in her two hands, and with a few shooting gestures, in and out, wound it into a dishevelled lump, which she stuck to the back of her head with two or three pins.  All the time she was looking at Valentine for an answer to her question.

“Perhaps I don’t know how yet.”

“Yes, you do, though.  I can see you do.  What have you got to do with him, with Marr?”

“I never said I had anything to do with him.”

“Ah! but you have.  I always knew it!”

“Many men are linked together by thin, perhaps invisible threads, impalpable and impossible to define.”

The lady of the feathers was out of her depth in this sentence, so she only tossed her head and murmured: 

“Oh, I dessay!” with an effort after contempt.

But Valentine’s mood seemed to change.  An abstracted gaiety stole over him.  If it was simulated, the simulation was very perfect and complete.  Sitting back in his chair, the cigarette smoke curling lightly round him, his large blue eyes glancing gravely now at Cuckoo crumpled up on the horsehair sofa, now meditatively at some object in the little room, or at the ceiling, he spoke in a low, clear, level voice, as if uttering his thoughts aloud, careless or oblivious of any listener.

“Every man who lives, and who has a personality, has something to do with many men whom he has never seen, whom he will never see.  Messengers go from him as carrier-pigeons go from a ship.  He may live alone, as a ship is alone in mid-ocean, but the messengers are winged, and their wings are strong.  They fly high and they fly far, and wherever they pause and rest, that man has left a mark, has stamped himself, has uttered himself, has planted a seed of his will.  Have you a religion?”

Valentine stopped abruptly after uttering this question, and waited for an answer.  It was characteristic enough.

“What?” said the lady of the feathers, staring wide-eyed.