“Why—­why can’t you understand?”

The piquancy of the situation evidently delighted his mind and his sense of mischief.  He enjoyed playing the philosopher to a fool; and the more the fool became a fool, the higher soared his philosophy and his appreciation of it.  There is always something paradoxical in wisdom instructing folly, for, after all, folly can never really learn, can never really understand.  Valentine hugged that thought.

“Go on,” the lady of the feathers said, apparently in gaping wonderment.

“Why? do you mean to tell me you are interested?”

“I’m listenin’!  It sounds wonderful!”

“It is wonderful!” Valentine cried.  “Every living lie is wonderful.  But you don’t know yet much about will.  My gospel is full of secrets and of subtleties, and only a few people are beginning to guess at its far-reaching power, and to aim at learning its truths and sounding its depths.  And many unbelievers play with it, and never know that they are playing with fire.  A man did this once.  Shall I tell you about him?”

“Yes!” said Cuckoo.

And her soul cried to the darkness in which she imagined some vague power to dwell; cried aloud for understanding.  This silent cry was so intense that she lay back upon the hard sofa, almost exhausted, and as she lay there, something hot, like fire, seemed to make its nest in her heart, and to flame there, and to be alive, as a flame is alive, and to speak to her, but not aloud, as a flame speaks in the coals to the imagination of the watcher by the hearth.  In that moment the lady of the feathers felt as if she were conscious of a new companion, a companion full of some intensity towards her, some anxiety about her, anxious and brilliant as a flame is, vital, keen, blazing, intense.  Although she could not define her sensation thus, that lack of analytical power could not deprive her of it.  She knew that her vision became clearer, that her mind became brighter, that a light illumined her, that she was, for the moment, greater than herself.  But Valentine did not know it.  He looked towards the sofa and saw spread upon it a thin, painted, haggard young creature curled into a position at once passionate, languid, and merely awkward, with relentless, thickly tangled hair, staring eyes, and half-opened lips, glowering in rouged stupidity and a coarseness of the gutter.  He was a philosopher, with a beauty of the stars and of snows, with a refinement, white in its brilliance.  She was an image of Regent Street, a ghastly idol of the town; and he was telling her strange things that she could never comprehend, in a jargon that was to her as Greek or as Hebrew.  It was too absurd.  Yet he loved to tell her, and he could scarcely tell why he loved it.

“Go on,” said the lady of the feathers.