On the night when Valentine heard Julian babble incoherently the name of the lady of the feathers, he said to himself that the battle should be his, and he leaned upon his will to feel its power and its glory.  That night he forgot its fury, the intense emotion that had overtaken him at the supper-table as he gauged, or strove to gauge, the influence that Cuckoo was obtaining over Julian.  He forgot Doctor Levillier.  He remembered only himself and his own strength, which he was now to test to its foundations.  And when he woke again to thoughts of others, it was only to laugh at the force arrayed against him.  The lady of the feathers moved, to his fancy, like the most piteous of puppets, a jeering fate manipulating the strings.  This manipulator had kept her long to one set of motions, stiff pleading arm, anxious head, interrogative joints, and a strut of wolfish eagerness and hunger.  But such a game was now to be abandoned.  And behold the puppet a warrior forsooth, a very Amazon, hounded to fight by the doctor’s voice, the doctor’s word of encouragement, battling with the stiff arms that had abandoned the pleading gesture, stern in a wooden attitude of defiance.  And Fate, in fits of laughter at the string-holding!  Then Valentine lost his fear, and could have been angry that such a scarecrow was the creature selected by Fate to draw a sword against him.  He chose to forget the vision in the mirror when he struck at the staring reflection of the lady of the feathers and shivered under the influence of a cold terror.  He chose to remember only the thin and fearful woman who had given her body to the world, and so had surely given her soul to a mill that had long ago ground it to powder.

There is nothing so terrible to one screwed up to the highest pitch of action as a monotony of waiting.  Scourging were better, the hemp or the fire.  The lady of the feathers had been stirred to a strange enthusiasm, and to a belief in herself, a faith more wonderful to some, more unaccustomed and remote than any faith in God or devil.  A flood of energy flowed over her, warm as blood, strong as love, keen with the salt of beautiful novelty, turbulent as the seas when the great tides take hold on them.  It was to her as if for the moment the world’s centre was just there where she was in the winter, and in the Marylebone Road, within sound of the great church clock, the great church bells, the cries of the street, the very steam panting up from the Baker Street Station.  Cuckoo was in the core of things, and the core of things is fierce and hot and action-prompting.  That half-revealed shadow waving good-bye to Julian, as he stepped into the frosty night, was a shadow on fire.  Yet he had scarcely looked back at it.  But Cuckoo was to learn to the last word the lesson of patience.  Inspired by the sympathy of the doctor and by something deep in her own heart, she was, for the moment, all courage, all flame.  She was ready to fight.  She was ready to do supreme things,