“In ’er ’air (whimper) she wore a white cam-eelyer, Dark blue (whimper) was the colour of ’er heye.” (Whimper.)

It was like a religious service with one devout worshipper.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Cuckoo walked slowly along.  It was a dark night, very still and very damp.  The frost had gone.  The stars were spending their brightness on clouds that were a carpet to them, a roof to poor human beings who could not see them.  In the air was the unnatural, and so almost unpleasant, warmth that, coming suddenly out of due season, strikes at the health of many people, and exhausts them as it would never exhaust them in time of summer.  Cuckoo, faint with hunger, fainter yet with sorrow, felt intensely fatigued.  She did not consider where she was going, but just walked on slowly and heavily; but the habit of her life, profiting by her unconsciousness, led her towards that long street in which she had passed hours which, if added together, would have made a large part of her life.  Piccadilly drew her to it as the whirlpool draws the thing which inadvertently touches even the farthest outpost of its influence.  Presently she was at the Circus.  The little boys upon the kerb, crying newspapers, greeted her with excited comments and with laughter.  They had missed her for so long that they had imagined her ill, perhaps dead.  Seeing her turn up again, they were full of greedy ardour for her news.  They put to her searching and opprobrious questions.  She did not hear them.  Soon she was in the midst of the crowd.  Yet she scarcely realized that she was not alone.  No mechanical smile came to her face.  It seemed as if she had forgotten the old wiles of the streets, put off forever the frigid mask of vice, that freezes young blood, yet makes old blood sometimes run strangely faster.  What was the street to Cuckoo now, or Cuckoo to the street?  Once it had at least been much, almost everything, to her.  And she had been perhaps as much to it as one of the paving-stones on which the feet of its travellers trod.  Now things were changed.  The human wolf was in the snow still, but it no longer feared starvation.  Rather did it live in starvation with a fervour that was untouched by anything animal.

Cuckoo walked on.

The crowd flowed up and down, in two opposed and gliding streams.  The warm heaviness of this premature air of spring had brought many people out, and had even induced some of the women to assume costumes of mid-summer.  There were great white hats floating on the stream, like swans.  Bright and light coloured dresses touched the black gown of Cuckoo as with fingers of contempt.  She did not see them.  Many women who knew her by sight murmured to each other their surprise at her reappearance.  One, a huge negress in orange cotton, ejaculated a loud and guttural:  “My sakes!”

Unheeding, Cuckoo walked on.