For she was not wholly unaware of the mystery of Valentine, of the sharp contrast between his appearance and the vision of his nature as it came to her.  She understood that there was something in the fine beauty of his face and figure to account for Julian’s blindness and refusal to be warned against him.  Cuckoo’s intuition, the intuition of an unlearned and instinctive creature trained by the hardest circumstances to rely on what she called her wits, laid the crystal temple in ruins, and drove the demon from its lurking-place naked and shrieking into the open.  But, after all, was not she rather deceived than Julian?  Julian, from the first moment of meeting Valentine, looked upon him as saint.  Cuckoo, from the first moment of meeting, looked upon him as devil.  Each put him aside from the general run of humanity, the one in a heaven of the imagination, the other in a hell.  Neither would allow him to be midway between the two, containing possibilities of both,—­ordinary, natural man.  Julian angrily scouted the notion of Valentine’s being like other men.  Cuckoo felt instinctively that he was not.  And so they glorified and cursed him.

Cuckoo had at first cursed him plainly in the market-place and upon the house-top.  But that was before she had learned wisdom.  Slowly she learnt it on these hot days and nights, when the London dust filtered over the paint upon her cheeks and lips, clung round the shadows in the hollows beneath her eyes, and slept in the artificial primrose of her elaborate cloud of hair.  Slowly she learnt it in many vague and struggling mental arguments, in which logic was a dwarf and passion a giant, in which instinct strangled reason, and love wandered as a shamefaced fairy with tear-dimmed eyes.

Julian’s prolonged absence and silence first taught the lady of the feathers the slow necessity of wisdom, otherwise, perhaps, her vehement ignorance could never have absorbed the precious thing.  Women of her training and vile experience, nerve-ridden, and clothed in hysteria as in a garment, often think to gain what they want by the mere shrillness of outcry, the mere grabbing of ostentatious, eager hands and frenzy of body.  Their lives lead them through a wonder of knowledge and of danger to the demeanour of babyhood, and they cry for every rattle, much more for every moon.  So Cuckoo had thrown her feelings down before Julian.  She had dashed her hatred of Valentine in his face; she had cried her fears of his downfall to that which she consorted with eternally and loathed—­when she had still the energy to loathe it, which was not always—­in his ears with the ardent shrillness of a boatswain’s whistle.  She had, in fact, done all that her instinct prompted her to do, and the result was the exit of Julian from her life.  This set her, always in her sharp and yet childish way, sometimes oddly clear sighted, often muddled and distressed, to turn upon instinct with a contempt not known before, to discard it with the fury still of a child.  And instinct thus forsaken by an essentially instinctive creature opened the gates of distress and of confusion.