"
Julian reddened with a sudden understanding. Her words touched him in
his sorest place. In the first place, no man likes to think he has been
doing a thing because he has been led by some one else. In the second,
Julian had grown ardently to dislike Cuckoo's unreasoning antipathy to
Valentine. Originally, and for some time, he had believed that she would
get over it. Finding later that there was no chance of that, he had once
told her that he could not hear Valentine abused. Since that day she had
been careful not to mention his name. But now her bitterness against him
peeped out once more, and seemed even to have been gathering force during
the interval.
"Cuckoo, you're talking great nonsense," he said, forcing himself to
speak quietly.
But she was in one of her most mulish moods, and was not to be turned
from the subject or silenced.
"No, I ain't," she said. "Where was you last week? You didn't come in
once."
"I was in Paris."
Cuckoo's brow clouded still more. Her knowledge of Paris was not
intimate, and, indeed, was confined to stories dropped from the lips of
men who had been there for short periods, and for purposes the reverse of
geographical or artistic. Julian's mention of the French capital drove a
sword into her.
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