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.
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