She insisted on
contemplating his ultimate reappearance, and her wits were at work to
devise means to win him from Valentine's influence without stirring his
horror at any thought of disloyalty to his friend. Cuckoo, in fact,
wanted to be subtle, intended to be subtle, and sought intensely the
right way of subtlety. She sought it as she walked, as she hovered at
street corners in the night, while the hours ran by, sometimes till the
streets were nearly deserted, sometimes even till the dawn sang in the
sky to the wail of the hungry woman beneath it. She sought it even in the
company of those strangers who stepped for a night into her life as into
a public room, and stepped from it on the morrow with a careless and
everlasting adieu, half-drowned in the chink of money.
And sometimes she thought, with a sick dreariness, that she would never
find it, and sometimes courage failed her, and, despite her passionate
resolution, she did for a moment say to herself, "If he should never come
again." There were moments, too, when every other feeling was drowned by
sheer jealousy of Julian, when the tiger-cat woke in this street-girl who
had always had to fight, when her thin frame shivered with the shaking
violence of the soul it held.
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