Then she clenched her hands, and longed to
plant her nails in the faces of those other women, divined, though never
seen,--those French women who had sung him, like sirens, to Paris, away
from the sea of her greedy love. Her similes were commonplace. In her
heart she called such sirens hussies. Had she met them the battle of
words would have been strong and singularly unclean. That she herself was
a hussy to other men, not to Julian, did not trouble her. She did not
realize it. Human nature has always one blind eye, even when the other
does not squint. This passion of jealousy, circling round an absent man,
seized her at the strangest, the most inopportune moments. Sometimes it
came upon her in the street, and the meditation of it was so vital and
complete that Cuckoo could not go on walking, lest she should, by
movement, miss the keenest edge of the agony. Then she would stop
wherever she was, lean against the down-drawn shutter of a shop, or the
corner of a public house, among the gaping loungers, let her powdered
chin drop upon her breast, and sink into a fit of desperate detective
duty, during which she followed Julian like a shadow through imagined
wanderings, and watched him committing all those imagined actions that
could cause her to feel the wildest and most inhuman despair.
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