"Eh, how?"
She had lost all self-consciousness now, and in her eagerness of fear,
wonder, and curiosity seemed tormented by the veil of yellow hair that
was flopping in frizzy strands round her face and over her eyes. She
seized it in her two hands, and with a few shooting gestures, in and out,
wound it into a dishevelled lump, which she stuck to the back of her head
with two or three pins. All the time she was looking at Valentine for an
answer to her question.
"Perhaps I don't know how yet."
"Yes, you do, though. I can see you do. What have you got to do with him,
with Marr?"
"I never said I had anything to do with him."
"Ah! but you have. I always knew it!"
"Many men are linked together by thin, perhaps invisible threads,
impalpable and impossible to define."
The lady of the feathers was out of her depth in this sentence, so she
only tossed her head and murmured:
"Oh, I dessay!" with an effort after contempt.
But Valentine's mood seemed to change. An abstracted gaiety stole over
him. If it was simulated, the simulation was very perfect and complete.
Sitting back in his chair, the cigarette smoke curling lightly round
him, his large blue eyes glancing gravely now at Cuckoo crumpled up on
the horsehair sofa, now meditatively at some object in the little room,
or at the ceiling, he spoke in a low, clear, level voice, as if uttering
his thoughts aloud, careless or oblivious of any listener.
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