She bought a new hair-dye, painted her thin cheeks more heavily than ever
before, and sought, almost with a wild exultation that swiftly fled away,
to sink lower.
The monotony of sin is one of the scourges of sin. In those days Cuckoo
suffered many stripes. Her eyes grew more weary, her smile in Piccadilly
more mechanical, her walk more puppet-like than ever. Life was like
a moving dream of horror. And yet no day passed without a gleam of that
strange sensation of ignorant power, fluttering upward, fading away,
pausing, passing, dead.
She did not know what it meant. She could not keep it nor use it. She
could not unravel its message nor rest upon its strength. It was gone
almost while it came, but it did something for the lady of the feathers.
It gave to her the little seed of expectation that, quite alone in a
weary desert, yet makes of that desert the plot men call a garden. Like a
thread of steel, it held up this girl from the uttermost abyss, until at
last the doctor's hand struck upon her door.
Julian's occasional visits were as the scourgings of God, giving to
Cuckoo a vision of shifting ruin, in which she--so she told herself,
thinking of the dance of the hours--had been the first to have a share.
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