) But it glowed upon him more steadily, with a warmth of
humanity, of something inherent, rooted, not detached, and merely for the
moment and as if by chance prisoned in some particular place, from which
at a breath it might escape. It drew him to Cuckoo, and at the same time
it slightly repelled him, the latter--though Julian did not know it--by
the sharp abruptness of its novelty. For the doctor had lit a blaze of
strength in the girl by a word. Julian's eyes were dazzled by the blaze.
Custom might teach them to face it more calmly. At present he could look
at the stars with greater ease. Indeed, as he walked, he did look at
them, and thought of the eyes of Cuckoo, and then of the eyes of all
women, and of their strange intensities of suggestion and of realization,
of their language of the devil and of the clouds, of their kindling
vigours. But the eyes of Cuckoo were no longer as the eyes of any other
woman. Julian glanced at a girl who watched him from the corner of the
street. He knew that Cuckoo looked each night at men as that girl looked
at him. He knew it, yet he felt that he did not believe it. For to him
she was dressed already in the fillet of some priestess, in the robes
of one tending some strange and unnamed altar.
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