For Cuckoo would give no reason
whatever for her reiterated formula of refusal to earn any money. And now
she could not pay her week's rent, plunging Mrs. Brigg into the further
circle of an _inferno_, and yet sat within doors day after day. Mrs.
Brigg approached apoplexy by way of persuasion, was by turns pathetic
and paralytic with passion. She coaxed with the ardour of an executioner
inveigling the victim's neck to the noose and in haste to be off to
breakfast. She threatened like Jove in curl-papers. Cuckoo was
inexorable.
"Then out you go!" said Mrs. Brigg at last. "Out of my house you pack,
you--" Nameless words followed.
Cuckoo got up from her chair with no show of emotion and moved towards
her bedroom stonily to pack her box. She didn't care. She was in a mood
to lie down in the gutter and wait the last blow of Fate, living only in
her one obstinate determination to do what the doctor had told her, the
one thing Julian had asked of her. She did not any longer war with words
against the purple and hard-breathing landlady. And her silence and her
movement of obedience awed Mrs. Brigg for the moment into another mood.
She shuffled after Cuckoo into the bedroom.
"Eh? What is it?" she ejaculated.
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