In the air was the unnatural, and so
almost unpleasant, warmth that, coming suddenly out of due season,
strikes at the health of many people, and exhausts them as it would
never exhaust them in time of summer. Cuckoo, faint with hunger, fainter
yet with sorrow, felt intensely fatigued. She did not consider where she
was going, but just walked on slowly and heavily; but the habit of her
life, profiting by her unconsciousness, led her towards that long street
in which she had passed hours which, if added together, would have made a
large part of her life. Piccadilly drew her to it as the whirlpool draws
the thing which inadvertently touches even the farthest outpost of its
influence. Presently she was at the Circus. The little boys upon the
kerb, crying newspapers, greeted her with excited comments and with
laughter. They had missed her for so long that they had imagined her
ill, perhaps dead. Seeing her turn up again, they were full of greedy
ardour for her news. They put to her searching and opprobrious questions.
She did not hear them. Soon she was in the midst of the crowd. Yet she
scarcely realized that she was not alone. No mechanical smile came to her
face. It seemed as if she had forgotten the old wiles of the streets, put
off forever the frigid mask of vice, that freezes young blood, yet makes
old blood sometimes run strangely faster.
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