"Oh, but you must," he said. "Have some of these sugar-biscuits."
She took some from him and began to sip and munch steadily, but still in silence. Julian began to fear that the festival must be a dire failure, for her obvious and extreme constraint affected him, and he was also seized with an absurd sense of shyness in the presence of Valentine, and, instead of talking, found himself immersed in a boyish anxiety as to Valentine's attitude of mind towards the girl. He looked at Cuckoo in the firelight as she mutely ate and drank, and was all at once profoundly conscious of the dreary vulgarity of her appearance, against which even her original prettiness and her present youth fought in vain. Her hat cast a monstrous shadow upon the wall, a shadow so distorted and appalling that Julian almost grew red as he observed it, and felt that Valentine was probably observing it also. He wished poor Cuckoo had left the crying scarlet gown at home, and those black lozenges, which were suited to the pavement of the hall of a financier. Everything she had on expressed a mind such as Valentine must become acquainted with in amazement, and have intercourse with in sorrow. The pathetic side of this preposterous feathered and bugled degradation he would fail to see. Julian felt painfully certain of this. All the details of the woman would offend him, who was so alive to the value of fine details in life. He must surely be wondering with all his soul how Julian could ever have contemplated continuing the intercourse with Cuckoo which had been begun for a definite purpose already accomplished. Yet Julian's feeling of friendship towards this rouged scarecrow with the pathetic eyes and the anxious hands did not diminish as he blushed for her, but rather increased, fed, it seemed, by the discordant trifles in which her soul moved as in a maze. He was so much in the thrall of thought that he had become quite unconscious of the awkwardness of the brooding silence, when he heard Valentine's voice say:
"Are you fond of art, Miss Bright?"
The question sounded as if addressed to some society woman at home in
Melbury Road. Addressed to Cuckoo it was entirely absurd, and Julian
glanced at Valentine to deprecate the gay sarcasm which he suspected.
But Valentine's face disarmed him, it was so gravely and serenely polite.
"Eh?" said Cuckoo.
"Are you fond of art? or do you prefer literature?"
"I don't know," she said nervously.
"Or perhaps music?"
"I like singing," she said. "And the organs."
"Do sing us something, Val," Julian said, to create a diversion.