"Why—but you were out in the crowd too," he said.
"I!" she said sharply, and with a touch of scathing contempt for herself, yet impatient, too, of any introduction of her entity into the discussion; "of course I've got to be there. What's that to do with it?"
"Really, Cuckoo," Julian began, but she interrupted him.
"I ain't you," she said.
"No, of course, but—"
"I'm different. It's nothing to me where I go of a night, or what I do.
But you ain't got to be there. You needn't go, need you?"
"Nobody need," he said. "But—"
"Then what d'you do it for?" she reiterated, still in the same tone of one sitting on high in condemnation, and moved by her own utterance to an increasing excitement. This time she paused for a reply, and set her rouged lips together with the obvious intention of not speaking until Julian had plainly put forward his defence. Strange to say, her manner had impressed him with a ridiculous feeling that defence of some kind was actually necessary. It was a case of one denizen of the dock putting on the black cap to sentence another. Julian glanced at Cuckoo before he made any reply to her last question. If he had had any intention of not answering it at all, of calmly disposing, in a word or two, of her right to interrogate him on his proceedings, her fixed and passionate eyes killed it instantly. He moved his coffee-cup round uneasily in the saucer.
"Men do many things they needn't do, as well as women," he began. "I must have my amusements. Why not?"
At the word "amusements" she drew in her breath with a little hiss of contempt. Julian flushed again.