Having uttered this very direct contradiction, Cuckoo proceeded with great energy:
"You've been lettin' him do it. I know you have."
Julian was completely puzzled.
"What do you mean?" he asked, with a real desire for information.
"You know well enough. He's leadin' you wrong."
Julian reddened with a sudden understanding. Her words touched him in his sorest place. In the first place, no man likes to think he has been doing a thing because he has been led by some one else. In the second, Julian had grown ardently to dislike Cuckoo's unreasoning antipathy to Valentine. Originally, and for some time, he had believed that she would get over it. Finding later that there was no chance of that, he had once told her that he could not hear Valentine abused. Since that day she had been careful not to mention his name. But now her bitterness against him peeped out once more, and seemed even to have been gathering force during the interval.
"Cuckoo, you're talking great nonsense," he said, forcing himself to speak quietly.
But she was in one of her most mulish moods, and was not to be turned from the subject or silenced.
"No, I ain't," she said. "Where was you last week? You didn't come in once."
"I was in Paris."