"In that case I fear you misrepresented me, Cresswell. I do not choose my patients. But Cuckoo Bright is no patient of mine."
"If she's not ill," Julian said, "why should she go to you?"
"That is her affair, and mine," the doctor answered, in his quietest and most finishing tone.
Julian accepted the delicate little snub quietly, but Valentine sneered.
"Perhaps she went to seek you in your capacity of a doctor of the mind rather than of the body. Perhaps, after all, she sought your aid."
As he spoke the doctor could not help having driven into him the conviction that the words were spoken with meaning, that Valentine knew the nature of Cuckoo's mission to Harley Street. There rose in him suddenly a violent sensation of enmity against Valentine. He strove to beat it down, but he could not. Never had he felt such enmity against any man. It was like the fury so obviously felt by Cuckoo. The doctor was ashamed to be so unreasonable, and believed for a moment that the poor street-girl had absolutely swayed him, and predisposed him to this animus that surged up over his normal charity and good, clear impulses of tenderness for all that lived.
"My aid," he said—and the turmoil within him caused him to speak with unusual sternness. "And if she did, what then?"
"Poor Cuckoo!" Julian said, and there was a touch of real tenderness in his voice.
"Oh, I have nothing to say against it," Valentine replied, buttoning slowly and carefully the last button of the second glove. "Only, Cuckoo Bright is beyond aid. She can neither help herself nor any one else."
"How do you know, Cresswell?"