"Yes. Cuckoo Bright admires you, and you go to number 400 to smell the rather rank fumes of the incense which she burns at your shrine."
"Nonsense!" Julian cried warmly.
"What other reason can you have? She has no beauty; she has no conversation, no gaiety, no distinction, no manners—she has nothing. She is nothing."
"Ah, it's there you're wrong."
"Wrong!"
"When you say she is nothing."
"I say it again," Valentine reiterated almost fiercely.
"The lady of the feathers is nothing, nothing at all. God and the devil—they have completely forgotten her. A creature like that is neither good, nor would I call her really evil, for she is evil merely that she may go on living, not because she has a fine pleasure in sin. But if you sell your will for bread and butter, you slip out of the world, the world that must be reckoned with. I say, Cuckoo Bright is nothing."
"And I tell you she is something extraordinary."
As Julian spoke the words the cab stopped at the Savoy. Valentine sprang out and paid the man. His face was flushed as if with heat, despite the piercing cold of the night.