It was not so. Cuckoo was sitting alone in the little room of the Marylebone Road looking a new spectre in the face, the spectre of hunger, only shadowy as yet, scarcely defined, scarcely visible. And the lady of the feathers wondered, as she gazed, if she and the spectre must become better acquainted, clasp hands, kiss lips, be day-fellows and night-fellows.
* * * * *
"I am going to write to Cuckoo," Julian said a day later. "What shall I say?"
Valentine hesitated.
"What have you thought of saying?" he asked.
"Oh, I don't know. First one thing, then another. Good-bye among the number. That's what you wish me to say, Val, isn't it?"
He spoke in a listless voice, monotonous in inflection and lifeless in timbre. The dominion of Valentine over him since the supper at the Savoy had increased, consolidating itself into an undoubted tyranny, which Julian accepted, carelessly, thoughtlessly, a prey to the internal degradation of his mind. Once he had only been nobly susceptible, a fine power. Now he was drearily weak, an ungracious disability. But with his weakness came, as is usual, a certain lassitude which even resembled despair, an indifference peculiar to the slave, how opposed to the indifference peculiar to the autocrat. Valentine recognized in the voice the badge of serfdom, even more than in the question, and he smiled with a cold triumph. He had intended telling Julian now, once for all, to break with the lady of the feathers, of whom even yet he stood in vague fear. But the question, the voice of Julian, gave him pause, slid into his soul a new and bizarre desire, child of the strange intoxication of power which was beginning to grip him, and which the doctor had remarked. If Julian broke with Cuckoo, repulsed her forever into the long street that was her pent and degraded world, would not the sharp salt of Valentine's triumph be taken from him? Would not the wheels of his Juggernaut car fail to do their office in his sight—there was the point!—upon a precious victim? The lady of the feathers thus deliberately abandoned by Julian would suffer perhaps almost to the limit of her capability of pain, but Valentine would have lost sight of her in the dark, and though he would have conquered that spectral opposition which she had whimsically offered to him—he laughed to himself now, thinking of his fear of it—he would not see that greatest vision, the flight of his enemy. These thoughts flashed through his mind, moving him to an answer that astonished Julian.
"Good-bye!" he said. "Why should I wish that?"
"You said the other day at the Savoy that she hated you; that you and she must have a battle unless I chose between you."
"I was laughing."