ith crime as a truer judgment of human
nature than was held by a sentimental civilization, and he began to
wonder whether a good deal of his own privacy had not been spent in a
fool's paradise of security. The moated grange and the dark tower were
harmless rococo terrors beside the maleficent commonplace of Agnes
House.

"The kitchen's in a rare old mess, isn't it?" said Daisy looking round
her. "It gives Bert the rats to see it like this."

"Are you fond of him?" Michael asked. He was anxious to display his
friendly interest.

"Oh, he's all right. But I wouldn't ever get fond of _any_body. It
doesn't pay with men. The more you give them, the more they think they
can do as they like with you."

"I don't understand why you live with him, if he's nothing better than
all right," said Michael.

"Well, I'm used to him, and he's not always in the way like some fellows
are."

Michael would have liked to ask her about the beginning of her life as
it was now conducted. Daisy was so essentially of the streets that it
was impossible to suppose she had ever known a period of innocency. Her
ancestry seemed to go back to the doxies of the eighteenth century, and
beyond them to Alsatian queens, and yet farther to the tavern wenches of
Francois Villon and the Chronique Scandaleuse. There was nothing
pathetic about her; he could not imagine her ever in a position to be
wronged by a man. She was in very fact the gay woman who was bred first
from some primordial heedlessness unchronicled. She would be a hard
subject for chivalrous treatment, so deeply would she inevitably despise
it. Nevertheless, he wanted to try to bring home to her the quality of
the feeling she had inspired in him. He was anxious to prove to her the
reality of a friendliness untainted by any thought of the relation in
which she might justifiably think he would prefer to stand.

"There's something extraordinarily attractive about being friends," he
began. "Isn't it a great relief for you to meet someone who wishes to
be nothing more than a friend?"

"Friends," Daisy repeated. "I don't know that I think much of friends.
You don't get much out of _them_, do you?"

"Is that all anybody is for," Michael asked in disappointment. "To get
something out of?"

"Well, naturally. Anyone can't live on nothing, can they?"

"But I don't see why a friend shouldn't be as profitable as an ephemeral
... as a lover ... well, what I mean is, as a man you meet at eleven and