ed, "to live gay, she isn't
going to be whistled back to Virginia the same as you would a dog. Now,
is she?"

"But I want to marry her," said Michael simply.

Daisy stared at him in commiseration for his folly.

"You must be worse than potty over her," she gasped.

"Why?"

"Why? Why, because it doesn't pay to marry that sort of girl. She'll
only do you down with some fancy fellow, and then you'll wish you hadn't
been such a grass-eyes."

A blackbeetle ran quickly across the gaudy oilcloth, and Michael sitting
in this scrofulous kitchen had a presentiment that Daisy was right.
Sitting here, he was susceptible to the rottenness that was coeval with
all creation. It called forth in him a sense of futility, so that he
felt inclined to surrender his resolve to an universal pessimism. Yet in
the same instant he was aware of the need for him to do something, even
if his action were to carry within itself the potential destruction of
more than he was setting out to accomplish.

"When do you see her?" asked Daisy. "And what does _she_ say about being
married?"

"Well, as a matter of fact, I haven't seen her for nearly five years,"
Michael explained rather apologetically. "I'm searching for her now.
I've got to find her."

"Strike me, if you aren't the funniest---- I ever met," Daisy exclaimed.

She leaned back in her chair and began to laugh. Her mockery was for
Michael intensified by the surroundings through which it was echoing.
The kitchen was crowded with untidy accumulations, with half-washed
plates and dishes, with odds and ends of attire; but the laughter seemed
to be ringing through a desert. Perhaps the illusion of emptiness was
due to the pictures nailed without frames to the walls of the room,
whose eyes watched him with unnatural fixity; and yet so homely was the
behavior of the people in the pictures that by contrast suddenly they
made the kitchen seem unreal. Indeed, the whole house, no more
substantial than a house in a puppet-show, betrayed its hollowness. It
became an interior very much like those glimpses of interiors in Crime
Illustrated. The slightest effort of fancy would have shown Daisy Palmer
cloven by a hatchet, yet coquettish enough even in sanguinary death to
display lisle-thread stockings and the scalloped edge of a white
petticoat. There was nothing like this of which to dream in Leppard
Street. Death would come as slowly and wearily thither as here he would
enter sensationally.

Daisy