It would be dull and dreary either way with Paul, the latter condition worse than the former, for then she would be tied, and the bonds would be more difficult to break. And yet she could not bring herself to an open rupture with her lover. He was so kind, so attentive, so delicate, and above all, so passionately devoted to her. It must come, she thought; it would come some time or other, but not just yet. The evil day should be delayed as long as possible. And she had given no answer to Colonel Orpington. She did not mind about that; he was a man of the world, and would not expect one immediately. He would ascribe her delay either to modesty or calculation; under the sway of which of the two he might imagine her to be deliberating was quite indifferent to her. To only one out of the three men who proposed to pay her their addresses had she conveyed her decision: that one was John Merton. There would be no more trouble with him, she thought. He could not misunderstand her words, and, above all, her manner, during that conversation in the street on her way to the chambers in the Temple. She knew he had not misunderstood it by the abrupt way in which he had taken his departure. Daisy felt a mild kind of pain at having hurt John Merton's feelings, as the details of that interview recurred to her. But, after all, it was better at an end. It was perfectly impossible that she could have led the life which he offered her. In company with him it would have been very respectable and very dull: in her then state of mind, Daisy considered that respectability and dulness generally went together. There would have been a bare sufficiency to live upon at first, and they would have had to have been supported by the hope of thriving on the inevitable progress of honesty, industry, and that kind of twaddle, which she had heard enunciated from pulpits, and seen set forth in the pages of cheap popular periodicals, in which, contrary to her experience of the world, the virtuous people got on wonderfully, besides being preternaturally clean in the woodcuts, while those who drank beer, and abstained from Sunday-afternoon service, were necessarily dirty and poverty-stricken. It was not in her lodgings in South Molton Street that Daisy sat cogitating over these eventful circumstances, and deliberating as to her future. Madame Clarisse had gone away on business to Paris, and before she left she had requested her assistant to instal herself in the private rooms of the establishment in George Street.