Michael as he saw the crude pink sheets of Crime Illustrated strewn about the room was not surprised that Daisy should often get nervous when left alone. These horrors in which fashion-plates with mangled throats lay weltering in pools of blood could scarcely conduce to a placid loneliness, and Michael knew that she probably spent a great deal of every day in solitude. Her life with Crime Illustrated to fright her fancy must always be haunted by presentiments of dread at the sound of a key in the latch. It was curious, this half childlike existence of the underworld always upon the boundaries of fear. Michael could see the villainous paper used for every kind of domestic service—to wrap up a piece of raw meat, to contain the scraps for the cat’s dinner, and spread half over the kitchen table as a cloth whereon the disks of grease lay like great thunder-drops. It would be very natural, when the eyes never rested from these views of sordid violence, to expect evil everywhere. Himself, as he sat here, was already half inclined to accept the underworld’s preoccupation with 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 François 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.