“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.
“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 say good-bye to next morning. A friend could be quite as generous.”
“I never knew anyone in this world give anything unless they wanted twice as much back in return,” said Daisy.
“Why do you suppose I gave you money the other day and paid your fine in the police court?” he asked, for, though he did not like it, he was so anxious to persuade her of the feasibleness of friendship, that he could not help making the allusion.