“I had nothing to do with it,” Michael interrupted. “At least not directly.”
“Well, what are you pulling your hair out over?” she demanded in surprise.
“I feel a certain responsibility,” he explained. “Go on with what you were saying.”
“If she left a nice home,” Daisy continued, “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.