“No, properly, I mean, this time. Only we should have to go to a hotel, because the woman I’m living with’s got her son come home from being a soldier and she wouldn’t like for him to know anything. Well, it’s better not. You’re much more comfortable when you aren’t in gay rooms, because they haven’t got a hold over you. Are you coming?”
For a moment Michael was inclined to invite Daisy to go away with him. For a moment it seemed desirable to bury himself in a corner of the underworld: to pass his life there for as long as he could stand it. He could easily make this girl fond of him, and he might be happy with her. No doubt, it would be ultimately a degrading happiness, but yet not much more degrading than the prosperity of many of his friends. He had always escaped so far and hidden himself successfully. Why not again more completely? What, after all, did he know of this underworld without having lived of it as well as in it? Hitherto he had been a spectator, intervening sometimes in the sudden tragedies and comedies, but never intervening except as very essentially a spectator. He thought, as he sat opposite to Daisy with her white dress and candid roguery, that it would be amusing to become a rogue himself. There would be no strain in living with Daisy. Love in the way that he had loved Lily would be a joke to her. Why should not he take her for what she was—shrewd, mirthful, kind, honest, the natural light of love? He would do her no wrong by accepting her as such. She was immemorial in the scheme of the universe.
Michael was on the point of offering to Daisy his alliance, when he remembered what Sylvia had said about men and, though he knew that Daisy could not possibly think in that way about men, he had no courage to plunge with her into deeper labyrinths not yet explored. He thought of the contempt with which Sylvia would hail him, were they in this nightmare of London to meet in such circumstances. A few weeks ago—yesterday, indeed—he might have joined himself to Daisy under the pretext of helping her and improving her. Now he must help himself: he must aim at perfecting himself. Experiments, when at any moment passion might enter, were too dangerous.
“No, I won’t come home with you, dear Daisy,” he said, taking her hand over the puddly table. “You know, you didn’t kiss me that night in Quondam Street because you thought I might one day come home with you, did you?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“What’s the good of asking me why I kissed you?” she said, embarrassed and almost made angry by his reminder. “Perhaps I was twopence on the can. I can get very loving on a quartern of gin, I can. Oh, well, if you aren’t coming home, you aren’t, and I must get along. Sitting talking to you isn’t paying my rent, is it?”
He longed to offer her money, but he could not, because it was seeming to him now indissolubly linked with hiring. However genuinely it was a token of exchange, money was eluding his capacity for idealization, and he was at a loss to find a symbol service.
“Is there nothing I can do for you?”
“Yes, you can give me two quid in case I don’t get off to-night.”
He offered them to her eagerly.