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I

Blanche celebrated the second evening of Dick's return by one of the family rallies around a bumper meal, in which she revelled. The Mazeres were one of numerous old clans who had forsaken the bush for the suburbs. Such folks, when of small means, were late in life exiled from the spacious routine of the squattocracy without assimilating urban avocations, a situation specially trying to old men, who were like beached whalers. Neither was it wholesome for women still active physically but untrained to intellectual or public interests. Contracted activities had a corresponding mental reaction. Wanting outlet in any channel, they formed pockets in society, with social intercourse restricted to Blanche visiting Dot or Aunt Jane, and Cousin Isabel intervisiting those to retail family gossip, resulting in internecine jealousies with the backbiting and quarrels common among those afflicted by blood relationship.

The family proper on this occasion was supplemented, among others, by Larry Healey and his wife (née Dot Saunders), who had retired to the city upon the death of old Tom Saunders of Saunders Plains. Dot, through the intermarrying of the pioneer families up the country, was cousin to some of the Mazeres.

"Everything is ready," said Philippa. "We only wait for the Healeys and Mr James." The parents of James had been original Bool Boolians in the early days of the Mazere dynasty.

Laleen drew Dick aside. "I want Bob James to be your brother-in-law."

"Dear me! What are the signs?"

"He's a twin soul of Blanche. They would be a complete pair."

"How has he developed?"

"He has a roving eye and a stationary one, and an appetite like a kangaroo dog."

"I meant mentally."

"People who believe you can't change human nature, and that women's place is the home, don't develop mentally." Diversion came with the arrival of the Healeys. Mrs Healey had an air of triumph. "You are not the only distinguished traveller from abroad, Dick," she exclaimed. "Do you and Freda remember each other?" Freda Healey, who had arrived that morning on the Southern Mail, had seen the papers, and was prepared for Dick being the Mr Meyers, her table vis-à-vis of the Ballyphule, but as Miss Timson of that voyage Freda was a delightful surprise to Dick. He had rarely been more glad to see anyone. They laughed heartily.

"I was on the Ballyphule as far as Adelaide," said Freda in explanation.

"You never told us, Dick!" said Blanche reproachfully.

"He did not think it important, perhaps," interposed Freda. Dick was swept away from explanation by the arrival of the Labosseer uncles, and the reason of the omission congealed between him and Freda.

Dick found Larry frail for his mere sixty-five years, but Dot was quite recognizable from his boyhood days. She had survived the temperamental uncongeniality of the marriage better than Larry, and, now complete boss of the union, wag an example of resourceless and restless elderliness that was a scourge to Larry and also to Freda, sole survivor of a family of five.

When they were about to be seated, another arrival, in Sydney for the business exhibition, was Leslie Olliver. "Just ran out to say 'How are you?' to Dick, after all the years. Saw his photo in one of the papers."

Olliver was a sturdy fellow from Oswald's Ridges, near Goulburn, where the Mazeres and Healeys had lived at the time of Dick's departure. A man of action with fence and flock, self-dependent, good-natured, Olliver's large swarthy features crowned by coarse curls were no obstacle to popularity with young women. Girls came and went with him without mishap to either person, but Laleen had been the reigning favourite since the age of six, when she appeared at the little school in the scrub the year that Les, at the age of fourteen, had been due to retire, his school education finished. Laleen had arrested his adolescent attention by wild bellows consequent upon the sting of a bull-dog ant. She had been too untamed to be ashamed of her yells, which were so disintegrating to Les that he gave her his choicest marbles, and offered to carry her home on his back. He had since carried her in his heart and stood for ever ready to surrender the equivalent of his choicest marbles. She was the embodiment of romance, a treasure-trove of thrilling surprises.

Since his last visit she was going in for some blooming writing stunt, and in advance by letter had refused invitations to the theatre, or to go to the Zoo. She even scorned chocolates as muggy brain food. Numerous girls make ineffectual feints against chocs for fear of pimples or fat, but only Laleen could be such a trick as to rule them out as brain-soddening. Enough to make a fellow laugh all around his dial!

Aubrey found amusement in Leslie's pursuit and in teasing him and Laleen. He seated Bob James beside Laleen, as Leslie was suspicious of the nearest insect, no matter what its disqualifications.

Leslie glowered at Bob. Why was that old wind-bag hanging around? Laleen tried to palm him off on Blanche, but Leslie suspected James of being as madly in love with Blanche AS he, Leslie, was with the long-nosed parson who had lately taken charge of Oswald's Ridges. He'd need to be careful, though, to take this writing seriously, or he would earn a Hack mark from Laleen. She had taken the notion because Dick was something new to her, and written-up in the papers. For the first time in his life Leslie that morning had gone to the booksellers and bought a copy of Dick's poems. There were one or two nice little bits that he could copy into letters to Laleen, but the most of it must have been written when Dick had a pain in the wind. However, while Laleen was occupied with him, it would shut out the rapacious hordes which Leslie visioned as lying in wait for her.

Blanche did not allow Laleen to sit beside Bob James. She placed Freda Healey there. James was a tall lean man with a consequential bellow, an uneven stare, and a name for large eating and much talking. He enjoyed a reputation for business acumen in the Nanda household, where they had none themselves. Blanche had impressed it upon Dick, who immediately forgot whether James was in rice or artificial silk, but he was a York Street farmer of some sort. He was confidently trying to impress Freda, but she had outgrown his type of arrested mental development years since. She preferred Olliver's, as it was free from pomposity.

The seating and serving was an incessant turmoil as managed by Blanche and Philippa, assisted by Mrs Gambol in the kitchen. When they were set to work upon their plates, comment fell upon Dick, picking a way amid a plateful of over-rich food.

"A person who can't eat what I provide--for it's always the best; I never think it a saving to buy cheap food and have it wasted because no one likes it--should go to Dr Cardigan in Macquarie Street," said Blanche. "I'll make an appointment for you, Dick."

"But Dick doesn't believe in doctors. He's a Christian Scientist," said Philippa.

"Only a very humble student," corrected Dick.

"There may be a great deal in that new thought stuff for some things, as long as you're not really ill," cheerfully conceded Bob James.

"I think it would be wonderful if I could bring my mind to believe in it," chimed Philippa with large-eyed amiability.

"That, of course, presupposes the possession of a mind," observed Freda.

"It's all bosh," said Blanche. "It's not Christian or human not to be able to sympathize with those who are ill."

"That's what I think, too," said Philippa. "I do like to be sympathetic."

"Supposing it was a form of selfishness to be sympathetic as you understand it, why not restrain yourself?" posed Freda.

"I'm sure it could never be Christian to be unsympathetic."

"If Blanche or Philippa can convict anyone of cancer or tuberculosis, they achieve the zenith in sympathy as they understand it," murmured Mrs Mazere so placidly that it went unchallenged.

"Some people always think anything they cannot believe themselves is no good," said Laleen, championing Dick.

"Laleen has gone in for it," announced Aubrey to Leslie. "She is not going to have a body much longer, only a mind."

"I don't quite get the strength of it myself," admitted Les, which was convulsing to Aubrey.

"What on earth is the matter with Aubrey?" inquired Uncle Erik, laughing heartily with him. He was likewise of invincible sense of humour.

"You explain, Laleen," chortled Aubrey. "All I know is that you don't feel pain or love or anything, only with your mind--no body."

This was startling to Les. Love without a body--only in the mind. That's what a fellow had to do when some other chap ran off with his girl. Philippa's solicitous attentions in refilling his plate were an immense relief.

"Will you find the quiet you need in Ashville?" Freda asked Dick, to change the subject.

"If he couldn't get all the quiet he wants in his own home, where could he expect to?" demanded Blanche.

"He really doesn't need quiet," added Philippa. "He wouldn't enjoy it at all. I often think I'd like a quiet day myself, but when I'm left I don't know what to do. I think it's better to keep up. It keeps you from growing depressed."

"You're right there!" agreed Uncle Erik. "I think you want to keep going every minute you're awake. It leaves no time for thinking. I reckon thinking is a disease. It's one of the worst signs. As soon as a man begins to think, he gets a set on something and it spoils him as a worker, either for someone else, or in getting on himself. If these red-raggers and labour fellows didn't get any time to think, you'd have none of their loony ideas ruining the country."

"Have a little more bread sauce," urged Philippa.

"Another thing I can't stand is a person who always has his nose in a book. I'm as fond of reading as anyone, but I could no more think of sitting down with a book while here was work to be done," said Blanche.

"You are really not fond of books, then, sis," said Dick, with his gentle smile, "or you couldn't resist opening a new one for just one peep."

"And let my house get dirty! I hope I have a conscience!"

"The point was love of books," said Laleen. "You love housework better than mental work; why not be honest?"

"I have too much sense of duty to get out of my share of work by reading a book," snapped Blanche. Laleen shut her eyes contemptuously and shrugged. Incompatibility between her and Blanche was so active that high state occasions could scarcely suppress it.

"I agree with Blanche," said Uncle Sylvester. "Reading is as bad as drink or drugs if a man takes to it properly. I took care to thrash it out of my own boys."

"I should think so," commended Blanche.

"Have a little of the seasoning," suggested Philippa. "There is no use in talking such tommyrot about thinking," said Larry Healey, getting his oar in at last. "It's only reason, the power to think, that distinguishes us from the beasts. Why, God bless my soul, everything we have depends on mind--thought."

"It is only by using his mental faculties that man can continue, but is he worthy to continue?" said Freda.

"Yes. Is humanity progressing or going back?" said Mrs Mazere.

"Neither. He's stationary except for a few gadgets. You can't change human nature. That's fundamental," said Bob James rousingly, to reach the deafest ears.

"Let me give you a little more poultry," said Blanche. She always said poultry as being more refined than fowl.

Laleen flicked a glance at Freda, who demurely observed, "You will have many to agree with you, Mr James."

"That stands against all reasoning," he responded, astride a hobby-horse of obsolete opinions charging at the waves of mental speculation with a leaky dipper.

Les could not make head or tail of it. They never talked like that in his home, but he had a regard for this as unbelievably intellectual conversation characteristic of the Mazeres, who had been of the first families, educated people who started in a stringy-bark humpy in their great-grandparents' day, whereas Olliver's mother and father could scarcely read the newspaper and had started in a tent within living memory.

Uncle Erik, however, considered Bob James a bore. He turned and shouted at Dad Mazere. "Prime cattle are going up. If this drought keeps on, they'll go out of sight. At Flemington on Saturday, young bullocks..."

Philippa interposed concerning food.

Bob James was not desisting. He lurched on to a louder note. "That's what I say about human nature. You can't pretend all people are born equal. They're not, and while human nature is what it is..."

Uncle Erik was not giving in either. He looked at Bob and thought him like old grandfather Mazere of Three Rivers. If anyone crossed Uncle Erik he always thought he resembled the old Mazere. "The grasshoppers ate up a twelve-acre paddock of lucerne on Turrill Turrill, I hear," he bawled at Dad Mazere, but Larry Healey had just overheard something Les was saying and demanded the length of the table what it was.

"He says old Mick Finnegan at Oswald's Ridges has a new car--a Buick," said Freda.

"Gosh, I'd like to see old Mick driving it," cackled Larry till he choked.

"When are you coming to town to live, Uncle Erik?" inquired Freda, while her father recovered. He was uncle by courtesy to her.

"A week or two in the blinded hole now and again is all can bear. These little places, there's not space to turn round--there isn't even room to spit! And I have to sit around and wait for a train if I want to go to any place. Give me the good old saddle-horse! You can throw your leg across him and set out when you want."

"What beats me here is that if you ask the distance they say it's ten minutes here, and five minutes there, and that doesn't give you any idea at all." This from Dad Mazere.

"Yes, nonsense," agreed Larry. "They call it ten minutes to the station from my house, but I can do it in five easy, or on a hot day string it out to a quarter of an hour. I stepped it to really know, and it's just thirty chain."

"Like dingoes in a cage," chuckled Aubrey. "The real old way-backs. You can't change 'em." He turned to Dick. "What do you consider yourself now--a Yank or an Englishman? You won't be much better than a pommy after being so long away from a country of real men."

"I've found real countries and real men in several places," Dick replied, answering the twinkle in Aubrey's eyes.

"If you don't find something better than our present Labour Government is making of this part of the world, the people are to be pitied," said Bob, and had even Uncle Erik with him.

"Have a little more ham?" said Blanche.

"The working men have everything their own way now. You just have to put up with them," conceded Uncle Erik. "Have some more vegetables," said Philippa.

"We're living in a world of entirely false values," said Uncle Sylvester. "Any man can make £12 or £15 a week rabbiting or shearing, and he's not going to settle down to hard work."

Aubrey was chuckling to himself again, at the idea of these sums being earned without the vilest labour. He had tried these jobs. But no one took any notice of him. In a family several of whose members were without a sense of humour, Aubrey had a lot of Jimmy Woodser laughs.

"The people won't save, that's the trouble," pursued Uncle Sylvester. "Any young man that liked could save enough in four or five years to start on his own, but he spends it on a motor car and taking girls to the jazz dances. A box of chocolates costs him ten shillings. Other things in proportion. He couldn't take a girl out for Saturday night under thirty shillings, I reckon."

"And the girls nowadays are not like they used to be. I still have all the little treasures that were given me. I value them for the sake of the givers. But unless you give girls something expensive now they turn up their noses at it." This from Blanche.

"Would you like your tea now or later?" demanded Philippa.

"Ah, it depends upon the givers! I see Laleen treasuring some things like a dog with a bone, and others she strews around." Aubrey again was convulsed, as the expression o Leslie's brow reflected a jealous desire to know which thin Laleen treasured.

"Thirty shillings on recreation out of £12 or £15 a week would not be such arrant thriftlessness for a virile young ma at the girl-fancying stage, would it?" inquired Freda, reverting to the former point, but Blanche interrupted again about second helpings. She and Philippa would have interrupt Bacon and Shakespeare clearing up the great controversy press second helpings.

"But that is only one item," said Sylvester Labosseer. "Everything else is in proportion."

"Do let me give you a little more trifle," said Philippa.

"Shearing and rabbiting are only seasonal trades and have the chronic disadvantages of such," said Dick sociologically.

"But people don't appreciate their opportunities," contended Uncle Sylvester. "They could put themselves in a solid position if they wished, but they have never known anything but this fictitious prosperity since the war. They think it is going to last, and it can't."

"Perhaps it will this time, though," offered Philippa. Her amiabilities were incessantly directed to amelioration of disharmony, existing or anticipated.

"I have never thought it out," observed Mrs Mazere, ignoring Philippa. "But if everyone took his opportunity to save and settle down to substance, what would happen then? It seems that it is only because some are improvident and incapable that others can accumulate."

"You mustn't think like that," said Larry Healey, "or you might arrive at the truth, and that might be something unrespectable and dangerous like soviets or red-raggism, and all the churches would have to preach against it and the police put it down."

"It's all very well to rave against the law and the churches," said his wife with asperity, "but we must have law and order, or we'd all belong to the basher gangs. I don't see that those who don't go to church are any better than those who do."

"Let me give you a little more jelly," said Philippa.

"No, indeed," agreed Blanche. "Those who have nothing would like to see everyone the same as themselves. Have a little more of this pie."

"And that applies, Blanche, to those who have no brains, even more than to those who have no money. It looks as if the potato-brained are going to have a great innings at levelling down, and that the people of intellect are in greater jeopardy than those who have only money."

Blanche would not ask what Freda meant. It might be worse than what she had already said.

"The country is bled white by the Yanks," said Uncle Erik. "The working man has mortgaged his home for a car and the flickers, and all the money is going out of the country."

"You're right," said Dad. "They used to make a living rearing horses and growing maize for them. Now they buy the iron motor horse, and his maize is Yankee oil. We can't go on as we are."

"All the yokels will be driven back to the bush where they belong presently," chuckled Aubrey. "All the houses in these streets--parasite work--not one primary producer."

"But to get back to the point," said Bob James, with a big mouthful of hen, the point being his mind to hold the floor, "what Mr Sylvester Labosseer was saying bears out what I am always saying myself. With all their wages and rich conditions, what I say is that the working men are no better off today than they were in the old days. They get more wages, but the price of living has gone up, and the need for spending has grown out of all proportion, and in the end they don't have as much money as they used to on twenty bob or two pounds a week."

"You're right," agreed Uncle Sylvester. "When men used to get a pound a week and their tucker they used to save--"

"Golly! And such tucker!" interposed Aubrey. "Sodden damper and flyblown salt junk. A man would want to be pretty rich to compensate him, and have an inside of cast iron, or he'd spend all he saved trying to get cured."

"But he was just as well off then as today," persisted Bob.

"Aw, bosh!" exclaimed Dad Mazere, who was usually silent, but he and Larry had sneaked out and had a couple "spots" in honour of the homecomers, which had loosened their tongues. "The working man just as well off in the old days, be hanged! The old pioneers that got on by scraping till they got a few pounds lived like dogs. Look at this old hide over the fence here, with his gramophone, and with a brick house with an iron roof on it, and linoleum on the floor! And electric light! The pioneers didn't have a light, if the old woman was too lazy to make candles--"

"Or a slush lamp," interposed Larry excitedly.

"Yes, and if they let the fire go out they had to ride to a neighbour for a fire-stick, or put some greasy rag in the old muzzle-loader and fire it off, and they didn't know the time except by the sun. By gosh, and this old frogabollow is going to the Jenolan Caves for Christmas! And he a hod carrier. The Jenolan Caves for Christmas!"

"The highest swells in the old days didn't have what he has today," supplemented Larry.

"Yes. He's on the level of old Mick Muldoon, and in the old days Mick's only holiday was to get drunk and lie in fireplace with the dogs till he came to. A trip to the Caves--for the Muldoons! Huh! And those old pioneers' clothes, why bless my soul, you couldn't live long enough to count the patches on their trousers, and often they did not have a coat at all."

"What about the wife who had to sew the patches on?" inquired Blanche.

"Oh, no one would ever think or care about her," remarked Dot.

"Will you have some more cream?" from Philippa.

"At any rate she wouldn't be leathering about in a motor car with a bit of a silk dress to her knees; and the swells of the old days would have thought her house a palace, with water laid on and a gas stove, and silk stockings. What's the good of saying the working man was as well off as now, in face of the facts?"

"I think the skirts are really a bit too short," said Dot. "Yes, give me just a bite more, thank you, Philippa."

"The knee is not a beautiful part of the body, and should not be shown," seconded Blanche. "It's vulgarity and unwomanliness. Don't you think so?" she appealed to Freda. "I'm not as old as some, but I can remember when there was as much hysteria about women showing their ankles."

"People pretend to like long skirts when they have bandy legs," said Laleen in an aside which convulsed Les.

"It's just the desire to attract the men," said Blanche.

"Attract the men!" Aubrey exploded. "I'm thankful they warn us off. A man was in danger of falling in love with knock-knees in the old days."

"He'll have to do it now, too, or go without," said Uncle Erik. "Wait till you get the spasm, and nothing will stop you short of a monster with a glass eye and two heads."

"I think women giving up their womanliness and trying to ape the men has a lot to do with the terrible things that are happening," said Blanche.

"Do let me give you a little more plum pudding," said Philippa.

"What is this womanliness that women have given up?" demanded Larry Healey.

"Frowsy old birds' nests of hair, and skirts flopping up the dirt, and a steel rat-trap around the middle," said Laleen. "I'm always trying to teach Laleen the value of understatement," said her mother composedly.

"But she finds overstatement more hilarious," said Freda. "Laleen thinks it funny to make mock of higher things," said Blanche. "It makes the men laugh, but she'll find some day that men don't really respect that sort of thing, though it makes for a little passing notoriety."

"They propose to it, though, don't they, Laleen?" said Aubrey slyly, noting that Bob James guffawed at Laleen's sally, though he was always lauding sweet old-fashioned womanliness.

Women, in Bob's knowledge, always had this irritating way of getting off the subject. It was inherent in femininity, fact like the immutability of human nature.

"All you have been saying brings it back to the same thing, that you can't change human nature. Might as well try to stop war. It stands to reason there's always got to be war. The lower races are always swarming ready to grasp what the others build up, and what are you going to do about it but protect yourself by fighting as much as you can?"

"But the last fight wasn't with lower races," said Uncle Erik.

"You'll never do away with war, now listen to me," commanded Larry, "till one thing happens, and that is till a nation's riches cannot be taken away by brute force. When you have a nation, and mind you it needn't be a big nation--I'm not sure that little nations wouldn't be better for development--when you have a nation that has found out its mind and lives for happiness and goodness without so many banks full of money, and manufactories full of clothes that no one can wear till they have paid; and fruit tipped in the harbour not because people have no appetite for it, but just because they haven't the money that the York Street farmers have decided it will pay them to sell for: then you will have peace. Then there will be no war, because no men, either of superiors or the backward people, can take away contentment and peace and health by gunnery. They will only be able to copy it, and the more they take the more will the givers have.

"And you'll never have that till the millennium," said Bob. The Uncles Labosseer thought it too silly for any response. Larry hadn't a ha'penny to his pocket unless it was put there by his wife, who had a little tied up from old Tom Saunders who had left a decent property for his day by hard-headedness and hard-fistedness undiluted by any idiocy of mental speculation.

"No fear, if man would only open his eyes to his spiritual possibilities he could have it in our lifetime."

"But you'd have to change human nature."

"You'd only have to use that kind of human nature, instead of the sharks' sort as they struggle around a dead whale which is all we have at present. And the inferior races--that I'm not so sure are inferior--would be just as anxious to copy that as they are to copy the guns and battleships today.

"You have a good thought there," said Dick. He recalled that, when a boy, Larry had lent him books of poems, and had seemed to understand his adolescent demand for finer things from life than Oswald's Ridges furnished. In those days it had never occurred to him that Larry, too, might have had his frustrations.

Freda looked at her father with tenderness. "You are right dear," she said. He never had a soul with whom to exchange an idea, yet the atrophying isolation had not robbed him of spiritual sweetness, whereas two or three days in that atmosphere of mental drought already had made inroads on her own harmony.

Philippa whispered to Blanche, "Sounds like whisky talking."

Blanche agreed. "Get them away from the table without any more blab. They encourage each other." Larry and Dad Mazere had partly earned this attitude by their weakness with alcohol in earlier days, also Philippa and Blanche feared unfamiliar ideas as the plague. To them they were indistinguishable from raving. They took their politics from the Herald, which was polite and respectable, and a family institution since the first Mazere's day.

II

"You have brains. What do you keep them for?" inquired Freda, going with Aubrey to the sitting-room. "Going to let them waste in the fashion of the Mazeres and Stantons and Saunders?"

"Brains are a handicap unless you can take the other fellow down and make plenty of money. I do that whenever I can, but the business is overcrowded."

"And what are you going to do with the money?"

"Just keep it around. Handy thing to have. I could do what I like if I had plenty of money."

"The catch in that," said Freda, lighting a cigarette, "is that you mightn't know enough to like what you could do."

"Plenty of catches in everything...What do you think of us after all this time? Lot of dashed old back numbers?"

"The real old pioneer folk are unspeakably precious."

"They used to be old bush-whacker cockatoos, but they're becoming on to be the old pioneers now."

"Why don't I find you married?"

"Lots of reasons," chuckled Aubrey. "Most of 'em not fit for the Church News. Always to be jawed by some woman doesn't appeal to me. A wife is either the mad-housekeeper kind driving herself and everyone to distraction over the mats and cakes like poor old Blanche or Philippa, or she is out chasing another man."

"They try to mitigate the monotony of monogamy."

"Hang it all, you don't believe in polygamy, do you?" he cackled.

"Polygamy seems to be a thing we hanker after for ourselves but deny the other fellow. Being for ever hermetically sealed in knowledge of only one man--or woman--makes marriage seem stifling to me. The whole sex arrangements of the middle class and respectable are gruesome when you consider them: the physical excesses of marriage--and it is impossible to have a decent conversation with a married man. Unless he is reckless he is as timid as a mid-Victorian old maid; if you asked him how he was he'd run and tell his wife that you were seducing him. Take note of the sheer asininity--leaving the vulgarity aside--of the badinage among married people, if a wife or husband even speaks to a lame old baker or a fat old charwoman."

"Well, by gum, you couldn't trust even an old woman with one eye or an old man with no legs out of your sight."

"That's a point of view that makes life intolerable to me."

"Well, you can't change it. It always has been the same and always will be, and what's the good of worrying about it.

"That's where I disagree. Human mentality can be moulded and directed to anything."

"You can't prove it."

"The changes that take place all the time prove it."

"Huh! Freda! You must be a bolshevist. And how did you begin smoking?" Aubrey had mental possibilities totally unexercised. He had never associated with an intellectual woman. He was puzzled to estimate if the little girl with whom he had run about the bush was talking through her hat or really "fast", and something to be shunned as dangerous and expensive, like racehorses or gambling. Her ideas and cigarette-smoking appealed to him as a cocktail does to a youth, on first going among men.

"Smoking is part of my business façade, erected so that my opponents shan't discover my old bush simplicity."

"Freda, please don't say anything interesting till I get the washing-up done," pleaded Laleen from the doorway and the grand turmoil of clearing the table. Mrs Gambol did no stay to wash up.

"I'll come and wipe, and we'll have a nice opportunity for a talk. Aubrey can help too if he's good."

"Good-o! Bonzer!"

"We couldn't let a visitor wash up," said Philippa.

"Blanche is such a great housekeeper no one can do anything to satisfy her," said Mrs Mazere, comfortably subsiding into a chair in the front room. She liked to escape from the "womanly" piffle.

"Those kind of soft words," said Blanche, "are just to run me on to work my life to the bone while others sit down and talk."

"They all rush to the little bit of work because it is more pleasurable than the kind of talk which is the alternative, and as there is such competition for the pleasure, let them have it, while you and I have a little talk," said Freda, drawing Laleen's arm through hers and going into the back garden.

"It doesn't take much persuading for Laleen to leave work to others." Blanche's voice followed, infuriating Laleen.

"I'd easily do the work if you'd get out of the way."

"While I'm the one in the position of responsibility I must see that things go right." Blanche's housekeeping was never done under a bushel. Certain of her indispensability, she was everywhere, bustling, and fault-finding if possible.

A furious jazz record screeched from the adjoining house hack. Any time from 7 a.m. till 10 p.m. or later some awful sound could be heard as of performances in lunatic asylums recorded for the entertainment of illiterate morons outside the walls.

"Good heavens, poor Dick!" exclaimed Freda.

"I ought to go back and help. Blanche will be in a state."

"If you took the work away from Blanche she would be derelict. These women of stupendous energy or restlessness and no interest but the petty mechanics of existence, and not enough of them to occupy them, are a problem, and I do think it's time that as a nation we put more of our women to something else. We want others besides charwomen, so I'm glad to hear you are turning to writing."

"I want to do a long book."

"Fine! Stick to it. You'll need courage and industry. It means work as you have never known it."

"I have Ignez Milford's book all about Oswald's Ridges where we all used to live. She must have had time to write."

"Ah," said Freda softly. "She was wonderful, for she had no one to help her. But she went away and never came hack--and she never wrote another book."

"I wonder why."

"She once told me that she could not afford to. She had to earn her living, and she mistakenly took up causes that devoured her."

"Tell me about her."

"Some day when we are to ourselves. Let's talk about your intentions tonight. Writing books is a full-life job, only people are too ignorant to realize it. If you haven't it in you, you are still young enough to start something else; and there is always marriage."

"Any dud can get married. I want to do something worth while and get away from here."

"Time is on your side--go to! Will Dick get the quiet that will save him?"

"Oh, Dick is Blanche's pet, and men aren't supposed to scratch all day on housework, whether it needs doing or not."

"Laleen, you're monopolizing Freda, and keeping her out in the cold." It was Blanche's voice.

"I have been monopolizing Laleen."

The girl glowed. Freda always filled her with inspiration and could even point out the funny angle of Blanche. Freda had that effect on various friends scattered around the globe, from Chicago via London to Beograd, and back by Cawnpore to Rotaru and Queanbeyan and Bool Bool.

"Oh, I am glad you have come home again, Freda--and Dick too, just in the nick of time."

"I hope Laleen won't pick up smoking from Freda," said Blanche to the "front" room.

"She might pick up something worse from someone else," said Laleen's mother, and turned again to the men, who were discussing the villainy of the State Labour Government.

"I know for a positive fact," said Bob James, "of one publican who gave the Premier £8000 as a bribe against prohibition. There's not any job you can go into now that doesn't demand that sort of thing. If you are not ready to put your hand in your pocket, you'll never get a position of any sort, and after you get it you'd stay at the foot of the tree for ever if you didn't bribe your way up."

"It's the only way to success," agreed Aubrey. "Look at all these fellows, H--- and C--- and L---. They all have grand places, which they couldn't have bought out of their screw while in Parliament."

The commotion of clearing away had taken the women to the back of the house. Freda, coming in, saw the danger of being marooned in the trivial clack of cake recipes and primitive fancy-work, such as bead necklaces or covers to keep the flies out of the milk, which led with gusto to cases of diabetes or nervous troubles--even corns, if no major disablement was available, and the more shot with scandal the better. They had not progressed in cultural interests since years before she had repudiated the hated round as filling her mind with fat hen and nettles.

Freda preferred the men. When they talked wool, it was a subject on which Australia had commanded world respect. Their politics, though of the Bumble school, were less dispiriting than the women's gloatings on illnesses.

Les Olliver manoeuvred Laleen to the front veranda to woo her with chocolates. Young people's amours were as exciting to Dot as news of a dramatic masterpiece to her daughter.

"Anything in that?" she asked Blanche, her eyes glistening.

"He'd at least steady her and provide the common sense and unselfishness."

"Is Laleen selfish?" asked Freda quizzically, her mind on some move to escape from the women to the front room.

"She wants to write now, and she doesn't care how the work gets done."

"But you care only how the housework gets done--that is, you care only for your concerns too."

"But Laleen's young and ought to take her share. I've borne the heat and burden all my life."

"If she is to succeed in writing it will take all her time."

"Why doesn't she go in for teaching or nursing or something substantial?"

"I'm relieved to see one of our old tribe attempting to be something but a charwoman."

"I'm sure I've always tried to be a lady," said Philippa, with gentle injury.

"What I mean is that if there was a budding Madame Curie, or a female Pasteur or Einstein, or a Charlotte Brontë, in Australia, she'd still be compelled to be a charwoman; it's the supreme preoccupation of my countrywomen."

"That's not true," said Blanche. "Several of the Bool Bool Saunders are nurses."

"That's only a glorified and certificated charwoman. Twenty years ago when a respectable girl wanted to escape from the home or domestic service or marriage, her only bent was hospital nursing, because it was what she and every female since Australia was founded was driven to in the home. It is depressing still to find it the chief outlet. Other countries are beginning to use women's capabilities in ever so many ways. Here you are still all charwomen--that expresses it."

"I'm sure, to be a nurse is a wonderful thing. If you were ill you'd be very glad to have one," said Philippa. "They would be hurt to hear you disparage them, and there are not nearly enough."

"It doesn't speak well for transplantation to a whole new continent if the hospitals and asylums cannot keep up with the needs of the population. No good in displacing the gentle kangaroo for such people as that. As an experiment it would be nice to give Laleen opportunity."

"She can write as much as she likes if she only does h share of the work first."

"But writing is her first work. You want her to do your work and leave her own to odd moments."

"She'll never be a writer. She's too selfish. You mentioned Charlotte Brontë. In that little book of mine it tells that she took the eyes out of the potatoes. You don't become a great writer by selfishness and imposing on others. All the famous geniuses struggled up at great self-sacrifice, that is what made them great."

"I think many more are lost to the world through lack of their own selfishness than through too much of it."

"If it's only selfishness that's needed, Laleen will be well equipped."

"I made no such claims for selfishness per se," said Freda vowing never to discuss anything above tea-cosies in this circle.

"The selfish always attract the unselfish," Blanche charged on like a faucet. It was her custom to bludgeon remarks to death with barnacled platitudes. "Leslie thinks of Laleen all the time, and she is totally indifferent."

"If he pursues Laleen it is, I suppose, for his own satisfaction, not out of philanthropy for Laleen."

"I see she has you on her side, no matter what she does."

"I hope the child will get her talent out of the napkin of household mechanics that has buried so much talent in the other female members of the old pioneer families. If, with the smaller families, and all the conveniences of town cottages, you can't liberate one of your sex, I think you are thunderingly inefficient housekeepers."

"Talent is no excuse for riding roughshod over others that have borne the heat and burden of the day without sparing themselves. You may say I am only an old dud without any brains, but you can put that to all the great people that you think so much of, and they'll agree with me. If Laleen thought of others, she'd find all this genius that you talk about would take care of itself. I've had to sacrifice my life. I've never had a moment to think of myself in all my life."

"Leslie is like Old Dog Tray," interposed Philippa, in an attempt to soften matters. "Laleen thinks she doesn't like him, but girls generally dislike the man they marry at first. It's funny, too, how people who are direct opposites are always attracted before marriage, and then don't have anything in common afterwards. Now, Freda, how do you account for that?"

"Oh well, one doesn't need to be an iconoclast to realize that marriage will have to be drastically reformed or superseded."

"Of course, I know you smoke, but surely you don't hold Iii such loose views as that," said Blanche in horror. "I think this easy divorce is ruining the country. Do away with marriage, and what would the women do when they get old? The men would be only too glad to get rid of them and get new ones."

"I hope I'll never fall so low as to live on or with a man when I have become obnoxious to him, and he kept me only because compelled."

"If there wasn't marriage to protect women--Here's Freda giving the most immoral views, what do you say to her?" demanded Blanche of Mrs Healey.

"I cannot be responsible for her. I've learnt to hold my tongue and take a back seat."

"Freda doesn't mean what she says," said Philippa. "But now we must change the subject or the men might hear, and I suppose I'm old-fashioned, but I don't like talking all sorts of subjects before men."

"You must be glad to have Dick back again," said Freda, scorning herself for attempting discussion. "Would you have known him?"

"I was so shocked that I nearly fainted. He looks as if he had one foot in the grave already. Poor Dick! He'll go the way of Allan and Sylvia. I must take him to a doctor as soon as I can persuade him."

"But he doesn't believe in medicine or doctors."

"That silly Christian Science rubbish! I think it's awful not to be able to get good medical advice and do something for those we love. I should have to change my whole nature before I could be callous when anyone is suffering. You don believe in this all-is-mind bosh, do you? We can't deny the facts of pain."

"You and I may not be able to, but think how marvellous for those who can."

"The beans were so beautifully fine tonight: do you have a special cutter?" inquired Dot.

"No," said Philippa. "I use a sharp knife."

"It's waste of time to cut them so fine," said Blanche. "Oh no, I do like to have things nice, and they taste ever so much better."

Supposing they did, thought Freda, what difference would it make in that circle, or any other? Blanche and her mother were not long to be diverted from their most absorbing interest.

"Poor Aunt Jane doesn't recover very fast from her operation."

"How could she expect to. She showed me the wound. They had ripped her open from..." Blanche illustrated, lingering on the details. Dot outdid her with another case. They were engrossed in what Aubrey termed an organ recital--of the organs lost to the scalpel. Freda escaped to the veranda and the glory of the jewelled sky, which she now had to herself. Laleen had gone inside lest Leslie should accompany chocs with ardour.

The white trumpets of arum lilies showed in the shadow and the crisp dry night was sanctified with freesia, narcissus and violet. Such beds of violets, big blossoms among a wealth of leaves, she never saw elsewhere except at Cape Town. Everywhere, from Chicago to Paris, violets were vended in tight bundles, mostly guiltless of perfume, but these had the old English scent.

"Thank God for the violets, at least for the violets," she breathed. She could have weathered the absence of mental pabulum for a year or two, but accompanied by a nagging antagonism it produced a stifling spiritual aridity. What injury had been wrought the souls of her mother and Blanche, which nothing could appease? Blanche, Philippa, and her mother had all the virtues, observed all the respectable conventions, while in her there was a wild desire to play with temptations as well as with philosophical flights in the upper air. They could never be initiated into her contacts, had no urge that way, consequently no sympathy. They were too set, too circumscribed by environment to change. The onus was upon her to adjust herself while with them.

A crisp tang of frost was refreshing after the hot midday sun. "Give me a reservoir of tolerance and patience," she prayed, and remained out on the veranda alone.

III

The treeless road and the coarse dry grass of the sidewalks were suddenly illuminated by the arrogant headlights of a limousine as it passed in its own darkness and stopped in front of the house beyond. The driver inquired for the Mazeres.

"Someone from the auto show coming to sell you a car," Freda remarked to the room behind her, but it did not penetrate Bob James's stentorian pronouncement that it is against nature for women to think they could take men's places, and Laleen's aside that women had never been such cuckoo billy-goats as to want to, when their own place was so much nicer. A man stepped to the door without discerning Freda, and knocked. Blanche came and switched on the veranda light. "A friend of Mr Mazere," said the caller. "I'll bring her in." He turned back towards the car, but not before he had flashed a smile at Laleen, who had come to the door behind Blanche. Laleen's quick glance captured the elegance of a tall young man with fur on his coat collar, and fur gloves, as if it were Canada--and white spats twinkling in the murk. Where the light fell full she saw the brown of his eyes matched by his tie as he removed his hat and kept it off with bravura. Excitement shot her pulses. Surely this was no chauffeur or mere married man! Disappointing if he had a young wife and a baby!

Nothing mattered in all the universe, not the Yankee time-payment seduction that was bleeding the country white, or the terrible drought that was excoriating the West, or the Labour Government that was sinking the State in bribery and corruption, or the intransigence of her family towards her genius. Instantaneous illiquation removed all pestiferations till she should know who was the young man, and if he were free from the shackles of matrimony. There surely could be nothing so dull connected with this shining radiance.

Leslie Olliver, who stood behind Laleen, saw a girlified dude who took off his hat and "grinned like a goanna eating fat".

"He looks like one of the aides from Government House whispered Laleen ecstatically.

"Looks like a dolled-up pup, and he must have rheumatism in the ankles--all bound up in white rag. Some Yank or pommy trying to sell wireless sets or hair oil to dodge work and bleed us a little whiter," muttered Leslie.

Laleen ignored this disparagement, her cool young heart accelerated, her ears strained for news from the front. The young man was holding the gate open for a figure, larger, more effulgent than any Laleen had known. Her coat was of fabulous fur like those in the books of modes that Dick had sometimes sent from London or Paris. Jewels gleamed in amazing curls and at the opening at her throat. Who on earth--surely not the young man's wife!

"Madame Austra," said the gorgeous young man, with flourish proper to a prima donna.

"Not Austra, here?" said a marvellously placed voice. "It's only Mollye Brennan from Bool Bool, looking for her old playmate Dicky Mazere. Are you Blanche?"

"Yes. Is it really Mollye! So grand, you take my breath away!"

"It takes mine away, Blanche darling, to see you again and hear you call me by name."

Blanche was enveloped in such a perfumed smothering hug as she had never previously known. "See who's here!" she said, still in affectionate embrace, as she towed her prize before the company. Introductions. There was not room for all the guests in the front room, cluttered as it was with tables, pictures, photographs. A stir went through the gathering. A miracle was happening. Something outside the realm of ordinary routine as when a queen appears. This one dropped, too, as a beneficent surprise without the travail of preparation.

"You can't remember me," said Mrs Healey, animated and good-tempered as was her wont until people became familiar.

"I remember every one of the dear old Bool Bool folks, if you'll only start me off...Of course, the champion lady rider, you used to be. Do you ever ride now?"

"Marriage soon took that and everything else out of me!" Larry looked as though marriage had been no more enriching to him, but the point flattened unnoticed as Mollye renewed connections.

"It is heaven to see you all again! I must pay respects to Dick as a fellow artist. I had your poems with me, Dick, all the way from London. I hope you are not going to be as unamiable as you were last time I asked you for something." Eager inquiries.

"Oh, it was at old Mrs Mazere's funeral at Three Rivers, and I wanted Dick to kiss me, and he pinched me instead, when no one was looking."

"The ungentlemanly brute!" exclaimed Aubrey.

"That was Freda who wanted to kiss him, and then howled when he did," said Blanche, the family chronicler, with a phonographic memory for incidents and dates. Freda said nothing. She had worked in circles which reveal that as history ripens the plums in anecdotes are often transferred from the lesser to the greater stars.

"I expect it was both of them," said Uncle Erik in his hearty way. "The boot is on the other foot now, and I bet Dick could howl like a dingo without awakening your pity. How about it, Freda?"

"To find he was a Mormon freezes my interest."

"Au contraire, I'm intrigued to find he was so all-conquering," said Mollye, giving Dick the honours in her glances. "No woman appreciates her inamorato being a chimpanzee t hat other ladies would flee from." She caught sight of Laleen. "Come here, you lovely thing, and tell me who you are. A Mazere I can see, and the image of Sylvia."

Laleen stepped out of prosaic life into a fairy-tale to this resplendent being in the golden slippers and jewels and famous furs, and with a train of gleaming tissue slipping on the carpet under her coat. Her joyous confidence, the celebrity, the magnificence of her career were an embodiment of glory.

Blanche explained the relationship, adding, "She is supposed to be the image of great-aunt Emily, who was drowned."

"She is like a wind-flower. Tell me, do you sing?"

"Not much. I write, at least I try to."

"As long as you do something! What I deplore in Australia is the wasted talent for want of opportunity and contact. Are you a second Dick? Why don't you write the libretto of the Australian opera, and Mr Horan will compose it. Nathaniel, where are you keeping yourself?"

Nathaniel came forward. "Miss Mazere. Everybody. Mr I loran!" Bows, murmurs, and some handshakes. "Mr Horan is by way of being a composer."

So, he was a real celebrity! Mr Horan was quite a composer. His face had some years earlier illustrated native journals. He had had the enthusiastic initial Australian appreciation and support. He had been well received in London. Fortunes in his line are not, however, so furiously made, and he was delighted to come out to meet Austra and go on tour with her.

"I'll take a chair into the hall," said Laleen.

"Allow me," said the prodigy. Leslie was a good soldier and followed. "Are you a musician or a poet?"

"Neither. I'm a sheep man with a little dairying," said Leslie bravely.

"At the foundation of things," said Horan charmingly.

"I reckon I'm pulling my weight. Butter and wool are staple industries." Leslie was willing to be discursive. Horan was prepared to assist him. He had social charm, resting on the phenomenon that for a celebrity he was not for ever boosting himself, but Laleen was not going to permit the intrusion of the bear in her first fairy story.

"It must be divine to travel all round the world," she breathed.

"I suppose you'll be at the concert," he replied.

Laleen was ashamed that they were too poor to go. "All the tickets are gone," she said lamely.

"Why didn't you tell me in time?" said Leslie.

"Shall you play any of your own compositions?"

"Yes. Madame is very good. I am to play two of my own and she wants to sing two of your brother's songs to my settings. That is what she has come for."

"How heavenly!"

"There is nothing to prevent a great Australian opera. We have all the ingredients," Austra was saying. "We need something like that to put us on the map of art as wool has put us on the commercial map."

Dick agreed, more talkative than he had been since his arrival. "When people in England say that we have wool in our brains and can produce rank-and-file soldiers, but only tenth-rate politicians and writers that are insignificant echoes of the parent stock, I have always maintained that a people who can do those other things well could also produce some of the most sincere and characteristic drama if they were seized with the idea."

"Oh, Dick! I'm so glad you feel like that too."

"I'm glad you are a good patriot," said Blanche. "So Australians do nothing but criticize their own country."

"Yes, if we'd only praise it," Philippa hastened into the opening. "Others will think the same. It's just what people say that makes other people think the same."

Mollye said, "Well, I'm on the way to a ball. Her Excellency got hold of me, and I mustn't intrude too long on your joyous reunion. Though I am nearest after the family proper."

"Your great-grandmother and ours were as dear as sisters," said Blanche.

"That is history...Dick, can you come tomorrow and hear which versions you like best? I'll send the car for you and Blanche, and you must stay for lunch. I'll see you all at the concert, if not before."

Murmurs about all the tickets being sold.

"It would break my heart right in two if one of you was absent. Nat, tell Miss Gay. The whole family must hear Dick's songs." Laleen could not believe her ears. It was intoxicating to see a miracle bearing fruit. Mollye rose in all her splendour, exchanged jocular remarks with the Labosseer uncles, and accepted an invitation to stay at Coolooluk. She moved towards the door and Laleen. "Bring this pretty thing with you tomorrow."

It could not be true. It was like floating on air. Only Leslie was not so elated. Mollye chucked Laleen on the chin and stooped forward and kissed her, leaving the girl entranced and worshipful.

They all went out to see the visitors into the peripatetic boudoir. Horan spoke to Oliver about the best road back to town, and the latter offered to point out the way. He was mesmerized into examining this glittering rival at close quarters. He stepped into the car and called "Ta-ta!" Mollye left them all aglow with interest and enjoyment, such was the vitality, the good-nature of her big personality, such the power of a spark of greatness to leaven the ordinary.

IV

Much reminiscence ensued.

"Her grandfather, old Tim Brennan of The Gap, was madly in love with our great-aunt Emily," said Blanche.

"Didn't she care for him?"

"No. She was madly in love with old Bert Poole of Curradoobidgee. You remember them all, don't you, Uncle Erik?"

"I'd be very gone in the upper storey if I didn't. Ghost! She's a real Brennan in every way."

"Yes, isn't she?" said Dad. "Old Mother Brennan of The Gap was just such another, only she hadn't this style and polish. By Jove, this men be a big woman in another ten years."

"She's supposed to be the image of the one who became a nun because she couldn't marry Bert Poole," added Blanche. "Tell me more," said Laleen, till that moment contemptuous of amorous romances.

"I thought love stories were quite out of date," said Freda.

"If Laleen wants to write a story, I reckon she couldn't do better than take the history of the old days of the Mazeres and Brennans at the time of the drowning of Emily,"* said, Uncle Erik. "All the young fellows, Mollye's granddad and your uncle, and Dad too, Larry, and all the old Saunderses and Stantons, were mad after Emily: and all the girls, Emily included, were mad after old Bert Poole of Curradoobidgee, who married Milly Saunders in the end."

[* See Up the Country.]

"Didn't any of the pairs love the right ones?"

"They all got sorted out in the end," said Larry.

"It was as well one way as another. They probably found that whoever they married it was the wrong one," said his wife.

"They didn't all sort themselves," said Uncle Erik. "Emily was drowned and Mary Brennan became a nun, and Jack Stanton and Bert Poole hung on the hooks till they made fools of themselves marrying children."

"My sister Aileen had to marry old Jack Stanton Skinny Guts because of his money bags," contributed Larry. "It was supposed to break her heart at the time, but she got fat on it, so there's no sense in dragging old dogs from their kennels at this date." He fell absent concerning one dog that had remained in its kennel--the facts of his receiving the deep scar on his temple and the crushed thorax which tortured and prematurely bent his tall willowy form. It had been through loving a girl too much--not his wife. It had been Milly Saunders.

An old wound pricked ever so slightly when Dick remarked, "At any rate Milly Saunders was as happy as heaven with Bert Poole. When Ignez Milford lived with us she was never done telling us about them."

"That was Ignez," Blanche disparaged.

"I never knew anyone to tell a thing as true as Ignez," said Freda.

"She and Milly Saunders were equally good at pretending and imagining things that never happened," said Mrs Healey contemptuously, but Laleen had much more respect for the possibilities of love in the last half-hour than ever previously.

"You'll have to cut love out as I have done, Laleen, or you might find yourself in the wrong pair," said Freda.

"How can she cut love out with poor old Les looking at her like a--"

"Billy-goat! He's cuckoo," interposed Laleen impatiently. "That's how it looks exactly, when it's unwelcome, so beware," added Aubrey.

V

Uncles Erik and Sylvester left about ten-thirty and Bob James went with them. Aubrey, Dick, Blanche, and Laleen escorted them to the train. The Healeys went the same way, as they lived about a mile distant.

"Bring Miss Healey in some evening and we'll have dinner and go to the theatre," said Bob, as the train was drawing in.

"I'll tell Blanche," said Laleen. "I haven't a minute to spare."

"Blanche is such a home bird," he murmured.

"Yes, she is, but I think she'll go if you ask her prettily."

Freda put her parents into the bus, and Dick singled her out and called out to Blanche that he would take a walk. Blanche said she would go too. "You'll go with me, then," whispered Aubrey, chuckling. "Freda doesn't want you."

"I don't want her either."

"But Dick doesn't want us, and he does want Freda."

"You don't mean--" began Blanche, like a dog on the scent of a rabbit.

"I thought that would get a bite," said Aubrey with renewed chuckling, against which Blanche knew it was useless to struggle. Freda and Dick proceeded under the railway bridge hand in hand like children. "Fancy my not knowing you on the Ballyphule. You robbed me of all those weeks."

"I feel the same. I was taken for Meyers by bad writing and I let it go, but why were you Miss Timson?"

"I am known under my own name, and used another to see things as they really are on a migrant ship. I thought my name was Timson till I was quite an age."

Dick hazily recalled something irregular about Freda's infancy.* Blanche could inform him, but he would never allow her to mention the subject. "I met you as a stranger and have missed you every day since."

[* See Ten Creeks Run.]

"It's nice to hear that," she said unaffectedly, "because it was the most delightful surprise to see Mr Meyers turn into Dick Mazere. By the way, you were married, weren't you?"

"Yes. It wasn't a success. I did not suit my wife, so the marriage was dissolved. It is a relief to hear that I did not hold her up too long to make a fresh start."

"Any children?"

"One girl. She wasn't six when I left New York for the war in 1915. Her mother wanted her, and I could not dispute that.

"And now you are free to write--I envy you."

"How about yourself and love or marriage?"

"Never was in a position to give way to it. My first love," she continued lightly, "was a young poet named Dick Mazere. Do you remember when Ignez Milford used to take us to She-oak Ridge to write in the old cockatoo days of Oswald's Ridges? I used to adore you with all my childish affection."

"I used to worship Ignez in the same way, I guess."

"How long did you remember her? You were nearer maturity."

"Faded in the stress of events. I remember her more clearly now, when you recall her. She was a brave, vivid creature."

"Not coarse enough to battle from an environment so removed from art. My own case has been similar. Let's hope Laleen escapes."

"Allan and Sylvia died so young. I miss them."

"Allan was my second love after you and Ignez deserted and left me all alone--that was a tussle for me."

"Poor little kid. How did you escape eventually?"

"Sort of ran away, and poor old Dad said I must be 1et go. I cannot imagine anything more sad than coming back after long absence and finding so many gaps among the young, and the old so very old, and so sad and sour. The mental possibilities are undeveloped, and they are without resources. They are a scourge to anyone responsible for them who wishes to lead a life of anything but animal restlessness. Laleen is the only hope, and they hamper and worry child instead of helping her to her bent."

"I wish I could feel that youth again. Life used to be tough sometimes, but right across our track was a fairyland to be realized in the immediate future. Nevertheless there is only the ever-present and glorious here and now. 'What you see, hear, feel, is a mode of consciousness, and can have no other reality than the sense you entertain of it."

"Yes, it is dangerous to rest upon the evidence of the senses." She smiled at him in the light of the street lamp before her door, where stately camellia bushes held guard.

"I can't keep my eyes off the Southern Cross."

"If you can keep your eyes on the stars and your ears deaf to disharmony, you will...well...God will be with you."

"You will let me have as much of your companionship as you can spare."

"That will be following my inclination."

He stood a few minutes holding her hand, breathing the fragrance distilled by the cream plush blossoms of the loquots, which appeared uninvited in every plot, and were allowed to remain for their pretty manners.

VI

He took a detour of meditation and reached home at midnight. Blanche was waiting up for him with a rich supper. "Blanche, dearest, I never eat anything after my evening meal.

"But I'm going to feed you up in your own home and make you put on weight."

"I don't need to put on weight."

"What is the good of all my cooking if you won't eat it?"

"There are so many things to read and think that are better than superfluous cooking."

"I read when I have time."

"The point is that you must have time."

"You don't understand a woman's work and how constant it is."

"Well, at least, no cake-making for me."

"But with cake-making I have to keep in practice."

"If it is necessary for you to keep in training, that is another matter, but I never eat cake."

"Well, I am disappointed."

"Sorry, sis."

"Isn't Mollye wonderful, yet as friendly as she was as a little girl, and Dick, I believe she is in love with you."

"Oh, sis, none of those provincial ideas of love--please! She has done me a vast honour to choose my little songs. There's a great deal of that sort of exchange among artists and writers."

"A great deal of the other thing, too! You can't fool me!"

"Not in this case. You shouldn't have waited up," said Dick firmly, departing for the night.

"Don't get up. I'll take your breakfast in."

"I'd rather see you resting."

"I don't expect any rest unless in my grave." Blanche retired to the room she was sharing with Philippa, and waked her to discuss apparel for the morrow. Philippa chased this hare with unpunctured amiability till Blanche complained. "If you don't stop chattering, I'll get no sleep and look a washed-out wreck tomorrow."

"There's no need for you to get up in the morning, Blanche. You know I always do."

VII

For Laleen life was enmeshed in a rainbow at the end of which was--is there anything that man has dreamed since dreams were his, not to be found at the end of youth's rainbow? Sleep was banished for hours. Horan was not married. The name sounded Roman Catholic, but what is a mere difference of label in the early glamour of young love, with beauty and romantic setting to generate enchantment? And tomorrow, tomorrow! The sheer adventure of tomorrows!

Not so glorious to Les Olliver. He attributed his wakefulness to the racket of the trams while his mind ran on that blooming dude with the rags around his ankles like a racing colt, and hands as white as a girl's...that pompadour in his hair! No real man's hair grew like that. It was like those permanent kinks the girls had cooked into their shingles at the paint and powder shops. And his collar, with a hem-stitched edge, fit for a girl, only girls didn't wear collars within a mile of their necks.

Of course the fellow was entertaining and polite, and could drive a car like hell. Just the sort of stinker Laleen would fall for, blow him! Leslie set his mind on the farm at Oswald's Ridges, via Goulburn, to the end that the dairying and ploughing might admit of a day's run down again for the Austra concert. It was scarcely feasible. By George, if he could get Dick up to write at his place, for the quiet! That would be the peg to hang things upon!

Then Leslie slept, with the bellow of the steamers in the Harbour as lullaby.