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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, by Miles Franklin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Some Everyday Folk and Dawn
+
+Author: Miles Franklin
+
+Release Date: June 1, 2007 [EBook #21659]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME EVERYDAY FOLK AND DAWN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                         Transcriber's Note:
+
+       The Table of Contents is not part of the original book.
+
+
+
+
+                                 SOME
+
+                               EVERYDAY
+
+                                 FOLK
+
+                               AND DAWN
+
+
+
+
+                            MILES FRANKLIN
+
+
+
+                 First published in Great Britain by
+
+                       William Blackwood & Sons
+
+                                 1909
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+_TO THE
+
+ENGLISH MEN WHO BELIEVE IN VOTES FOR WOMEN
+
+THIS STORY IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED,
+BECAUSE THE WOMEN HEREIN CHARACTERISED WERE
+NEVER FORCED TO BE
+
+"SUFFRAGETTES,"
+
+THEIR COUNTRYMEN
+HAVING GRANTED THEM THEIR RIGHTS AS
+
+SUFFRAGISTS
+
+IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1902.
+
+M. F._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+ONE.            CLAY'S.
+
+TWO.            AT CLAY'S.
+
+THREE.          BECOMING ACQUAINTED WITH GRANDMA CLAY.
+
+FOUR.           DAWN'S AMBITION.
+
+FIVE.           MISS FLIPP'S UNCLE.
+
+SIX.            GRANDMA CLAY'S LOVE-STORY.
+
+SEVEN.          THE LITTLE TOWN OF NOONOON.
+
+EIGHT.          GRANDMA TURNS NURSE.
+
+NINE.           THE KNIGHT HAS A STOLEN VIEW OF THE LADY.
+
+TEN.            PROVINCIAL POLITICS AND SEMI-SUBURBAN DENTISTS.
+
+ELEVEN.         ANDREW DISGRACES HIS "RARIN'."
+
+TWELVE.         SOME SIDE-PLAY.
+
+THIRTEEN.       VARIOUS EVENTS.
+
+FOURTEEN.       THE PASSING OF THE TRAINS.
+
+FIFTEEN.        ALAS! MISS FLIPP!
+
+SIXTEEN.        ADVANCE, AUSTRALIA!
+
+SEVENTEEN.      MRS BRAY AND CARRY COME TO ISSUES.
+
+EIGHTEEN.       THE FOUNDATION OF THE POULTRY INDUSTRY.
+
+NINETEEN.       AN OPPORTUNELY INOPPORTUNE DOUCHE.
+
+TWENTY.         "ALAS! HOW EASILY THINGS GO WRONG!"
+
+TWENTY-ONE.     THINGS GO MORE WRONG.
+
+TWENTY-TWO.     "O SPIRIT, AND THE NINE ANGELS WHO WATCH US ..."
+
+TWENTY-THREE.   UNIVERSAL ADULT SUFFRAGE.
+
+TWENTY-FOUR.    LITTLE ODDS AND ENDS OF LIFE.
+
+TWENTY-FIVE.    "LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM."
+
+TWENTY-SIX.     "OFF WITH THE OLD."
+
+TWENTY-SEVEN.   "ONE MIGHT THINK BETTER OF MARRIAGE IF ONE'S MARRIED
+                    FRIENDS ..."
+
+TWENTY-EIGHT.   LET THERE BE LOVE.
+
+TWENTY-NINE.    "THE SAVAGE SELLS OR EXCHANGES HIS DAUGHTER, BUT IN ..."
+
+THIRTY.         FOR FURTHER PARTICULARS CONSULT 'THE NOONOON ADVERTISER' OF
+                    THAT DATE.
+
+                L'ENVOI.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+GLOSSARY OF COLLOQUIALISMS AND SLANG TERMS.
+
+
+AUSTRALIAN.         AMERICAN EQUIVALENTS.    ENGLISH INTERPRETATION.
+
+Billy               A tin pail               A camp-kettle.
+Blokes              Guys                     Chaps--fellows.
+Bosker              Dandy or "dandy          Something meeting with
+                     fine"                     unqualified approval.
+Galoot              A rube                   A yokel--a heavy country
+                                                 fellow.
+Larrikin                                     A hoodlum.
+Moke                                         A common knockabout horse.
+Narked              Sore                     Vexed--to have lost the
+                                                 temper.
+Gin                 Squaw                    An aboriginal woman.
+Quod                                         Jail.
+Sollicker           Somewhat equivalent      Something excessive.
+                      to "corker"
+Toff                A "sport" or "swell      A well-dressed
+                      guy"                     individual--sometimes of
+                                               the upper ten.
+Two "bob"           Fifty cents              Two shillings.
+To graft            To "dig in"              To work hard and steadily.
+To scoot            To vamoose or skidoo     To leave hastily and
+                                                 unceremoniously.
+To smoodge          To be a "sucker"         To curry favour at the expense
+                                                 of independence.
+"Gives me the pip"  "Makes me tired"         Bores.
+"On a string"    }                           Trifling with him.
+"Pulling his leg"}
+Kookaburra          A giant kingfisher with grey plumage and a
+                     merry, mocking, inconceivably human laugh--a
+                     killer of snakes, and a great favourite with
+                     Australians.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Some Everyday Folk and Dawn.
+
+ONE.
+
+CLAY'S.
+
+
+The summer sun streamed meltingly down on the asphalted siding of the
+country railway station and occasioned the usual grumbling from the
+passengers alighting from the afternoon express.
+
+There were only three who effect this narrative--a huge, red-faced,
+barrel-like figure that might have served to erect as a monument to
+the over-feeding in vogue in this era; a tall, spare, old fellow with
+a grizzled beard, who looked as though he had never known a succession
+of square feeds; and myself, whose physique does not concern this
+narrative.
+
+Having surrendered our tickets and come through a down-hill passage to
+the dusty, dirty, stony, open space where vehicles awaited travellers,
+the usual corner "pub."--in this instance a particularly dilapidated
+one--and three tin kangaroos fixed as weather-cocks on a dwelling
+over the way, and turning hither and thither in the hot gusts of wind,
+were the first objects to arrest my attention in the town of Noonoon,
+near the river Noonoon, whereaway it does not particularly matter. The
+next were the men competing for our favour in the matter of vehicular
+conveyance.
+
+The big man, by reason of his high complexion, abnormal waist
+measurement, expensive clothes, and domineering manner, which
+proclaimed him really a lord of creation, naturally commanded the
+first and most obsequious attention, and giving his address as
+"Clay's," engaged the nearest man, who then turned to me.
+
+"Where might you be going?"
+
+"To Jimmeny's Hotel."
+
+"Right O! I can just drop you on the way to Clay's," said he; and the
+big swell grunted up to a box seat, while I took a position in the
+body of the vehicle commanding a clear view of the grossness of the
+highly coloured neck rolling over his collar.
+
+The journey through the town unearthed the fact that it resembled many
+of its compeers. The oven-hot iron roofs were coated with red dust; a
+few lackadaisical larrikins upheld occasional corner posts; dogs
+conducted municipal meetings here and there; the ugliness of the
+horses tied to the street posts, where they baked in the sun while
+their riders guzzled in the prolific "pubs.," bespoke a farming rather
+than a grazing district; and the streets had the distinction of being
+the most deplorably dirty and untended I have seen.
+
+The same could be said of a cook, or some such individual of whom I
+caught a glimpse when landed at a corner hotel, where I sat inside the
+door of a parlour awaiting the appearance of the landlady or the
+publican, while for diversion I watched the third arrival wending his
+way from the station on foot and shouting something concerning melons
+to a man in a dray in the middle of the roadway.
+
+Evidently it was the land of melons and other fruits and vegetables.
+
+Over at the railway, loaded waggons, drays, and carts were backed
+against a line of trucks drawn up to convey such produce to the city
+and other parts of the country, while strings of vehicles similarly
+burdened were thundering up the street. Some carts were piled with
+cases of peaches, grapes, tomatoes, and rock-melons--the rich aromatic
+scent of the last mentioned strongly asserting their presence as they
+passed. On some waggons the water-melons were packed in straw and had
+the grower's initials chipped in the rind, others were not so
+distinguished, and at intervals the roughness of the thoroughfare
+bumped one off. If the fall did not break it quite in two, a stray
+loafer pulled it so and tore out a little of the sweet and luscious
+heart, leaving the remainder to the ants and fowls. The latter were
+running about on friendly terms with the dogs, which they equalled in
+variety and number. Droves of small boys haunted the railway premises
+at that time of the year and eagerly assisted the farmers to truck
+their melons in return for one, and came away with their spoils under
+their arms. Never before had I seen so many melons or so large. Some
+weighed sixty and eighty pounds or more, while those from sixteen to
+twenty-five pounds, in all varieties,--Cuban Queens, Dixies, Halbert's
+Honey, and Cannon Balls,--were procurable at one shilling the dozen,
+and nearly as much produce as sent away wasted in the fields for want
+of a market.
+
+An hour after arrival, having refused the offer of refreshments, which
+in such places are not always refreshing, I betook myself to a
+comparatively cool back verandah to further investigate my temporary
+surroundings.
+
+A yellow-haired girl with rings on her fingers sprawled in a hammock
+reading a much-thumbed circulating-library novel and eating peaches.
+This was the landlord's daughter, and a very superior young lady
+indeed from her own point of view.
+
+I learnt that at present there would only be one other boarder besides
+myself. He came up for the week-end, and had just gone down to Clay's
+to see some one there. If he could get a berth at Clay's he would not
+come back; but the only hope of being taken in there during the summer
+weather was to bespeak room a long way ahead, as there was a great run
+on the place. It was built right beside the river, and they kept boats
+for hire, which attracted a number of desirable young men from the
+city to engage in week-end fishing, picnicing, swimming, &c.; and the
+young gentlemen attracted young ladies, who found it difficult to be
+taken in at all, because old Mrs Clay allowed her granddaughter, Dawn,
+to boss the place, and _she_ favoured men-boarders.
+
+The tone of Yellow-hair suggested that perhaps the men-boarders
+favoured Dawn; at all events, it was an attractive name and aroused
+interested inquiry from me.
+
+"Oh yes, some thought her a beauty! There were great arguments as to
+whether she or Dora Cowper--another great big fat thing in a hay and
+corn store over the way--was the belle of Noonoon;" but for her part,
+Yellow-hair thought her too coarse and vulgar and high-coloured (Miss
+Jimmeny was sallow and thin), and she was always making herself seen
+and known everywhere. One would think she owned Noonoon!
+
+"There she is now," exclaimed the girl, pointing out another who was
+driving a fat pony in a yellow sulky. "Talk of the devil."
+
+"Perhaps it is an angel in this case," I responded, for though she was
+thickly veiled she suggested youth and a style that pleased the eye.
+
+Whether she and the boats were sufficient to make Clay's an attractive
+place of residence I did not know, but already was painfully aware of
+conditions that would make Jimmeny's Hotel an uncomfortable location.
+I retired to my room to escape some of them--the foul language of the
+tipplers under the front verandah, and the winds from two streets that
+also met there in a whirlwind of dust and refuse.
+
+There was nothing for me to do but kill time, and no way of killing it
+but by simple endurance. I had been ordered to some country resort for
+the good of my health. But do not fear, reader; this is not to be a
+compilation of ills and pulses, for no one more than the unfortunate
+victim of such is so painfully aware of their lack of interest to the
+community at large. There are, I admit, some invalids who find a
+certain amount of entertainment in inflicting a list of their aches
+upon people, blissfully unconscious of how wearisome they can be, but
+my temperament is of the sensitive order, knowing its length too well
+to similarly transgress.
+
+How I had struck upon Noonoon I don't know or care, except that it was
+within easy access of the metropolis, and I have no predilection for
+being isolated from the crowded haunts of my fellows. I had descended
+upon Jimmeny's Hotel because in an advertisement sheet it was put
+down as the leading house of accommodation in Noonoon. Now I had come
+to hear of Clay's and Dawn, and determined to shift myself there as
+soon as possible. This did not seem imminent, for presently the
+"bloated aristocrat" came back to Jimmeny's pub. for the evening meal,
+as he had been unable to get so much as a shake-down at Clay's. This
+so aroused my desire to be a boarder at Clay's that I straightway
+wrote a letter to its châtelaine inquiring what style of accommodation
+she provided, and could she accommodate me; and strolling up the
+broken street, while a few larrikins at corners, by way of
+entertaining themselves and me, made remarks upon my appearance, I
+dropped it in the post-office, but had to endure a week's inattention
+at Jimmeny's, and no end of yarns from outside folk I encountered as
+to how Mrs Jimmeny robbed the "swipes" who took their poison at her
+bar, before I was honoured by a reply from Mrs Clay.
+
+     "The accommodation provided by me for people is clean and
+     wholesome and the best as suits me. If it don't suit them
+     there are other places near that makes more efforts to
+     gather custom than I do. I can't take you in at present as
+     I'm too full for my taste as it is.--Yours respectfully,
+
+"Martha Clay."
+
+This interesting rebuff inspired me to further effort, and sitting on
+the back verandah, under a giant fig-tree shedding its delicious and
+wholesome fruit also to the fowls and ants, I wrote:--
+
+     "Dear Madam,--Would you kindly apprise me when it would be
+     convenient to accommodate me, as I'm anxious to be near the
+     river, where I could indulge in boating?"
+
+To this I received reply:--
+
+     "There isn't any chance of me accommodating you till the
+     cool weather, and then I don't take boarders at all. I like
+     to have them all in the summer, and then have a little peace
+     to ourselves in the winter without strangers, for the best
+     of them have their noses poked everywhere they are not
+     wanted. If you want to go near the river there are heaps of
+     houses where there isn't no such rush of people as at my
+     place."
+
+This firmly determined me to reside at Mrs Clay's, a desired member of
+the household, or perish in the attempt. Alack! I had plenty time to
+spend in such a trifle, for I was but a derelict, broken in fierce
+struggle and hopelessly cast aside into smooth waters, safe from the
+stormy currents now too strong for my timbers. That I had means to lie
+at anchor in some genial boarding-house, instead of being dependent
+upon charity, was undoubtedly food for thankfulness, and when one has
+burned their coal-heap to ashes they are grateful for an occasional
+charcoal among the cinders.
+
+No other place near the river but Clay's would do me, though the
+valley had much to recommend it at that season, when grapes, peaches,
+and other fruits were literally being thrown away on every hand. So I
+repacked my trunk, and the 'busman who had brought me took me once
+more along the execrable streets, past the corner pub., near the
+railway station, and, it being late afternoon, the railway employés,
+as they came off duty, were streaming towards it for the purpose of
+"wetting their whistle" after their eight-houred day's work.
+
+Leaving the misguided fellows thus worse than ignorantly refreshing
+themselves, and the tin kangaroos showing that the breeze was from the
+east, I travelled farther west to a summer resort in the cool
+altitude, there to await from Mrs Martha Clay a recall to the vale of
+melons. That I would get one I was sure, and so little was there in my
+life that even this prospect lent a zest to the mail each day.
+
+I had neither relatives nor friends. Fate had apportioned me none of
+the former, and fierce, absorbing endeavour had left little time for
+cultivating the latter, while pride made me hide from all
+acquaintances who had known me standing amid the plaudits of the
+crowd--strong and successful; and fiercely desiring to be left to
+myself, I shrank with sensitive horror from the sympathy that is only
+careless pity.
+
+
+
+
+TWO.
+
+AT CLAY'S.
+
+
+The long hot days gave place to cooler and shorter, and there was none
+left of the beautiful fruit--peaches, apricots, figs, plums,
+nectarines, grapes, and melons--which, for want of a market, had
+rotted ankle-deep in some parts of the fertile old valley of Noonoon
+ere I received a communication from Mrs. Clay.
+
+     "If you think it worth your while you can investigate my
+     place now. All the summer weather folk has gone. I would
+     only take one or two nice people now that would live with us
+     in our own plain way and who would be company for the
+     family, so I could not undertake to give you a separate
+     parlour and table and carry on that way, but if you like to
+     call and see me, please yourself."
+
+Accordingly, I lost no time in once more patronising the town 'busman,
+and being his only patron that day, he rattled me past the tin
+kangaroo weather-cocks, the battered corner pub. and its colleague a
+few doors on, and entering the principal street where Jimmeny's Hotel
+filled the view, turned to the right across fertile flats held in
+tenure by patient Chinese gardeners.
+
+Being a region of quick growth, it was of correspondingly rapid decay,
+and the season of summer fruits had been entirely superseded by autumn
+flowers. The vale of melons was now a valley of chrysanthemums, and
+with a little specialisation in this branch of horticulture could
+easily have out-chrysanthemumed Japan. Without any care or cultivation
+they filled the little gardens on every side; children of all sizes
+were to be seen with bunches of them; while discarded blossoms lay in
+the streets, after the fashion of the superabundant melons and orchard
+fruits during their season.
+
+About a mile from the station we halted before a ramshackle old
+two-storey house that was covered by roses and hidden among orange and
+fig trees. The approach led through an irregular plantation of cedar
+and pepper trees, pomegranates and other shrubs, and masses of
+chrysanthemums and cosmos that flourished in every available space.
+
+The friendly 'busman directed me to a gable sheltered by a yellow
+jasmine-tree, where I tapped on the door with my knuckle. Footsteps
+approached on the inside, and after some thumping and kicking on its
+panels it was burst open by a nimble old lady in immaculate gown, with
+carefully adjusted collar, and wavy hair combed back in a tidy knot
+and with still a dark shade in it.
+
+"Them blessed white ants!" she exclaimed. "They've very near got the
+place eat down, so that you have to make a fool of yourself opening
+the door, and that blessed feller I sent for hasn't come to do 'em up
+yet; but some people!" She finished so exasperatedly that I felt
+impelled to state my name and business without delay, and with a prim
+"Indeed," she led the way across a narrow linoleumed hall, so
+beeswaxed that one had to stump along carefully erect.
+
+She invited me to a chair in a stiff room and began--
+
+"I've only got another young lady in the place now, and if you come
+you'll have to eat with the family."
+
+I considered this an attraction.
+
+"And there'll be no fussing over you and pampering you, for I'm not
+reduced to keeping boarders out of necessity. They ain't all I've got
+to depend on," she said with a fiery glance from her choleric
+blue-grey eyes.
+
+"Certainly not; I'm sure of that by your style, Mrs. Clay."
+
+"But of course I like to make a little; this Federal Tariff has rose
+the price of living considerable," she said, softening somewhat as we
+now sat down on the formidable and well-dusted seats.
+
+"But I believe you are somethink of a invalid."
+
+"Unfortunately, yes."
+
+"Well, this isn't no private hospital, and never pretended to be. Sick
+people is a lot of trouble potterin' and fussin' around with. I
+couldn't, for the sake of my granddaughter, give her a lot of extra
+work that wouldn't mean nothink."
+
+This might have sounded hard, but with some people their very
+austerity bespeaks a tenderness of heart. They affect it as a shield
+or guard against a softness that leaves them the too easy prey of a
+self-seeking community, and such I adjudged Mrs. Clay. Her stiffness,
+like that of the echidna, was a spiky covering protecting the most
+gentle and estimable of dispositions.
+
+"My ill-health is the sort to worry no one but myself. I need no
+dieting or waiting upon. It is merely a heart trouble, and should it
+happen to finish me in your house, I will leave ample compensation,
+and will pay my board and lodging weekly in advance."
+
+"I ain't a money-grubber," she hastened to assure me; "I was only
+explaining to you."
+
+"I'm only explaining too," I said with a smile; and having arrived at
+this understanding of mutual straight-going, she intimated that I
+could inspect a room I might have.
+
+In addition to a couple of detached buildings composed of rooms which
+during the summer were given to boarders, there were a few apartments
+in the main residence which were also delivered to this business, and
+I was conducted to where three in an uneven gable faced west and
+fronted the river.
+
+"This is my granddaughter Dawn's, and this one is empty, and this one
+is took by a young party for the winter," said the old dame.
+
+I selected the middle room, as it gave promise of being companionable
+with those on either hand occupied, and its window commanded an
+attractive view. A tangled old garden opened on a steep descent to the
+quiet river, edged with willows and garnished by a great row of red
+and blue boats rocking almost imperceptibly in the even flow, while a
+huge placard advertised their business--
+
+     BEST BOATS ON THE RIVER TO BE HIRED HERE.
+
+                            MRS. MARTHA CLAY.
+
+To the right was an imposing bridge, and on the other side of the
+water, right at the foot of the great range which in the early days
+had remained so long impassable, lay the quiet old settlement of
+Kangaroo.
+
+"If you think that room will do, you are welcome to it," continued
+Mrs. Clay. "Seventeen-and-six a-week without washing--a pound with."
+
+I agreed to the "with washing" terms, so the affable jehu hauled in
+what luggage I had brought, and at last I was installed at Clay's.
+
+The only thing wanting to complete the incident was the advent of
+Dawn, but she was nowhere to be seen. As it was only eleven in the
+morning I sat in my room and waited for her and a cup of tea, but
+neither were forthcoming. In her own words, Mrs. Clay "was never give
+to running after people an' lickin' their boots." Eventually, having
+grown weary of waiting for Dawn and luncheon and other things, I went
+out on a tour of inspection. First find was a tall dashing girl of
+twenty-four or thereabouts, dusting the big heavily encumbered
+"parler" into which my room opened.
+
+"Good morning!" heartily said she.
+
+"Good morning! Are you Dawn?" inquired I.
+
+"Dawn! No. But you might well ask, for it's nothing but Dawn and her
+doings and sayings and good looks here! You'd think there was no other
+girl in Noonoon. She won't take it as any compliment to be taken for
+me."
+
+"Well, she must be something superlative if it would not be a
+compliment to be taken for you."
+
+"Oh me! I'm only Carry the lady-help--general slavey like, earning my
+living, only that I eat with the family and not in the kitchen. In the
+summer they hire a cook and others, but in the winter there are only
+me and Dawn and the old woman," said this frank and communicative
+individual in the frank and communicative manner characteristic of the
+Clay household.
+
+Proceeding from this encounter, I went out the back way past more
+gardens and irregular enclosures, where under widespreading
+cedar-trees I found a boy at the hobbledehoy age chopping wood in a
+desultory fashion, as though to get rid of time, rather than to
+enlarge the stack of short sticks, were the most imperative object.
+Driving his axe in tight and holding on to it as a sort of balance, he
+leant back, effected a passage in his nostrils, and after having
+regarded me with a leisurely and straightforward squint, observed--
+
+"I reckon you're the new boarder?"
+
+"I reckon so. I reckon you belong to this place."
+
+"Yes, Mrs. Clay, she's my grandma."
+
+"Is that your grandfather?" I inquired, pointing to the old man who
+had travelled with me on the day of my first visit to the town, and
+now supporting an outhouse door-post, while a young man with whom he
+talked leant against the tailboard of a cart advertising that he was
+the first-class butcher of Kangaroo, and had several other
+unsurpassable virtues in the meat trade.
+
+"No, he ain't me grandfather, thank goodness he's only me uncle;
+that's plenty for me."
+
+"Aren't you fond of him?"
+
+"I ain't _dying_ of love for him, I promise you. Old Crawler! He
+reckons he's the boss, but sometimes I get home on him in a way that a
+sort of illustrates to his intelligence that he ain't. Ask Dawn. She's
+the one'll give you the straight tip regarding him."
+
+"Where is Dawn?"
+
+"Oh, Dawn's in the kitchen. She an' Carry does the cookin' week about
+w'en the house ain't full. Grandma makes 'em do that; it saves rows
+about it not bein' fair. You won't ketch sight of Dawn till dinner.
+She'll want to get herself up a bit, you bein' new; she always does
+for a fresh person, but she soon gets tired of it."
+
+"And you, are you going to get yourself up because I'm new?"
+
+"Not much; boys ain't that way so much as the wimmin," he said, and
+the grin we exchanged was the germ of a friendship that ripened as our
+acquaintance progressed. I intended to settle down to the enjoyment
+afforded by my sense of humour. I had preserved it intact as a private
+personal accomplishment. On the stage, having steered clear of comedy
+and confined myself to tragedy, it had never been cheapened and made
+nauseous by sham and machine representations indigenous to the hated
+footlights, and was an untapped preserve to be drawn upon now.
+
+So I was not to see Dawn till the midday dinner; she was to appear
+last, like the star at a concert.
+
+A star she verily was when eventually she came before me carrying a
+well-baked roast on an old-fashioned dish. Her lovely face was scarlet
+from hurry and the fire, her bright hair gleamed in coquettish rolls,
+and a loose sleeve displayed a round and dimpled forearm--a fitting
+continuance of the taper fingers grasping the chief dish of the
+wholesome and liberal menu she had prepared.
+
+Old Uncle Jake took the carver's place, but Grandma Clay sat at his
+left elbow and instructed him what to do. He handed the helpings to
+her, and she supplemented each with some of all the vegetables,
+irrespective of the wishes of the consumers, to whom they were handed
+in a business-like method. The puddings were distributed on the same
+principle, grandma even putting milk and sugar on the plates as for
+children; and further, she talked in a choleric way, as though the
+children were in bad grace owing to some misdemeanour, but that was
+merely one of her mannerisms, as that of others is to smile and be
+sweet while they inwardly fume.
+
+Excepting this, the unimpressive old smudges hung above the mantel,
+and probably standing for some family progenitors, gazed out of their
+caricatured eyes on an uneventful meal. Conversation was choppy and of
+the personal order, not interesting to a stranger to those mentioned.
+I made a few duty remarks to Uncle Jake, which he received with
+suspicion, so I left him in peace to suck his teeth and look like a
+sleepy lizard, while I counted the queer and inartistic old vases
+crowded in plumb and corresponding pairs on the shelf over the
+fireplace.
+
+Miss Flipp, the other boarder, was in every respect a contrast to me,
+being small, young, and dressed with elaboration in a flimsy style
+which, off the stage, I have always scorned. Her wrists were laden
+with bangles, her fingers with rings, and her golden hair piled high
+in the most exaggerated of the exaggerated pompadour styles in vogue.
+Her appetite was indifferent; the expression of her eyes bespoke
+either ill-health or dissipation, and she was very abstracted, or as
+Mrs Clay put it--
+
+"She acts like she had somethink on her mind. Maybe she's love-sick
+for some one she can't ketch, and she's been sent up here to forget."
+
+This was after Miss Flipp had retreated to her room, and Carry
+continued the subject as she cleared the table.
+
+"She _says_ she's an orphan reared by a rich uncle; she's always
+blowing about him and how fond he is of her. She's just recovered from
+an operation and has come up here to get strong. That's why she does
+nothing, so she _says_, only poke about and read novels and make
+herself new hats and blouses; but _I_ think she'd be lazy without any
+operation. She'd want another to put some go in her."
+
+"She'd require inoculating with a little of yours," said I, watching
+with what enviable vigour the girl's work sped before her as though
+afraid. I also retired to my room for a rest, intending to come out
+and pave the way for friendship with Dawn by-and-by, for I quickly
+perceived she was not the character to go out of her way to make the
+first overture.
+
+Some time after, when strolling around in an unwonted fashion, I was
+pleased to again encounter my friend Andrew. Evidently he had been set
+to clean out the fowl-houses, for a wheelbarrow half full of manure
+stood at the door of a wire-netted shed, and in the middle of this
+task he had sought diversion by shooting rats from among the straw in
+a big old barn, where a great heap of unused hay made them a harbour.
+In this warm valley, carpeted in the irrepressible couch-grass, there
+was no lack of fodder that season, and even the lanes and byways would
+have served as fattening paddocks. Andrew leant upon his gun, and
+having delivered himself of certain statistics in rat mortality, and
+exhibiting some specimens by the tail, he began a conversation.
+
+"Say, what did you think of Miss Thing-amebob, Miss Flipp I mean?"
+
+"I didn't bother thinking anything at all about her."
+
+Andrew looked interrogatively at me and broke into a grin.
+
+"Well, I reckon she's the silliest goat I ever came across. She came
+out to me and asked did I think she looked pretty, as her uncle is
+coming up to-night, and if she looks nice he'll give her a present or
+something. I reckon she'd have to look not such a mad-headed rabbit
+before I'd give her anything but some advice to bag her head. And he
+must be a different uncle to Uncle Jake; I reckon he wouldn't give you
+nothing if you had on two heads at once. Here's Larry Witcom coming
+back from his rounds, and he promised me a bit of meat for Whiskey!
+Here, Whiskey! Whiskey!" he roared, and a small canine pet that had
+been hunting rats desisted from the fray and ran with his master. I
+also walked with him--this without exception, even in slum scenes on
+the stage, being the dirtiest escort I ever had had. His face was
+grimed, his shirt like an engine-rag, and his trousers dusty, while
+from a hole in the seat thereof fluttered a flag of garment--such an
+ingratiatingly wholesome blunderbuss of a boy!
+
+"Here, you Larry," he yelled, "you promised me! Come on, Whiskey! Why,
+ain't he a bosker!" he enthusiastically exclaimed, as the hideously
+unprepossessing little mongrel stood on his hind legs and yelped in
+excited begging.
+
+"Hullo, Andrew! Don't bust! Who's that you had with you?--(I had
+turned a corner)--a new boarder, I suppose? Rather an old piece!"
+
+"Yes," said Andrew. "Her hair is a little white, but she ain't sour
+and stuck up."
+
+"A chance for you to hang your hat up, Jake," said Larry.
+
+"No, thanks! I'm cautious of them old maids. If you say a pleasant
+word to 'em they can't be shook off, and might have you up for breach
+of promise like with Tom Dunstan."
+
+"I suppose there is a danger, you being so fascinating," chuckled the
+butcher as I went inside, with a premonition that should it come to
+taking sides in the Clay household, if avoidable I would not be on
+Uncle Jake's.
+
+"Who is Uncle Jake?" said Carry in response to my inquiry, as she
+prepared four o'clock tea; "he's Uncle Jake, that's what he is, and
+enough for me too, that he is. The old swab wants hanging up by the
+beard."
+
+"Yes, but what place does he hold in the house?"
+
+"Place! that of walking round poking his nose in everywhere and
+growling about things that don't concern him. Mrs Clay keeps
+him--gives him fifteen shillings a-week--because he's her brother, and
+you'd think he owned everything. If you want to know what he is, he's
+a terribly bad example to Andrew. _He's_ the greatest clumsy,
+lumbering, dirty lump (oh, you should see his clothes, what they are
+like to wash, and the only way to keep him clean would be to stuff him
+in a glass case!), but for all that he's a very fair kid. You can't
+expect much of boys, you know, and have to be thankful for any good
+points at all. O Lord!" she here exclaimed, looking out a window,
+where along a path through the orchard she descried approaching a fine
+buxom dame in a fashionably cut dress, "here's Mrs Bray in full sail.
+I suppose she saw the 'busman leaving you here to-day, and her
+curiosity couldn't stand any longer without coming on a tour of
+inspection."
+
+"Who is Mrs Bray?"
+
+"She won't let you overlook who she is, and what she owns, and what
+she '_done_,' you'll soon hear it. She's the most inquisitive
+blow-hard I ever came across."
+
+Dawn now appeared and invited me to afternoon tea, which was a
+friendly and hospitable meal spread on a big table on a back verandah,
+so enclosed by creepers and pot-plants and little awnings leading in
+various directions as to be in reality more of a vestibule. Mrs Bray
+hove into near view and took up a seat beside a bank of lovely
+maiden-hair fern.
+
+"How are you living?" she asked Grandma Clay as she complacently shook
+hands. "Nice cool weather now and not so many beastly mosquitoes."
+
+"By Jove! Did you know about the 'skeeters' here?" inquired Andrew of
+me. "They're big enough to ride bikes and weigh a pound. You wait till
+you hear 'em singing Sankey's hymns to-night."
+
+"If I were you I'd hold my tongue and not draw attention to my
+dirtiness," said Dawn. "It's a wonder a garden doesn't sprout upon
+you."
+
+I was then introduced to Mrs Bray, who acknowledged me genially, and
+seemed so flourishing, and was so complacent regarding the fact, that
+it did one good to look at her.
+
+After addressing a few remarks to me she had to move, for the trimming
+of her hat caught in the cage of a parakeet, and she took another seat
+in the shelter of a tree-fern near Uncle Jake.
+
+"You have some lovely pet birds," I remarked by way of making myself
+agreeable to Grandma Clay.
+
+"The infernal old nuisances!" she said irascibly, "I wish they'd die.
+Andrew calls them his, but they'd starve only for me. I'm always
+saying I'll have no more pets, and still they're brought here. Some
+day when he has a home of his own and people plague him, he'll know
+what it is."
+
+On the other side of the verandah above Uncle Jake stretched a passion
+vine, where a thick row of belated fruit hung like pretty pale-green
+eggs, and evil entering Andrew's mind, he remarked to me--
+
+"Wouldn't it be just bosker if one of them fell on his old nut," and
+going out he returned with a pair of orange clippers.
+
+"Where's Carry got to?" asked grandma.
+
+"I saw her out there doing a mash with Larry Witcom," said Andrew.
+
+"Now, do you think there'll be anything in that?" interestedly asked
+Mrs Bray. "I suppose she'd be glad to ketch anything for a home of her
+own."
+
+"Well, it's to be hoped the home she'd catch with him would be better
+than some of the meat we've caught from him lately--it was as tough as
+old boots," put in Dawn.
+
+At this point Andrew succeeded in disturbing Uncle Jake--succeeded
+beyond expectation. Uncle Jake had just sucked his fuzzy 'possum-grey
+moustache in the noisy manner peculiar to him, and was raising his tea
+again, when he was struck by the passion fruit, causing him to let
+fall the cup.
+
+"Just like you! On the clean boards! Carry will be pleased. I'm glad
+it's not my week in the house," said Dawn. What Uncle Jake said is
+unfit for insertion in a record so respectable as this is intended to
+be, and grandma seemed to grow too agitated for verbal utterance, but
+her facial expression was very fiery indeed as Andrew and Uncle Jake
+withdrew and settled their little score in a manner unknown to the
+company.
+
+"Well, it's an ill wind that don't blow nobody no good, and though
+there's a cup broke, it's got us rid of the men, and there's never no
+talking in comfort where they are," remarked Mrs Bray, who had a
+facility for constructing sentences containing several negatives. Two,
+we learn in syntax, have the effect of an affirmative, but there being
+no reference to a repletion, only that her utterances were
+unmistakably plain, Mrs Bray might have reduced one to wondering the
+purport of her remarks.
+
+"Did you hear the latest?" she said, laughing boisterously. "You don't
+know the people yet," she continued, turning to me, "half of 'em want
+scalding."
+
+Here she burst into a full flood of gossip regarding the misconduct of
+the leading residents; but honest and straightforward though her
+communications were, I cannot include them here, for this is a story
+for respectable folk, and a transcript of the straight talk of the
+most respectable folk would be altogether out of the question. I must
+confine myself to the statement that Mrs Bray had found few beyond
+reproach, and "the latest," as she termed it, concerned one Dr Tinker,
+whose wife--known colloquially as the old Tinkeress--had recently
+administered a public horsewhipping to a young lady whom the doctor
+had too ardently admired. Mrs Bray had only just unearthed the facts
+that day, and was overwhelmingly interested in them.
+
+"I tell you what ought to be done with some people," said grandma when
+Mrs Bray halted for breath. "There's no respectability like there used
+to be in my young days. In Gool-gool--that's where I was rared--the
+people used to take up anythink that wasn't straight. There was a
+woman there. She and her husband lived happy and respectable, with no
+notion of anythink wrong, till a feller--a blessed feller," grandma
+waxed fierce, "that was only sellin' things and making a living out of
+honest folk, come to town an' turned her head. I won't say but he was
+a fine-lookin' man, had a grand flowin' beard," grandma spread her
+hands out on her chest.
+
+"Must have been lovely with a _beard_, especially if it was like Uncle
+Jake's!" interposed Dawn.
+
+"How dare you, miss! Beards is a natural adornment gave to man by God,
+and it's a unnatural notion to carve them off--"
+
+"Some of them do want adorning, I'll admit," said Dawn.
+
+"He was a good-lookin' man," persisted grandma.
+
+"Must have been with a _beard_!" scornfully contended the
+irrepressible Dawn.
+
+"She must be smitten on some of these clean-faced articles," said Mrs
+Bray with a laugh, which effected the collapse of Dawn.
+
+"Hold your tongue, miss! surely I can speak in me own house!"
+continued grandma. "And he could sing and play, and that sort of
+thing. At any rate, this woman was terribly gone on him, and her
+husband was heart-broke, and they always lived so happy till then that
+the people of the town took it up. They went to the sergeant and told
+him what they was goin' to do, and he was in such sympathy with 'em
+that he got business that took him to the other end of the town for
+that night."
+
+"That'll tell you now!" exclaimed Mrs Bray with interest.
+
+"And they went and collared him," proceeded the narrator.
+
+"That'll tell you now, the faggot!" exclaimed Mrs Bray again.
+
+"So they took him and put him on a horse, naked except his trousers,
+about twenty of 'em did it, and rode on either side with tar-pots; and
+every time he'd turn his head any way to jaw about what he'd do,
+they'd swab him in the mouth with it; and they had bags of feathers,
+and nearly smothered him with 'em, till with the black tar stickin'
+on every way, and all in his great beard, he would be mistook for
+Nebuchadnezzar. When they got him out of the town he was let go, an'
+they said if he showed hisself in it again worse than that would
+happen him. That's what the men of my day did with a bad egg,"
+concluded the old lady, firm in the belief of the superior virtue of
+her generation.
+
+"What price beards in a case like that?" came from Dawn.
+
+"That clean-faced feller of yours would have the advantage then," said
+Mrs Bray. "And now I'll tell you the point of that story. It was just
+the men stickin' up for themselves. If that had been a woman harmed by
+her husband going away with some barmaid, or other of them hussies men
+are so fond of, there wouldn't have been nothing done to avenge _her_.
+_Her_ heart could have broke, and if she said anything about it people
+would have sat on her, but when one of the poor darling men is hurt
+it's a different thing."
+
+Mrs Bray had yet more to tell, and after another hearty laugh divulged
+a secret that should have pleased a Government lately reduced to
+appointing a commission to inquire into a falling birth-rate.
+
+"This," said grandma in explanation, "is a girl who used to be
+milliner in Trashe's store in Noonoon--one of them give-herself-airs
+things, like all these county-jumpin' fools! W'en you go to buy a
+thing off of them they look as if you wasn't fit to tie their
+shoe-laces, and they ain't got a stitch to their back, only a few
+pence a-week from eternal standin' on their feet, till they're all
+give way, and only fit for the hospital. I won't say but this one was
+a sprightly enough young body and carried her head high. And there
+was a feller came to town, was stayin' there at Jimmeny's pub. for a
+time, an' walkin' round as if Noonoon wasn't a big enough place for
+the likes of him to own. He talked mighty big about meat export trade,
+an' that was the end of his glory. He married this girl that was
+trimmin' hats, an' she thought she was doin' a stroke to ketch such a
+bug, an' now she lives in that little place built bang on the road as
+you go into town. Larry says he often takes her some meat, he's afraid
+she'll starve; an' you know, though he'll take you down in some ways,
+he's terrible good-natured in others, and that is the way with most of
+us; we have our good an' bad points. But the poor thing! is that what
+she has come to? I ain't had a family of me own not to be able to
+sympathise with her."
+
+"Well, she don't deserve no sympathy, she upholds him in his pride,"
+said Mrs Bray.
+
+"Pride! His pride," snorted grandma, "it's of the skunk order. He'd
+make use of every one because he thinks he's an English swell, and
+then wouldn't speak to them if he met them out no more than they were
+dogs. I don't think there's a single thing he could do to save his
+life. If there's a bit of wood to be chopped, she's got to do it, an'
+yet he'd think a decent honest workin' man, who was able to keep his
+wife and family comfortable, wasn't made of as good flesh and blood as
+him. That ain't what I call pride."
+
+"There's one thing, if I ever fell in love with a man he'd have to be
+a man and not a crawler," said Dawn. "Some girls think if they get a
+bit of a swell he's something; but I wouldn't care if a man were the
+Prince of Wales and Lord Muck in one, if he couldn't do things without
+muddling, I'd throw water on him."
+
+"What about young Eweword, are you goin' to throw water on _him_?"
+laughed Mrs Bray.
+
+"Ask Carry, she knows more about him than I do."
+
+"Dawn finds it handy to put her lovers on to me," said Carry, who was
+washing away the spilt tea and airing some uncomplimentary opinions of
+Andrew and Uncle Jake between whiles.
+
+"Why don't you come and see me, Carry?" continued Mrs Bray.
+
+"I can't be bothered, I've got my living to earn and have no time for
+visiting," said that uncompromising young woman.
+
+"Anything new on here, Dawn?" asked Mrs Bray, turning to her.
+
+"No, only Miss Flipp's uncle is coming up by this afternoon's train
+and we're dying to see him, there's been so much blow about him.
+Andrew is going to get out a tub to hold the tips."
+
+"Well, I'll be going now to get Bray his tea or there'll be a jawin'
+and sulkin' match between us. That's the way with men,--if you're not
+always buckin' around gammoning you think 'em somebody, they get like
+a bear with a scalded head. Well, come over and see me some day," she
+said hospitably to me. "Walk along a bit with me now and see the way."
+
+To this I agreed, and going to get a parasol heard the incautious
+woman remark behind me--
+
+"Seems to be an old maid--a gaunt-lookin' old party--ain't got no
+complexion. I wonder was she ever going to be married. Don't look as
+if many would be breakin' their necks after her, does she?"
+
+Mrs Bray posed as a champion of her sex, but could not open her mouth
+without belittling them. However, I was too well seasoned in human
+nature to be disconcerted, and walked by her side enjoying her
+immensely, she was so delightfully, transparently patronising. There
+are many grades of patronage: that from people who ought to know
+better, and which is always bitterly resented by any one of spirit;
+while that of the big splodging ignoramus who doesn't know any better,
+to any one possessed of a sense of humour, is indescribably amusing.
+Mrs Bray's was of this order, and would have been galling only to the
+snob whose chief characteristic is a lack of common-sense--lack of
+common-sense being synonymous with snobbery.
+
+"You'll get on very well with old grandma," she remarked, "she ain't
+such a bad old sort when you know her; she must have a bit of property
+too. Of course, I find her a bit narrer-minded, but that's to be
+expected, seeing I've lived a lot in the city before I come here, and
+she's only been up the country; but that Carry's the caution. The
+hussy! I only asked her over out of kindness, being a woman with a
+good home as I have, and did you hear her? Them hussies without homes
+ain't got no call to give themselves airs,--bits of things workin' for
+their livin'."
+
+"I'm afraid I'm in the same category, as I have no home," I said by
+way of turning her wrath.
+
+"Oh, well, yes, but you're different; you don't have to _work_ for
+your livin'."
+
+"Have you any daughters?" I asked.
+
+"I had one, but she soon married. Like me, she was snapped up soon as
+she was old enough." Mrs Bray laughed delightedly.
+
+Here was a broad-minded democrat who considered a woman lowered in
+becoming a useful working member of society, instead of remaining a
+toy or luxury kept by her father or some other man, and who, while
+loudly bawling for the emancipation of women from the yoke of men,
+nevertheless considered the only distinction a woman could achieve was
+through their favourable notice--an attitude of mind produced by moral
+and social codes so effectively calculated to foster immoral and
+untenable inconsistency!
+
+
+
+
+THREE.
+
+BECOMING ACQUAINTED WITH GRANDMA CLAY.
+
+
+When I returned the 'busman was driving away after having brought Miss
+Flipp's uncle, and Andrew was assisting to fill a spring-cart with
+pumpkins. This vehicle had arrived under guidance of a tall, fair
+young man with perfect teeth and a pleasant smile, which kept them
+well before the public, seeing they were not concealed by any hirsute
+ambuscade, regarding the adorning qualities of which Dawn and her
+grandmother were divided. The former came out to inform Andrew that
+the pony had to be harnessed, as Mrs Clay had promised Miss Flipp she
+could drive her uncle back to catch the train.
+
+"I hope the old thing won't smash up the sulky," said Andrew. "He's
+the old bloke that come down here in the summer in a check suit, an' I
+told him you was all out an' we was full up."
+
+"A few of him would soon fill up. He! he! ha! ha!" laughed the fair
+young man. "He looks as if he were always full up! He! he! ha! ha!
+ha!"
+
+"Well, he's the purplest plum I ever saw," said Dawn. "He's a complete
+hog. He has one of these old noses, all blue, like the big plums that
+grew down near the pig-sty. I think he was grown near the pig-sty,
+too, by the style of him. It must have taken a good many cases of the
+best wine to get a nose just to that colour. Like a meerschaum pipe,
+it takes a power of colouring to get 'em to the right tinge. And his
+eyes hang out like this," said the girl, audaciously stretching her
+pretty long-lashed lids in a way that would have been horrible on a
+less beautiful or less successfully saucy girl, but which in this case
+was irresistibly amusing. The fair young man was convulsed.
+
+"His figure is like as if he had swallowed our great washing-copper
+whole and then padded round it with hay bags, and he has a great
+vulgar stand with one foot here and the other over there by the
+wheelbarrow."
+
+"He must be a acrobat or be made of wonderful elastic, if he could
+stretch that far!" remarked Andrew.
+
+"Yes, and he gets up a gold-rimmed eyeglass and sticks it on his old
+eye like this, and so I up with my finger and thumb this way in a ring
+and looked at him," said Dawn, with a moue and the protrusion of a
+healthy pink tongue which for dare-devil impertinence beat anything I
+had seen off the stage, and I succumbed to laughter in chorus with the
+young man.
+
+By some intangible indications Andrew and I felt impelled to leave, he
+proceeding to harness the horse and I accompanying him.
+
+"Just look here, 'Giddy-giddy Gout with his shirt-tail out,'"
+exclaimed the lad, breaking into one of the poetic quotations of which
+he was rarely guilty. "Now, I didn't know me pants was tore. I must
+have looked a goat!"
+
+I offered to put a stitch in the breach, so he brought needle and
+thread.
+
+"Now don't you sew me on to me pants. Dawn done that once, thought it
+was a great lark, an' I jolly well couldn't get out; so I busted up
+the whole show, and grandma joined in the huspy-puspy, and there's
+been no more larks like that. Thanks, I must do a get and put the pony
+in. Did you notice that bloke fillin' up the cart with pumpkins? He's
+gone on Dawn!"
+
+"He shows good taste."
+
+"Do you reckon Dawn's fit to knock 'em in the eye?"
+
+"Rather!"
+
+"That's bein' a stranger! When you are used to a person every day an'
+they belong to you, you don't think so much of 'em, and at the same
+time think more, if you can understand. What I mean is this. When I'm
+busy fightin' with Dawn, and she's blowing me up for not doing things
+and tellin' grandma on me, I can't see what the blokes can see in her;
+but then if I caught any one saying she wasn't good for anything, if
+he was a bloke I felt fit to wallop, I'd give him a nice sollicker
+under the ear, an' I wouldn't bother about any other girl. Do you
+see?"
+
+"Yes; I'll hold up the shafts for you."
+
+"Thanks. Well, that's 'Dora' Eweword that's doin' a kill with Dawn
+now."
+
+"Dora is a funny name for a man."
+
+"It ain't his name. He's called it for a lark because he was after a
+girl up in town named Dora Cowper. She serves in a hay and corn store
+at the corner. Things were gettin' on pretty strong, and he used to be
+taking her out all hours of the night and day. Some reckon she's
+better-lookin' than Dawn, and her mother put it around that Eweword
+would make a brilliant match for her, and that shooed him off at once.
+I reckon if I was a girl and wanted to ketch a man I'd hold me mag
+about it, as I know two or three now has been turned off the same
+way."
+
+"Perhaps Dora Cowper didn't lose much."
+
+"Well, he has a bosker farm, you see. He keeps a power of pigs and
+fattens 'em. Then he went after one or two more girls, and now he
+comes here. Buying these pumpkins is only a dodge to get a chip in
+with Dawn. He has plenty lucerne for his pigs, but we have so many
+pumpkins rotting we are glad to get rid of them at two bob a load, and
+I suppose that is cheap to get a yarn with Dawn. He ain't preposed to
+Dawn yet, but I'm sure he's goin' to, because I asked him if he was
+goin' to marry Dora Cowper, an' he said no. Dawn is only pullin' his
+leg for him--she's got all the blokes on a string. You should see her
+with those that comes up in the summer. It's worth bein' alive in the
+summer. We had melons here in millions. We used to open a big Dixie or
+Cuban Queen and just only claw out the middle. We used to fill the
+water-cask with 'em to cool, an' every time Dawn came out to dive in
+her dipper, wouldn't she rouse! Me an' Uncle Jake used to race to see
+who could eat the most, but he beat. He's a sollicker to stuff when he
+gets anything he likes. It's a wonder we didn't bust. The oranges will
+soon be ripe, that's good luck: I can eat eighty a-day easy. Here
+comes old Bolliver!"
+
+A huge figure as described by Dawn came out of the house in company
+with Miss Flipp, and I recognised Mr Pornsch, the heavy swell who had
+travelled in the 'bus with me on the day of my first arrival in
+Noonoon.
+
+With repulsive clumsiness he climbed into the vehicle, and then said
+roughly, almost brutally, to his niece--
+
+"Get in! get in!" and scarcely gave her time to be seated ere he hit
+the pony and nearly screwed its jaw off getting out of the yard.
+
+"Cock-a-doodle-do! Ain't it nice to have a sweet temper," loudly
+remarked Andrew, as he stood aside. "He just is a purple plum. He's
+the kind of old cove I'd like to get real narked and then scoot.
+Wouldn't he splutter and think himself Lord Muck, and that every one
+oughter be licking his boots!"
+
+Dawn and "Dora" Eweword were still hanging over a garden fence as
+Andrew went after his cows and I betook myself to the house. Uncle
+Jake was in conference with his sister, and gave evidence of fearing I
+should pursue him, so I mercifully betook myself to my own apartment.
+Miss Flipp presently returned, and saying she had had tea up town with
+her uncle and would not want any more, shut herself in her room, from
+whence I soon detected the sound of impassioned sobbing. My first
+impulse was to ask her what was the matter, but my second, born of a
+wide experience of grief, led me to hold my tongue and tell no one
+what I had heard; but to escape from the sound of that pitiable
+weeping I went out in the garden, where I was joined by Mrs Clay.
+
+"Did you see that young feller out there this afternoon? Fine stamp of
+a young man, don't you think?" remarked she.
+
+"He should be able for a good day's work."
+
+"Yes; he's none of your tobacco-spitting, wizened-up little runts like
+you'll see hangin' on to the corner-posts in Noonoon."
+
+"Seems to admire your granddaughter?"
+
+"An' he's not the first by a long way that has done that, though she
+was only nineteen this month."
+
+"I can quite believe it. She is a lovely girl."
+
+"An' more than that, a good one. I've never had one moment's
+uneasiness with Dawn; she took after me that way. I could let her go
+out in the world anywhere with no fear of her goin' astray. She's got
+a fine way with men, friendly and full of life, but let 'em attempt to
+come an inch farther than she wants, and then see! Sometimes I'm
+inclined to wish she's be a little more genteeler; but then I look
+around an' see some of them sleek things, an' it's always them as are
+no good, an' I'm glad then she's what she is. There's some girls here
+in town,"--the old lady grew choleric,--"you'd think butter wouldn't
+melt in their mouths, an' they try to sit on Dawn. It's because
+they're jealous of her, that's what it is. I wouldn't own 'em! They'd
+run a man into debt and be a curse to him; but there's Dawn, the man
+that gets her, he'll have a woman that will be of use to him and not
+just a ornament."
+
+"He'll have an ornament too."
+
+"Perhaps so. I've spent a lot of money on her education. She's been
+taught painting and dancing. I had her down at the Ladies' College in
+Sydney for two years finishing, an' she's had more chances of being a
+lady than most. Some of these things in town here turn up their noses
+at her an' say, 'She's only old Mrs Clay's granddaughter, who keeps a
+accommodation house,' but I pay me bills and ain't ashamed to walk up
+town an' look 'em all in the face."
+
+"But it's generally those who owe the most who have the most lordly
+mien."
+
+"You're right. I could point you out some of them up town as hasn't a
+shirt to their back, an' they look as they owned everythink--the
+brazenest things!" The old dame's indignation waxed startling in its
+intensity.
+
+"But I was going to tell you about young Eweword. I've set me heart on
+him for Dawn. He's somethink worth lookin' at an' worth havin' too. He
+knows how to farm and make it pay, an' owns one of the best pieces of
+land about Noonoon--all his own. Dawn don't seem to take to him as
+she ought. He was after a girl here in town, a Dora Cowper, an' so she
+says she ain't goin' to take any leavin's; but he ain't any leavin's,
+she can be sure of that, for if he'd wanted Dora Cowper they'd have
+snapped him up, an' I think as long as a young feller don't go making
+too much of a fool of a girl, a little flirtation's only natural. This
+has been the mischief with Dawn. There's a lot of people here in the
+summer from the city, and they're all taken with her, and for
+everlasting telling her she's wasting her talents here, that she ought
+to be on the stage. It's a wonder people can't mind their own
+concerns!" (The old dame grew choleric again.) "It makes her think
+what I can give her ain't good enough. It's all very fine in a good
+comfortable home of her own, with love and protection around her, to
+think people mean that sort of thing, an' that w'en she walked out in
+the world they would be anxious to worship her. Just let her go out
+an' try, an' she'd find it all moonshine; but w'en I tell her, she
+only thinks I'm a old pig, an' only she's that stubborn I know she'd
+never come back. (I would be the same myself w'en young, so can't
+blame her.) I'd let her have a taste of hardship to bring her to her
+bearin's. But while I'm alive she'll never have my consent to be a
+actress. W'en I was young they was looked upon as the lowest hussies.
+I'd like to hear what my mother would say if I had wanted to be
+one--paintin' meself up an' kickin' up me heels and showin' meself
+before men in the loudest manner!"
+
+I concluded not to divulge my profession while at Clay's, and to boot,
+I held much the same point of view.
+
+"She thinks she'd like to marry some fine feller and be a toff; an'
+she's got this danger that's always the drawback of a girl bein'
+pretty, so many fellers come after them at the start they get finnicky
+an' think they can marry any one, an' leave it too late, an' in the
+end they marry some rubbishing feller an' don't came out half so well
+as the plain ones that was content with a fair thing w'en they had the
+chance of it. Just the same with a boy; it's a bad thing for them to
+be able to do everythink, they are so terribly smart they end up by
+doin' nothink, an' the ploddin' feller they grinned at for bein' a
+booby, because he stuck to the one thing, comes out on top."
+
+"Just so; want of concentration plucks one every time."
+
+"That's wot I want to save Dawn from. It's all right while I live, an'
+I don't want her to be chuckin' herself at the head of any Tom or
+Dick, but I won't live for ever, an' marriage is like everythink else,
+you want to have your eye on a good thing an' not humbug too much.
+W'en I'm gone"--the austere old face softened--"I wouldn't like to
+think of her I've spent so much money on, an' rared with me own hand,
+as I did her an' her mother before her, growin' old an' sour an'
+lonely, or bein' a slave to some worthless crawler." The old voice
+grew perilously soft, and saved itself from a break by a swift
+crescendo.
+
+"As I say, I suppose she's waitin' for some great impossible feller to
+come along, like we do w'en we're young; but these upper ten is the
+worst matches a girl can make, an' besides there's too many trying to
+ketch them in their own rank. I've had lots of 'em here, an' to see
+these swell girls the way they try to ketch some one would make you
+ill. Don't you think so?"
+
+"Well, my sympathies are always with the swell girl in the matrimonial
+market," I replied. "She has a far harder time than those of the
+working classes. You see, so many of the well-to-do eligibles prefer
+working girls--actresses, chorus-singers, and barmaids, which, in
+addition to marriage in their own class, gives these girls a chance of
+stepping up; whereas the swell girls cannot marry grooms and footmen
+and raise them to their rank as their brothers can their housemaids
+and ballet-girls. To be a success the society girl must marry a man of
+sufficient means to keep her as an expensive toy, and this description
+of bachelor being scarce in any case, little wonder she has to hunt
+hard and tries to protect her preserves from poachers. Think of it
+that way."
+
+"There is a lot in that, and that's why I like to see Dawn have young
+Eweword, who's a man I'd be happy to leave her to; but I daren't say a
+word, she's mighty touchy an' would flash up that she'd leave if I
+want to get rid of her. But while I've got breath in me body there's
+one thing I will set me foot on, an' that's these good-for-nothing
+skunks like bankers' sons an' them sort of high an' mighty pauper
+nobodies; they're fearful matches for any one. I know too much about
+the swells an' the old families of the colony, I'm thankful I ain't
+one of them. My father came out here a long time ago, an' I was born
+out here. He was a sergeant in the police. I am near seventy-six, an'
+can remember plain for seventy years back in the days w'en there was
+plenty convicts, an' me father, seein' his position, was put to see
+the floggin' of them. Me and another little girl that's dead now used
+to climb up a tree an' look over the wall like children would. We was
+stationed in Goulburn then, an' I'll never forget the scenes to me
+dyin' day. The men used to be stripped to the waist and tied on a
+triangle and walloped till they was cut to pieces, till they screamed
+like little children for mercy, and poor old wretches that had roamed
+the world for sixty years used to screech Mother! Mother! like little
+children. It was heart-renderin'! An' what used they be flogged for,
+do you think?--for the piggishness of the swells mostly. I'll tell
+you. There was a old feller lived out at Kaligiwa--that's more than
+twenty miles the other side of Goulburn, an' there's Parry's Lagoon
+there called after him till this day. He was a old Lord Muck if ever
+there was one, an' by reason of that got a land grant an' men
+assigned, an' he ought to have been give to them to kick--would have
+been the right thing; an' then he had a lot of skunks of sons,--took
+after their father, of course, an' hadn't much chance of bein'
+anythink else,--an' w'en they used to ride to town they used to have a
+man tied to the stirrup just to hold it."
+
+"What was that for?"
+
+"What was it for?" she raged. "It was because they was those skunks of
+swells that think other people is only made as floor wipes for 'em!
+An' this feller used to have to run all the way to town, and if he
+hadn't strength to run all the way he'd be dragged, an' if he give any
+lip the Parrys 'u'd report 'em; an' me father says he's often seen 'em
+flogged till their backs were like ploughed, an' then have to run the
+twenty miles home. Me father used to come in every day and fling
+hisself down an' cry and sob as if his heart would break, an' say he'd
+rather starve than stay in the police. Now, the Parrys got up an' one
+of them had a 'Sir' sent out to his name, and you'll see 'em writ
+about as one of the few _old_ families; and I hold that Dawn come from
+better stock than them, and has more to be proud of in her
+grandfather--he had some heart in him. An' Lord! there's Miss Flipp's
+uncle, one look at him ought to be sufficient warnin' to any girl.
+The likes of him is common among the swells--too much stuffin' an'
+drinkin' an' debochary. Nice thing if Dawn married a swell an' he
+developed into a old pig like that. I can tell you another great
+family of swells, the Goburnes--entertained the Royalties w'en they
+was out here, an' are such bugs one of 'em married the Governor's
+daughter. They got up about the same way. In the old days w'en things
+were carelesser an' land wasn't much, the old cock of all had the
+surveyor that was gone on his daughter measurin' the land, an' got him
+to slice in great pieces by false measurement, an' worked the lives
+out of convicts--as big a brute as the Parrys. That's the breed of the
+swells, an' I have a horror of them. The people as I consider ought to
+be the swells in this country is them that came out first, the free
+emigrants, and honestly worked up the colony with their own hands, an'
+their children done the same for four or five generations--them's the
+only proper Australian aristocracy we've got. That's why I have sich a
+contempt for this Rooney-Molyneux, Mrs Bray was tellin' of; only times
+is different he'd be the same, he's got the sort of pride that thinks
+his wife is a black gin because she was only a milliner."
+
+Out past the placard advertising Mrs Clay's boats gleamed the
+highroad, and from where we walked could be seen a now unused old
+stone milepeg, carved in Roman lettering, its legend differing
+somewhat from that in modern figures painted on the miniature wooden
+post by which it had been deposed. It was one of many relics of the
+dead and gone convicts who had done giant pioneer labour in this broad
+bright land in the days when Grandma Clay's mother had been young.
+Fine old grandma, daughter of a fine old dad who had wept for the
+cruelty endured by the men who had worked in chain-gangs and were
+flogged under his superintendence, and thinking thus I turned to the
+old dame who had ceased talking and said--
+
+"And what of your father, did he get away from seeing the convicts
+flogged?"
+
+"Yes; me mother thought he was goin' mad. He used to sob in his sleep
+an' call out and squirm that he couldn't bear to see them flogged, an'
+leap up in bed in a sweat. So he gave up the police an' we went a long
+way farther back to Gool-Gool on the Yarrangung, a tributary of the
+Murrumbidgee. The train in them days was only a little way out of
+Sydney, an' me father got a job of drivin' Cobb & Co.'s coaches from
+Gool-Gool to Yarrandogi, an' me an' me mother an' sisters an' Jake
+there used to live in a little tent at the first stage out of
+Gool-Gool, an' take care of the horses. I was fond of them horses, and
+used to sneak out to harness them on to the swingle-bar w'en I was no
+higher than the table. It's a wonder I didn't get me brains knocked
+out. I was lots smarter than Jake there with the horses, though it
+ain't supposed to be girl's work. But it came nacheral to me, an' I
+think in that case it's right. That's why I never was one to narrer
+girls down an' say you mustn't do this and that because you're a girl.
+I've always found, in spite of their talk, the best and gamest mothers
+is the ones that grew out of the tomboy girls. Well, it come that me
+father, being a steady man an' very kind and well liked, he got on
+surprisin', an' soon the tent give place to a bark hut. That's the way
+people worked up in my days, an' what they had was their own. They
+didn't want to start in mansions an' eat off of silver at the expense
+of others like in these times! After that we moved a long way down an'
+took up a position on the Murra-Murra run beside the Sydney road,
+where the coaches passed in the night; an' me mother made hot coffee
+for the passengers, an' we drove a roarin' trade, had to git girls in
+to help, an' put up a large accommodation house, and respectable
+people always made to us" (the old head went high and the eyes
+flashed) "because we was clean, temperance people, there never was no
+D.T.'s or sly grog where we had the rule. An' that's why I always like
+to have a few people in the house to this day. I'm used to their
+company like, an' feel there's nothing goin' on or doing without them.
+Well, I grew up in time. I can't say it meself, but them as knew me
+then could tell you I wasn't disfigured in any way or a cripple, an'
+had no lack of admirers. Me an' me two sisters had 'em by the score
+waitin' till we grew old enough to be married. I can tell you there
+was some smart fellers among 'em. Those were the times! Me sisters
+made what is called swell matches, an' not bein' used to bein' cooped
+up, their lives was failures. I was the only one married in me own
+circle, and my life was a pattern to the others. I was the oldest an'
+waited last, an' me mother was that disappointed in me that I had to
+run away, an' I have me reasons for fearin' Dawn is on for a swell. I
+seen me sisters' lives. I call them unwholesome marriages when girls
+marries these fellers, an' their narrer-minded people sits on her an'
+is that depraved they turn him agen her!" Mrs Clay was vehement.
+
+"When Dawn's mother grew up she was Dawn's image, an' we was keepin' a
+accommodation house too, that is Jim Clay an' me, and Dawn's mother
+was reckoned the prettiest and best girl in them parts, an' had lovers
+from far and near; but there came a feller up from Sydney to stay,
+nothin' to blow about neither, but he was dreadfully gone on me
+daughter. He seemed all right, but I was agen him--being a
+swell,--till me daughter threatened she'd run away with him if I
+didn't let her have him peaceful, an' rememberin' me own youth, I let
+her have him in spite of me misgivin's. She went home with him, an' it
+appears he was like these crawlin' fellers--couldn't do nothink, only
+what their parents give them; an' w'en they found he'd married a fine,
+good, wholesome girl, instead of one of their own style--one of the
+Parrys for instance--they cut him off with a shilling, an' poor thing
+she nearly starved, an' took to work to keep him, an' he always
+growlin' at her like the coward he was, that only for her he'd have
+been well off. A mess-alliance his people called it, but the mess
+wasn't from poor Mary's side. Well, w'en it come that she was to be a
+mother, his people took her in and told her, if you please, that if it
+was a boy they'd take it theirselves and educate it fit for their
+family, but if it was a girl they wouldn't. The poor thing, not bein'
+able for anythink an' too proud to come home, stood their insults as
+long as she could, an' at last she sneaked out at night and set off to
+walk to me. It is pitiable to think of."
+
+The poor old voice trembled.
+
+"She had more'n a hundred miles to travel an' it took her days, but
+some folk was good, an' one cold night about three hours before
+daylight she startled me by comin' into my room. I remember it like
+yesterday. 'Mother,' she says, 'I'm ill; I'm goin' to die; you won't
+let them take my child, will you?' I thought her wanderin', an' she
+was so gentle it frightened me; for we was always saucy ladies, I can
+tell you--every one of us, an' you can see Dawn is the same now. But
+that's only a way; w'en I'm ill she's as tender as anythink. It's
+grandma wouldn't this do you good, and that do you good? An' her
+little hands is very clever an' nice about my old bones w'en they
+ache. Well, her mother was took bad an' me an' her father done our
+best, an' her baby came into the world--a poor miserable little
+winjin' thing, an' its mother turnin' over said, 'What's that light,
+mother, comin' in, is it the Dawn?' an' lookin' up I see it was the
+Dawn; an' she never spoke again, but went off simple an' sudden just
+then, an' that's how Dawn come to get her name. I never thought she'd
+live to be called by it though. Little winjin' thing! I had to feed
+her on the bottle an' everythink disagreed with her. We had to keep a
+old cow especial. I remember her as clear as yesterday--a big old cow
+with a dew-lap an' a crumpled horn; we called her Ladybird because she
+was spots all over. As for _them_ getting Dawn! They had the cheek to
+write an' say if it was a boy they'd take it. They had the cheek after
+what happened--that's swells for you again! I writ them one letter in
+return that I reckon ought to last them to their dying day. I told
+them it wasn't any matter to them what _my_ child was; that they had
+_murdered_ one already, let that be sufficient for them; that they'd
+get no more unless over my dead body; an' that all I regretted was
+that the child had any of their cowardly blood in it, that it almost
+discouraged me about its rarin'. An' Dawn don't know her name, an'
+won't unless she's married. Her father married again, an' I'm glad to
+say never had another child, an' I believe hankers for Dawn, an' he
+will hanker for my part; an' I've got Dawn tootered up agen him too.
+Now you can see the blow it would be to me if she took up with a
+swell--there's no happiness marryin' out of yer own religion or class.
+Mine was what I'd call a love match now. Jim Clay _was_ a lover! I've
+seen him come in with a team of five all buckin', an' it snowin' an'
+never anythink but a laugh out of him. He'd ride miles an' miles to
+see me. The crawlers about these parts nowadays toddle about on bikes
+or sit like great-grandfathers in sulkies, an' if it was to sprinkle
+they'd think half a mile too far to go to see their sweetheart. I
+think the heart of the world must be dyin' out."
+
+"You'll tell me about Jim Clay, won't you?" I said; "for I am an
+Australian--one of those you consider entitled to be termed a real
+aristocrat. My people for several generations have practically worked
+in the building of the State, though I must admit they belonged to the
+leisured class at home."
+
+"Well, that ain't nothink agen 'em when they don't make it nothink
+agen 'em, if you understand. If a swell can prove hisself as good an'
+useful a man as another, he deserves the credit, an' comes out ahead
+too, because he has the education, an' sometimes that is useful. I'll
+tell you about me young days. Lately me mind seems to be goin' back
+more an' more to old times."
+
+"Grandma! Grandma!" called Dawn's rich young voice, "come to tea.
+Andrew and Carry want to go up town after."
+
+As I turned and looked at this glowing vision I laughed to think of
+her as a "little winjin' thing," and was grateful to the good offices
+of old Ladybird with the dew-lap and a crumpled horn.
+
+"You needn't be in such a hurry all of a suddent," said grandma
+crossly. "It's a different tune w'en _you're_ hangin' over the fence
+talkin' somewhere. There's no hurry roundin' me in to tea _then_!"
+
+We lingered awhile watching the afterglow above the great range
+dividing the coast land from the vast stretches of the interior, and
+which was no longer an impassable barrier to the people of the State.
+Now the train toiled over a stile-like way connecting east and west,
+and Noonoon and Kangaroo, divided by a mile and the river, nestled
+immediately at the foot of the zigzag climb.
+
+They lay asleep against the ranges in a slow-going world of their own,
+their little houses gleaming white in the fading light.
+
+There was a flush on the old woman's face as she turned
+houseward--also an afterglow. 'Twas a fitting nook for her present
+days, the decline of those splendidly vigorous years behind! What
+satisfaction to look back on strenuous, fruitful years, and be able to
+afford rest during the last stages!
+
+I, too, had rest; but it was only the ignominious idleness of a young
+boat with a broken propeller yarded among honourably worn-out craft to
+await a foundering.
+
+
+
+
+FOUR.
+
+DAWN'S AMBITION.
+
+
+After tea grandma took to reading the 'Noonoon Advertiser'--a
+four-sheet weekly publication containing local advertisements, weather
+remarks, and a little kindly gossip about townspeople. This was her
+usual Saturday night entertainment. Carry and Andrew went to town to
+participate in the unfailing diversion of a large percentage of the
+population. This was tramping up and down the main street in a stream
+till the business places closed, from which exercise they apparently
+derived an enjoyment not visible to my naked eye. Uncle Jake and Miss
+Flipp not being in evidence, Dawn and I were the only two unoccupied,
+and noticing that she was prettily dressed, I resorted to a point of
+common interest in promoting friendliness between members of our sex
+and invited her to look at a kimono I had bought for a dressing-gown.
+
+This had the desired effect. A look of pleasure passed over the face
+that charmed me so, and she arose willingly.
+
+"I'm glad it is my week to stay in and make the bedtime coffee," she
+said as we examined the gorgeous kimono, a garment of dark-flowered
+silk; and Dawn, having all the fetichly and long-engendered feminine
+love of self-decoration, was delighted with it.
+
+"Put it on," I suggested, and the girl complied with alacrity. She did
+not make a very natural Jap, being more on the robust than _petite_
+scale, but she was a very beautiful girl. With my impassioned love of
+beauty I could not help exclaiming about hers, and the foolish
+platitude, "You ought to be on the stage," inadvertently escaped me,
+seeing this is the highest market for beauty in these days when even
+personal emotions can be made to have commercial value.
+
+"Do you think so too?" she said eagerly, betraying what lay near her
+heart. "Do you know anything about the stage? You don't think all
+actresses bad women like grandma does, do you?"
+
+"Scarcely! Some of the most sweet and lovable women I've ever seen are
+earning their living on the boards. I'm intimately acquainted with
+several actresses, and will show you their photographs some day."
+
+"Oh, I'd love to be on the stage!" exclaimed the girl.
+
+"Tell me why and how you first came to have such a wish."
+
+"Well, it's this way," said Dawn, pulling my kimono close about her
+beautifully rounded throat and curling her pink feet on a wallaby-skin
+at the bedside as she sat down upon them. "I heard grandma telling you
+something about me this afternoon, and I suppose you think I'm a
+terrible girl."
+
+"A beautiful one," I said, revelling in the curling lips and rounded
+cheek and chin.
+
+"Don't make fun of me," said Dawn huffily, blushing like noon.
+
+"Good gracious, now _you_ are making fun of me. I'm only stating a
+patent fact. Mirrors and men must have told you a thousand times that
+you are pretty."
+
+"Oh, them! They say it to every one. Look here--there's the ugliest
+little runts of girls in Noonoon, and they're always telling their
+conquests and that this man and that man say they're pretty, when a
+blind cat could see that they are ugly, and the men must be just
+stringing them to try and take them down. So when they say it to me I
+always make up my mind I'd have more gumption than to take notice, for
+I can't see any beauty in myself. I'm too fat and strong-looking; all
+the beauties are thin and delicate-looking in the face--not a bit like
+me. I know I'm not cross-eyed or got one ear off, but that's about
+all."
+
+I had been wont to think the only place unconscious beauties abounded
+was in high-flown, unreal novels; but here was one in real life, and
+that the exceedingly unvarnished existence of Noonoon. Not that I
+would have thought any the less of her had she been conscious of her
+physical loveliness, for beauty is such a glorious, powerful,
+intoxicating gift that had I been blessed with it I'm sure I would
+have admired myself all day, and the wonder to me regarding beautiful
+men and women is not that they are so conceited, but, on the contrary,
+that they are so little vain.
+
+"I want to tell you why I want to be on the stage. I couldn't tell how
+I hate Noonoon. It's all very well for grandma to settle down now and
+want me to be the same, but when she was young (you get her to tell
+you some of the yarns, they're tip-top) she wasn't as quiet as I am by
+a long way. Just fancy marrying some galoot about here and settling
+down to wash pots and pack tomatoes and live in the dust among the
+mosquitoes, _always_! I'd rather die. I'll tell you the whole thing
+while I'm about it. You won't mind, as I'm sure you have had trouble
+too, as your white hair doesn't look to be age."
+
+Comparison of her midget irritation with those that had put broad
+white streaks in my hair was amusing, but the rosy heart of a girl
+magnifies that which it doesn't contract.
+
+"Grandma wants me to marry. Did you see that fellow who was after
+pumpkins?--he ought to make one of his head, the great thing! Grandma
+has a fancy for me having him, but I wouldn't marry him if he were the
+only man in Noonoon. Do you know, they actually call him Dora because
+he was breaking his neck after a girl of that name. He used to be
+making red-hot love to her. Young Andrew there saw him up the lane by
+Bray's with his arm round her waist, mugging her for dear life, and
+then he'd come over here and want to kiss me! If he had seen me up a
+lane hugging the baker, I wonder would he want me then!" Dawn's tone
+approached tears, for thus are sensitive maiden hearts outraged by an
+inconsistent double standard of propriety and its consequences, great
+and small.
+
+"Grandma says that's nothing if it's not worse, for that's the way of
+men, but I'd rather have some one who hadn't done it so plainly right
+under my nose; people wouldn't be able to poke it at me then. I've got
+him warded off proposing, and while I guard against that it's all
+right. Now, this is why I'd like to be on the stage. I'd love to have
+been born rich and have lovely dresses, and I'm sure I could hold
+receptions and go to balls, and the stage would be next best to
+reality."
+
+"But why not marry some one who could give you these things?"
+
+"Where would I find him? You may bet that's the sort of man I'd like
+to marry if I did marry at all," and the dullest observer could have
+seen she was heart-whole and fancy free. Certainly there would be a
+difficulty in procuring that brand of eligible. There was but a
+limited supply of him on the market, and that was generally
+confiscated to the use of imported actresses, and, could society
+journals be relied upon, it was the same in England; so Dawn showed
+good instinct in wanting to bring herself into more equal competition
+with the winners.
+
+"Can you sing?"
+
+"I've never been trained," she said, but at my request went to the
+piano in the next room and gave vent to a strong, clear mezzo. It was
+a good voice--undoubtedly so. There are many such to be heard all over
+Australia--girls singing at country concerts without instruction, or
+the ignorant instruction more injurious than helpful. These voices are
+marred to the practised ear by the style of production, which in a
+year or two leaves them cracked and awful. This widespread lack of
+voice preservation is the result of a want of public musical training.
+With all the training in Paris, Dawn would never have been a Dolores
+or Calvé, but with other ability she had sufficient voice to make a
+success in comic opera or in concerts as second fiddle to a star
+soprano.
+
+"You must sing again for me," I said, "and I'll discover whether you
+have any ability." For the way to wean any one from a desire is not by
+condemnation of it.
+
+"Don't you say anything to grandma about me and the stage or she'd
+very nearly turn you out of the house. You just ask her what she
+thinks of it some time, and it will give you an idea; but I hate
+Noonoon, and would run away, only grandma goes on so terribly about
+hussies that go to the bad, and she's very old, and you know how you
+feel that a curse might follow you when people go on that way," said
+the girl in bidding me good night.
+
+Dawn had many characteristics that made one love her, and a few in
+spite of which one bore her affection. Her method of dealing with her
+native tongue came among the latter. It was reprehensible of her too,
+seeing the money her grandmother had spent in giving her a chance to
+be a lady--that is, the type of lady who affects a blindness
+concerning the stern, plain facts of existence, and who considers that
+to speak so that she cannot be heard distinctly is an outward sign of
+innate refinement. She had made poor use of her opportunities in this
+respect, but if to be honest, healthy, and wholesome is lady-like,
+then Dawn was one of the most vigorous and thoroughly lady-like folk I
+have known, and what really constitutes a lady is a mootable point
+based largely upon the point of view.
+
+
+
+
+FIVE.
+
+MISS FLIPP'S UNCLE.
+
+
+I did not sleep that night. Dawn and her grandma had given me too much
+food for cogitation. I felt I had incurred a responsibility in regard
+to the former, upon which I chewed tough cud at the expense of sleep.
+
+While there was hard common-sense in the old grandmother's point of
+view, it was also easy to be at one with the girl's desire for
+something brighter and more stirring than old Noonoon afforded. The
+fertile valley was beautiful in all truth, but with the beauty that
+appeals only to the storm-wrecked mariner, worn with a glut of human
+strife and glad to be at anchor for a time rebuilding a jaded
+constitution.
+
+Upon a first impression this girl did not seem abnormally anxious for
+the mere plaudits or the notoriety part of the stage-struck's fever,
+nor was she alight with that fire called genius which will burn a hole
+through all obstacles till it reaches its goal; she appeared rather to
+regard the stage as a means to an end--a pleasant easy way, in the
+notion of the inexperienced, of obtaining the fine linen and silver
+spoon she desired. Had she been a boy, doubtless she would have set
+out to work for her ambition, but being a girl she sought to climb by
+the most approved and usual ladder within reach--the stage; for
+actresses all married the lovely, rich (often titled) young gentlemen
+who sat in rows in the front seats and admired the high-class "stars"
+and worshipped the ballerinas and chorus girls, or so at least a great
+many people believed, being led astray by certain columns in gossip
+newspapers, which doubtless have a colouring of truth inasmuch that
+the women of the stage are idealised creatures--idealised by
+limelight, and advertised by a pushing management for the benefit of
+the box-office.
+
+Now Dawn had ample ability and appearance for success on the stage if
+her parents had been there before her, so that she could have grown up
+in touch with it, but whether she had sufficient iron and salt to push
+her way against the barriers in her pathway I doubted. Only sheer
+genius can get to the front in any line of art with which it is not in
+touch, and even giant talent is often so mangled in the struggle that
+when it wrests recognition it is too spent to maintain the altitude it
+has attained at the expense of heart-sweat and blood.
+
+The girl worried me, and it worried me more to think that after all my
+experience I was so foolish and sentimental that I could be worried
+regarding her. She had a comfortable home, a loving guardian, youth,
+health, good appearance, and, to a certain extent, fitted her
+surroundings. There was nothing of the ethereally æsthetic about her,
+and no stretch of sickly imagination could picture her as pining to be
+understood. Notwithstanding this, there was I longing to help her so
+much that, in spite of my health and an acquaintance that was only
+twelve hours old, I was contemplating entering society for her sweet
+sake. The fact was, this little orphan girl who had taken up the life
+her mother had laid down at dawn of day nineteen years ago, had
+collected my scalp, and was at leave to string it on her belt as that
+of an ardent faithful lover who never entertained one unworthy thought
+of her, or wavered in affection from the hour she first flashed upon
+her.
+
+I desired to save her from such savage disappointment as had blighted
+my life, not that she would ever have the capacity to feel my frenzy
+of griefs, but remembering my own experience, I was ever anxious to
+save other youngsters from the possibilities of a similar fate.
+
+The best disposal to be made of Dawn was to settle her in marriage
+with some decent and well-to-do man on the sunny side of thirty; but
+where was such an one?
+
+Thus I lay awake, and heard the hours chime and the trains go roaring
+by, till all the household but Miss Flipp had returned. She entered
+from the outside, did not come in till after midnight, and was not
+alone. Her uncle accompanied her. My room had French lights opening
+into the garden in the same way as Miss Flipp's, and as my ailment was
+a heart affection it was sometimes necessary for me to go outside to
+get sufficient air, and in this instance I had the door-windows wide
+open and the bed pulled almost to the opening. Miss Flipp apparently
+had her window open too, for despite the conversation in her room
+being in subdued tones, I heard it where I lay.
+
+It contained startling disclosures anent these two persons' relations
+and characters, and when Mr Pornsch went his way with the uneven
+footsteps of the overfed and of accumulating years, he left me in a
+painful state of perturbation.
+
+What course should I pursue?
+
+Casting on a pair of slippers and a heavy cloak, I took a little path
+leading from my window through the garden to the pier where the boats
+were moored, and here I sat down to consider. Experience had taught me
+to be chary of entering matters that did not concern me, but it had
+not made me sufficiently callous to preserve my equanimity in face of
+a discovery so serious as this.
+
+Miss Flipp had sinned the sin which, if discovered, put a great gulf
+'twixt her and Grandma Clay, Dawn, Carry, and myself, but which would
+not prevent her fellow-sinner from associating with us on more than
+terms of equality. Should Grandma Clay become aware of what I knew,
+she certainly would bundle the girl out neck and crop, as she would be
+justified in doing. But the girl was in a ghastly predicament, and
+more sinned against than sinning, when one heard her grief and
+remembered the age of her betrayer, which should have made him the
+protector instead of the seducer of young women.
+
+Times out of number the dramatic critics have termed me an artist of
+the first rank, and it is this temperament which furnishes the faculty
+of regarding all shades and consequences of life's issues unabashed,
+and with the power to distil knowledge from good and bad and use it
+experimentally, rather than, as a judge, condemnatory.
+
+I determined to keep the girl's secret, and show myself
+sympathetically friendly otherwise, hoping she would extend me her
+confidence, so that in a humble way I might be privileged to stand
+between her and perdition.
+
+It was a beautiful night, one of those when the moon relinquishes her
+court to the little stars. Vehicular traffic had ceased, and the only
+sound breaking the stillness of the great frostless, silver-spangled
+darkness was the panting of the steam-engines and the murmur of the
+river where half a mile down it took a slight fall over boulders. The
+electric lights of the town twinkled in the near distance, and farther
+east was a faint glow beyond the horizon, rightly or wrongly
+attributed to the lights of the metropolis. After a time it grew
+chilly, and I was glad to return to my bed. Dawn was separated from me
+by a thin wooden partition, and her strong healthy breathing was
+plainly discernible as she lay like an opening rose in maiden slumber,
+but there was now no sound from the room of the other poor girl--a
+rose devoured by the worm in its core.
+
+Next morning, however, she appeared at breakfast, for Clay's was not a
+house wherein one felt encouraged to coddle themselves without
+exceptional reason, and to all but a suspicious or hypercritical
+observer she seemed as usual.
+
+Carry was going to church.
+
+"I haven't been able to go this three weeks because my dress wasn't
+finished, and next Sunday will be my week in the kitchen, so if I
+don't go now I won't be able to show it for a fortnight," she
+announced.
+
+"Well, I ain't going," said grandma. "Gimme back your porridge, I
+forgot to dose it"--this to Andrew, on whose oatmeal she had omitted
+to put sugar and milk. "I've always found church is a good deal of
+bother when you have any important work. I contribute to the stipend;
+that ought to be enough for 'em. If one spent all their time running
+to church they would have no money to give to it, an' I never yet see
+praying make a living for any one but the parsons."
+
+Thus, Dawn being engaged in the kitchen, and her Uncle Jake keeping
+her company there while he perused the 'Noonoon Advertiser,' which
+descended to him on Sunday morning, Andrew having gone away with Jack
+Bray, and Miss Flipp being invisible, grandma and I were left together
+to enjoy a small fire in the dining-room, so I took this opportunity
+of inquiring how Jim Clay had managed to capture her. This sort of
+thing interested me; I liked life in the actuality where there was no
+counterfeit or make-believe to offend the sense of just proportions.
+Not that I do not love books and pictures, but they have to be so very
+very good before they can in any way appease one, while the meanest
+life is absorbingly interesting, invested as it must ever be with the
+dignity of reality.
+
+
+
+
+SIX.
+
+GRANDMA CLAY'S LOVE-STORY.
+
+
+"Oh, you don't want to hear it now," she said in response to my
+request, but she gave a pleased laugh, betraying her willingness to
+tell it. "Sometimes I get running on about old times an' don't know
+where to stop, an' Dawn says people only pretend to be interested in
+me out of politeness. I think I hinted to you that mine was a love
+match--the only sort of marriage there ought to be; any other sort, in
+my mind, is only fit for pigs."
+
+"But sometimes love matches would be utterly absurd," I remarked.
+
+"Well, then, people that are utterly absurd ought to be locked up in a
+asylum. Anybody that's _fit_ to love wouldn't love a fool, because
+there must be reason in everything. _Some_ people I know would love a
+monkey, but they ain't fit to be counted with the people that keeps
+the world going. Well, I got as far as we kep' a accommodation house
+on the Sydney road,--fine road it was too, level and strong, and in
+many places flagged by the convicts, an' it stands good to this day.
+It ain't like these God-forsaken roads about here,"--grandma showed
+symptoms of convulsions,--"but _some_ people is only good for to be
+stuffed in a--a--asylum, and that's where the Noonoon Municipal
+Council ought to be, an' I say it though Jake there, me own brother,
+is one of them."
+
+"Did Jim Clay--" I said, by way of keeping to the subject.
+
+"I told you how I used to sneak out to buckle the horses on; an' w'en
+Jack Clay, a great chum of me father's, used to be driving the 'Up'
+coach, me father, w'en he'd be slack of passengers,--which wasn't
+often, there being more life and people moving in the colony
+then,--an' w'en I'd be good, would put me up on the box an' take me on
+to the next stage, an' I'd come back with Jack Clay--that was me
+husband's father.
+
+"As it used to be in the night, it usedn't to take from me time, an' I'd
+be up again next day as if I'd slep' forty hours. I wasn't like the
+girls these days, if they go to a blessed ball an' are up a few hours
+they nearly have to stay in bed a week after it. In that way I come to
+be a great hand with the reins, an' me father took a deal of pride in me
+because all the young men up that way began to talk about me. Me father
+had the best team of horses on the road. He used to always drive them
+hisself. He was always a kind man to every one and everythink about him.
+He drove three blood coachers abreast and two lighter ones, Butterfly
+and Fairy, in the lead. Weren't them days! That great coach swingin'
+round the curves and sidlings in the dark, I fancy I can feel the reins
+between me fingers now! And there was always a lot of jolly fellows, and
+usedn't they to cheer me w'en the horses 'u'd play up a bit. It was
+considered wonderful for me to manage such a team. I was only a slight
+slip of a girl, not near so fat as Dawn; she takes more after her
+grandfather. Me and me sisters had no lack of sweethearts, and we didn't
+run after them neither. Some people make me that mad the way they run
+after people and lick their boots. W'en I'd be drivin' with me father,
+Jim Clay used to be with his, but he was some years older than me. He
+wanted to enter the drivin' business soon as opportunity came, an' him
+an' me were sort of rivals like. Many of the young swells used to bring
+me necklaces and brooches, but somehow when Jim Clay only brought me a
+pocket-handkerchief or a lump of ribbon I liked it better an' kep' it
+away in a little scented box an' I was supposed to be in love with a
+good many in them days. _Some people_ always knows other's business
+better than they do theirselves. Me two sisters got married soon as they
+were eighteen--one to a thrivin' young squatter, an' the other to a rich
+old banker. Seein' how she got on is what makes me agen old men marryin'
+young girls. It ain't natural. A man might marry a girl a few years
+younger than hisself, but there must be reason in everythink. I was
+older than me sisters, an' people began to twit me an' say I'd be left
+on the shelf, but before this, w'en I was sixteen an' Jim Clay twenty,
+me father broke his leg and was put by. All his trouble was his horses;
+he fretted an' fretted that they'd be spoilt by a careless driver, an'
+he had 'em trained so they knew nothing but kindness. I was only too
+willin', and I up an' undertook to drive the coach right through. Old
+Jack Clay said he'd come with me a turn or two an' leave Jim to take his
+team, but just then he had some terrible new horses that no one could
+handle but hisself,--he was a wonderful hand with horses was Jim's
+father,--so Jim was sent with me. My, wasn't there a cheer when I first
+brought the mail in all on me own!" The old face flashed forth a
+radiance as she told her tale.
+
+"Some of the old gents in the town of Gool-Gool come out an' shook
+hands with me, an' the ladies kissed me w'en I got down off of the
+box. There was a lawyer feller considered a great lady-killer in them
+days. He had a long beard shaved in the Dundreary,--Dawn always says
+he must have been a howler with a beard of that description; but times
+change, an' these clean-faced women-lookin' fellers the girls think is
+very smart now will look just as strange by-an'-by. However, he was
+runnin' strong with me, an' me mother considered him favourable,--him
+bein' a swell an' makin' his way. Soon as ever I started runnin' the
+coach he was took with a lot of business down the road, an' used to be
+nearly always a passenger."
+
+"It appears that sweetheart tactics have not changed if the style in
+beards has," I remarked with a smile.
+
+"No, an' they'll never change, seein' a man is a man an' a girl a
+girl, no matter what fashions come an' go. I never can see why they
+make such a fuss and get so frightened because wimmen does a thing or
+two now they usedn't to. Nothing short of a earthquake can make them
+not men an' wimmen, an' that's the main thing. Well, to go back to me
+yarn, lots of other passengers got took the same way, an' there was
+great bidding for the box seat: that was a perquisite belongin' to the
+driver, an' me father used to get a sovereign for it often. I used to
+dispose of it by a sort of tender, an' £5 was nothink for it; an' once
+in the gold-rush times, w'en money was laying around like water, a big
+miner, just to show off, gave me two tenners for it. They used to be
+wantin' to drive, but I took me father's advice an' never let go the
+reins. Well, among all these fine chaps Jim Clay wasn't noticed. He
+was always a terrible quiet feller. _I_ did all the jorin'. He'd
+always say, 'Come now, Martha, there's reason in everythink,' just
+w'en I'd be mad because I couldn't see no reason in nothink. He was
+sittin' in the back of the coach, an' it was one wet night, an' only a
+few passengers for a wonder, who was glad to take refuge inside. Only
+the lawyer feller was out on the box with me, an' makin' love heavier
+than it was rainin'. I staved him off all I could, an' with him an'
+the horses me hands was full. You never see the like of the roads in
+them days. It was only in later years the Sydney road, I was
+remarkin', was made good. In them times there was no made roads, and
+you can imagine the bogs! Why, sometimes you'd think the whole coach
+was going out of sight in 'em, and chargin' round the stumps up to the
+axle was considered nothink. We had more pluck in them days! Well,
+that night the roads was that slippery the brake gave me all I could
+do, an' a new horse in the back had no more notion of hangin' in the
+breechin' than a cow; so I took no notice to the lawyer, only told him
+to hold his mag once or twice an' not be such a blitherer, but it was
+no use, he took a mean advantage off of me. You can imagine it was
+easy w'en I had five horses in a coach goin' round slippery sidlin's
+pitch dark an' rainin'. He put his arms 'round me waist an' that
+raised me blood, an' I tell you things hummed a little. You'll see
+Dawn in a tantrum one of these days, but she ain't a patch on me w'en
+me dander was up in me young days." Looking at the fine old flashing
+eyes and the steel in her still, it was easy to see the truth of this.
+
+"I jored him to take his hands off me or I'd pull up the coach an'
+call the inside passengers out to knock him off. He gamed me to do it,
+an' laughed an' squeezed me harder, an' the cowardly crawler actually
+made to kiss me; but I bit him on the nose and spat at him, an took
+the horses over a bad gutter round a fallen tree at the same time--an'
+some people is afraid to let their blessed daughters out in a doll's
+sulky with a tiddy little pony no bigger than a dog. If I had children
+like that I'd give 'em all the chances goin' of breaking their neck,
+as they wouldn't be worth savin' for anythink but sausage meat. Well,
+this cur still kep' on at his larks, so soon as I got the team on the
+level,--it was at Sapling Sidin', runnin' into Ti-tree creek; I could
+hear the creek gurgling above the sound of the rain, and the white
+froth on the water I can see it plain now,--I pulled sudden and said
+'Woa!' an' it was beautiful the way they'd stop dead. The passengers
+all suspected there must be a accident, or the bushrangers must have
+bailed us up, for they was around in full blast in them days. Well,
+w'en I pulled up I got nervous an' ashamed, an' bust out crying, an'
+the passengers didn't know what to make of it; but Jim Clay, it
+appears, had his eye an' ear cocked all the time, an' before any one
+knew what had happened he had the lawyer feller welted off of the
+coach an' was goin' into him right an' left. That's what give me a
+feelin' to Jim Clay all of a sudden, like I never had to no one else
+before or since. He was always such a terrible quiet feller that no
+one seemed to notice, an' he'd never made love to me before, but he
+got besides hisself then and shouts, 'If ever you touch my girl again
+I'll hammer you to smithereens.' Then he got back on the box an' wiped
+me eyes on his handkerchief an' protected me. The men inside--mostly
+diggers makin' through to Victoria--w'en they got the hang of things
+bust out roarin' an' cheerin', an' said, 'Leave the dawg on the road
+an' giv him a stummick ache.' He tried to get up, but they pushed him
+off. He made great threats about the law, but miners is the gamest men
+alive an' loves fair play. It ain't any use in talking law to them if
+it ain't fair play, an' they give him to understand if he said
+anythink to me about it, or told any one an' didn't take his lickin'
+like a man, they'd break every bone in his body, an' they meant it
+too. Then they lerruped up the team and left him in the rain an' pitch
+dark miles from anywhere. That was the only time I give up the reins.
+I couldn't see for tears, so Jim drove; an' the men took me inside so
+he could attend to his work, they said, an' they cheered an' joked an'
+asked w'en the weddin' was comin' off, an' said they'd all come an'
+give us a rattlin' spree if we'd let 'em know. I didn't know what come
+over me; I never was much for whimperin', but I cried an' cried as if
+me heart was broke; an' it wasn't, because every time I thought of the
+way Jim Clay stuck up for me it give me the best feelin' I ever knew,
+an' the men was all on my side, an' there was no harm done, an' I
+ought to have been smilin', but I could do nothink but sob, an' I
+always think now w'en I see girls cryin' on similar occasions to let
+'em alone. Girls can't tell what's up with them, and a cry is good,
+because they ain't got the outlets that men has w'en they're worked
+up. We came to the end stage, an' w'en we got off the men all shook
+hands, an' one or two kissed me, an' pulled me curls, an' slapped Jim
+Clay on the back, an' called him my sweetheart. W'en we delivered the
+mail Jim drove me to where I stayed, an' it was terrible embarrassin'
+w'en we was left alone with no extra people to take the down off of
+the affair. Jim was painful shy, but he faced it manful; an' he said
+it didn't matter what they said about us bein' lovers, if it was
+disagreeable to me he'd never mention it nor think nothink about it,
+an' it would be forgot in a day or two, as he was a feller of no
+importance. That was the way he put it; he never was for puttin'
+hisself up half enough. So crying again I just snuggled up to him an'
+said I didn't want to forget it, I wanted to remember it more an'
+more, an' with that he took the hint an' kissed me; an' that's how we
+got engaged without no proposing or nothink. I didn't tell me mother,
+or there would have been a uproar, an' just then Jim Clay got a coach
+on the Cooma line, an' went right away. I told him I'd wait for him.
+He was away two years, an' w'en he came home we found it was still the
+same with us. I was eighteen then, an' him twenty-two.
+
+He went away to Queensland for two years more, an' in that time the
+sister next me was married, an' Jake there was comin' on; but he was
+never no good on the box--he pottered round and grew forage. Me mother
+began to suggest I ought to marry this one an' that one, but I waited
+for Jim Clay, an' w'en I was gettin' on for twenty-one, old Jack Clay
+reckoned he was gettin' too old for drivin' in all weathers, an' Jim
+come home an' took his place. A fine great feller he was, all tanned
+and brown, with his white teeth showin' among his black beard. He said
+he'd seen no girl that wasn't as tame as ditch water after me, an' as
+for me, no one else could ever give me the feelin' he could, so we
+reckoned to be publicly engaged. It raised the most terrible bobberie,
+and me mother nearly took a fit. She had me laid out for a swell like
+me sisters, an' she said I must be mad to throw myself away like that.
+Me brother-in-laws got ashamed of their wives' parents bein' in such a
+trade, an' as they had made a comfortable bit, they was goin' to give
+it best and rare a few sheep an' cattle, an' me sisters came down on
+me an' said I would disgrace them now they had rose theirselves up in
+the stirrups. Mother said she'd never give her consent, an' I told her
+very saucy I'd do without it. That's why I know it don't do to press
+Dawn over far; she must have the same fight in her, an' if drove in a
+corner there'd be no doing anythink with her. Things was very strained
+at home then; they thought to wean me of him, an' Jim Clay he hung
+back some, sayin' I'd better think twice before I threw myself away on
+him. That made me all the determinder. Jim was the only man for me. I
+never did have patience with them as can't make up their mind. So I
+waited, an' the day I was twenty-one--me two sisters was twins and
+married, one at nineteen and the other at eighteen--I gathered up a
+few things, and I had two hundred in the bank, and I went to a point
+of the road, Fern-tree Gully it was named, an' w'en Jim come down the
+hill with his horses I waved--we had it all made up--an' he stopped
+till I clambered aboard, an' the box seat was reserved for me that day
+for nothink, and at the end of the stage we was married. I stayed with
+Jim's mother for a week or two till we seen a opening, an' I kep' a
+accommodation while Jim drove a coach. Jim was always steady, an' we
+was both very popular, though I never pandered to no one, or put up
+with nothink that didn't please me. Our story was a sort of romance in
+them days, an' money was changin' hands freely, an' we was all right.
+The old folk died by-and-by; they didn't live very long, and Jake
+there come to me. He wasn't good enough for his sisters, an' somehow
+that's made us always cling together. I ain't blind, I can see he's no
+miracle; he has his faults. Who hasn't?" the old lady fiercely
+demanded. I assured her I knew none, and somewhat appeased by this she
+proceeded.
+
+"Well, as I say, Jake there ain't a wonder of smartness, but he's the
+only one belonging to the old days left to me, an' you couldn't
+understand what that means till you get to be my age. If I went to any
+one of your age, or old enough to be your mother, an' said, 'Do you
+remember this or that,' how far back could they go with me, do you
+think?"
+
+"And then did you and Jim Clay--"
+
+"Me an' Jim Clay was the happiest pair I think ever lived under a
+weddin' ring, an' it was a love match. He was quiet an' easy-goin'
+like, an' I was the one to bustle, consequently there would be times
+w'en there would be a little controversy in the house; but Jim, he'd
+always put his arm round me an' kiss me, an' that's the sort of thing
+a woman likes. She doesn't like all the love-makin' to be over in the
+courtin' days, as if it was only a bit of fishin' to ketch her. Tho'
+of course I'd tell him to leave me alone, that I couldn't bear him
+maulin' me; but women has to be that way, it bein' rared into them to
+pretend they don't like what they do. An' you see Jim always
+remembered how I had stuck to him straight, an' flung up swell matches
+for him, which must have showed I loved him. That's what gets over a
+man, he never forgets that in a girl, an' always thinks more of her
+than the one with prawperty who marries a poor girl and is always
+suspicioning she took him for what he has. Of course, there are some
+crawlers of men ain't to be pleased anyhow, but they can be left out
+of it. In givin' advice to young wives, I always tell 'em w'en they
+get sick of their husbands, which they all do at times, especially at
+the start before you get seasoned to endure them, never to let him
+suspect it, for men, in spite of all their wonderful smartness, has a
+lot of the child in 'em after all, an' can take a terrible lot of
+love. (When it comes to givin' any in return, of course that's a horse
+of another colour.) But of course this is only dealin' with a man
+that's worth anythink; as I said, there are some crawlers you could
+make a door-mat of yourself for, an' they'd dance on you an' think
+nothink of it; but as I said before, there must be reason in
+everythink to begin with. After Jim died I didn't care for livin' in
+the old place, an' thought I'd like to get somewhere near the city.
+Old people ought to have sense. They don't want to crawl round like
+Methuselah at forty, but they know w'en they git up to seventy they
+ain't goin' to live for ever, nor get any suppler in the joints, an'
+ought to make some provision to get nearer churches an' doctors an'
+all that's necessary to old people; so I sold out an' bought this
+place down here."
+
+"What family have you?"
+
+"Only Dawn's mother and Andrew's, and two sons away in America. I was
+misfortunate with me daughters; they both died young, one as I told
+you, an' the other of typhoid; and so after bein' done with me own
+family I started with others. I used to think once I'd be content to
+live till I see me little ones grown up an' settled, an' then I wanted
+to live till I see Dawn able to take care of herself, an' now I
+suppose, if I didn't take care, I'd want to be waitin' to see Dawn's
+children around me. That's the way; w'en we get along one step we want
+to go another, an' it's good some matters ain't left for us to decide.
+But it's all for Dawn and Andrew I bother now, only for them me work
+would be done; but it's good to have them, they keep me from feelin'
+like a old wore-out dress just hangin' up waitin' to be eat by the
+moths."
+
+"Grandma!" said the voice of Dawn in the doorway, "I can't get this
+beastly old stove to draw, and I'm blest if I can cook the dinner. I
+never saw such a place, one has to work under such terrible
+difficulties. It's something fearful." Her voice was cross, and her
+facial expression bore further testimony to a state of extreme
+irritation.
+
+Grandma rose to combat, she never meekly sat down under any
+circumstances, great or small.
+
+"Terrible place, indeed; see if _you_ had to provide a home what you'd
+have in it. You was never done squarkin' for that stove; some one else
+had one like it, an' you was goin' to do strokes w'en you got it. It's
+always easy to complain about things w'en you are not the one
+responsible!"
+
+Grandma and I decided to go to the kitchen and prescribe for the
+stove.
+
+From an idle onlooker's point of view it seemed an excellent domestic
+implement in good health; but the beautiful cook averred it would
+produce no heat.
+
+"It must be like Bray's," said grandma, "they thought it was no good,
+and it was only because of some damper that had to be fixed."
+
+"Yes; and they had a man there to fix it for them; that's the terrible
+want about this place, there being no _man_ about it to do anything,"
+Dawn said pointedly, looking at Uncle Jake, who was calmly sitting in
+his big chair in the corner. He was not disconcerted. A man who could
+live for years on a widowed sister without making himself worth his
+salt is not of the calibre to be upset by a few hints.
+
+"I've busted up me pants again," cheerfully announced Andrew from the
+doorway--misfortunes never come singly. "Dawn, just get a needle and
+cotton and stitch 'em together."
+
+"I never knew you when they weren't 'busted up,' and you can get
+another pair or hold a towel round you till Carry comes home; she's
+got to do the mending, it's her week in the house. I've got enough to
+worry me, goodness knows!"
+
+"Dear me!" said grandma, walking away as I once more volunteered to be
+a friend in need to Andrew, "w'en people is young, an' a little thing
+goes wrong, they think they have the troubles of a empire upon them,
+but the real troubles of life teaches 'em different. You are a
+good-for-nothink lump anyhow, Andrew. Where have you been on a Sunday
+morning tearing round the country?"
+
+Andrew threw no light on the question, and his grandma repeated it.
+
+"Where have you been, I say--answer me at once?"
+
+"Oh, where haven't I been!" returned Andrew a trifle roughly, "I
+couldn't be tellin' you where I've been. A feller might as well be in
+a bloomin' glass case as carry a pocket-book around an' make a map of
+where he's been."
+
+The old lady's eyes flashed.
+
+"None of yer cheek to me, young man! You're getting too big for yer
+boots since you left school. If in five minutes you don't tell me
+where you've been an' who you was with, I'll screw the neck off of
+you. Nice thing while you're a child an' looking to me for everythink
+that goes into your stummick an' is put on your back, an' I'm
+responsible for you, that you can't answer me civil. Your actions
+can't bear lookin' into, it seems. I'll go over an' see Mr Bray about
+it this afternoon if you don't tell me at once."
+
+"I ain't been anywhere, only pokin' up an' down the lanes with Jack
+Bray."
+
+"Well, why couldn't you say so at once without raisin' this rumpus.
+Them as has rared any boys don't know what it is to die of idleness
+an' want of vexation."
+
+"It wasn't _me_ rose the rumpus. Some people always blames others for
+what they do themselves: it 'u'd give a bloke th' pip," grumbled
+Andrew, as I put the last stitch in his trousers and his grandma
+departed. Her black Sunday dress rustled aggressively, and her plain
+bibless holland apron, which she never took off except when her bonnet
+went on for street appearance or when she went to bed, and her little
+Quaker collars and cuffs of muslin edged with lace, were even more
+immaculate than on week-days. She scorned a cap, and her features were
+so well cut that she looked well with the grey hair--wonderfully
+plentiful and wavy for one of her years,--simply parted and tidily
+coiled at the back. This costume or toilet, always fresh and never
+shabby, was invariably completed by a style of light house-boots,
+introduced to me as "lastings"; and there was an unimpaired vigour of
+intellect in their wearer good to contemplate in a woman of the people
+aged seventy-five.
+
+It came on to rain after dinner and confined us all to the house.
+
+Dawn borrowed an exciting love-story from Miss Flipp; grandma read a
+"good" book; Uncle Jake still pored over the 'Noonoon Advertiser,'
+while Andrew repaired a large amount of fishing-tackle, with which
+during the time I knew him I never knew him to catch a fish, and Carry
+grumbled about the rain.
+
+"Poor Carry!" sympathised Andrew, "she can't git out to do a spoon
+with Larry, an' the poor bloke can't come in--he's so sweet, you know,
+a drop of rain would melt him."
+
+"It would take something to melt you," retorted Carry. "The only thing
+I can see good in the rain is that it will keep Mrs Bray away."
+
+And thus passed my first full day at Clay's.
+
+
+
+
+SEVEN.
+
+THE LITTLE TOWN OF NOONOON.
+
+
+The little town, situated whereaway it does not particularly matter,
+and whose name is a palindrome, is one of the oldest and most
+old-fashioned in Australia. Less than three dozen miles per road, and
+not many more minutes by train from the greatest city in the Southern
+hemisphere, yet many of its native population are more unpolished in
+appearance than the bush-whackers from beyond Bourke, the Cooper, and
+the far Paroo. It is an agricultural region, and this in some measure
+accounts for the slouching appearance of its people. Men cannot wrest
+a first-hand living from the soil and at the same time cultivate a
+Piccadilly club-land style and air.
+
+It is a valley of small holdings, being divided into farms and
+orchards, varying in size from several to two or three hundred acres.
+Many grants were apportioned there in the early days. Representatives
+of the original families in some instances still hold portions of
+them, and the stationary population has drifted into a tiny world of
+their own, and for want of new blood have ideas caked down like most
+of the ground, and evinced in many little characteristics distinct
+from the general run of the people of the State.
+
+Though they were, when I knew them, possessed of the usual human
+failings in an average degree, they were for the most part a splendid
+class of population--honest, industrious producers, who, in Grandma
+Clay's words, "Keep the world going." There was only a small
+percentage of idlers and parasites among them, but they did duty with
+a very small-minded unprogressive set of ideas.
+
+There is a place in New South Wales named Grabben-Gullen, where the
+best potatoes in the world are grown. Great, solid, flowery beauties,
+weighing two pounds avoirdupois, are but ordinary specimens in this
+locality, and the allegorical bush statement for illustrating their
+uncommon size has it that they grow under the fences and trip the
+horses as they travel the lanes between the paddocks. Similarly, to
+explain the wonderful growth of vegetation in the fertile valley of
+Tumut, its inhabitants assure travellers that pumpkin and melon vines
+grow so rapidly there that the pumpkins and melons are worn out in
+being dragged after them.
+
+Now, as I strolled around the lanes of Noonoon, I felt the old slow
+ways, like Grabben-Gullen potatoes, protruding to stifle one's mental
+flights; but there was nothing representative of the Tumut pumpkin and
+melon vines to wear one out in a rush of progress. The land was rich
+and beautiful and in as genial and salubrious a climate as the heart
+of the most exacting could desire; but the residents had drifted into
+unenterprising methods of existence, and progress had stopped dead at
+the foot of the Great Dividing Range. The great road winding over it
+bore the mark of the convicts, and other traces of their solid
+workmanship were to be found in occasional buildings within a radius
+of twenty miles; but their day had passed as that of the bullock-dray
+and mail-coach, superseded by the haughty "passenger-mail" and giant
+two-engined "goods" trains,--while for quicker communication with the
+city than these afforded, the West depended upon the telegraph wires.
+
+In days gone by the swells had patronised Noonoon as a week-end resort,
+and some of their homes were now used as boarding-houses,--while their
+one-time occupants had other tenement, and their successors patronised
+the cooler altitudes farther up the Blue Mountains, or had followed the
+governor to Moss Vale.
+
+Once upon a time Noonoon had rushed into an elaborate, unbalanced
+water scheme, and had lighted itself with electricity. To do this it
+had been forced to borrow heavily, so that now all the rates went to
+the usurer, and no means were available for current affairs. The
+sanitation was condemned, and the streets and roads for miles, as far
+as the municipality extended, were a disgrace to it.
+
+Exceedingly level, they possessed characteristics of some of the best
+thoroughfares; but the wheel-ways were formed of round river stones
+which neither powdered nor set, and to drive along them was cruel to
+horses, ruinous to vehicles, and as trying on the nerves of travellers
+as crossing a stony stream-bed. There seemed to be nothing possible in
+the matter but to abuse the municipal council as numskulls and
+crawlers, and this was done on every hand with unfailing enthusiasm.
+
+Though so near the metropolis, Noonoon was less in touch with it than
+many western towns,--in most respects was a veritable great-grandmother
+for stagnation and bucolic rusticity, and in individuality suggested
+one of the little quiet eddies near the emptying of a stream, and which,
+being called into existence by a back-flow, contains no current. But
+while thus falling to the rear in the ranks of some departments of
+progress, the little town retained a certain degree of importance as one
+of the busiest railway centres in the state, and its engine-sheds were
+the home of many locomotives. Here they were coaled, cleaned, and oiled
+ere taking their stiff two-engine haul over the mountains to the wide,
+straight, pastoral and wheat-growing West, and their calling and
+rumbling made cheery music all the year round, excepting a short space
+on Sundays; while at night, as they climbed the crests of the
+mountain-spurs, every time they fired, the red light belching from their
+engine doors could be seen for miles down the valley. Thus Noonoon's
+train service was excellent, and a great percentage of the town
+population consisted of railway employés.
+
+What is the typical Australian girl, is a subject frequently
+discussed. To find her it is necessary to study those reared in the
+unbroken bush,--those who are strangers to town life and its
+influences. City girls are more cosmopolitan. Sydney girls are
+frequently mistaken for New Yorkers, while Bostonian ladies are as
+often claimed to be Englishwomen; and it is only the bush-reared
+girl--at home with horse, gun, and stock-whip, able to bake the family
+bread, make her own dresses, take her brother's or father's place out
+of doors in an emergency, while at the same time competent to grace a
+drawing-room and show herself conversant with the poets--who can
+rightfully lay claim to be more typically Australia's than any other
+country's daughter. Of course the city Australians are Australians
+too. Australia is the land they put down as theirs on the census
+paper. She is their native land; but ah! their country has never
+opened her treasure-troves to them as to those with sympathetic and
+appreciative understanding of her characteristics, and many of them
+are as hazy as a foreigner as to whether it is the kooka-burra that
+laughs and the moke-poke that calls, or the other way about. They are
+incapable of completely enjoying the full heat of noonday summer sun
+on the plains, and the evening haze stealing across the gullies does
+not mean all it should. The exquisite rapturous enjoyment of the odour
+of the endless bush-land when dimly lit by the blazing Southern stars,
+or the companionship of a sure-footed nag taking the lead round stony
+sidlings, or the music of his hoof-beats echoing across the ridges as
+he carries a dear one home at close of day, are all in a magic
+storehouse which may never be entered by the Goths who attempt to
+measure this unique and wonderful land by any standard save its
+own,--a standard made by those whose love of it, engendered by
+heredity or close companionship, has fired their blood.
+
+These observations lead up to the fact that Noonoon folk boasted their
+own individuality, smacking somewhat of town and country and yet of
+neither. Some of the older ones patronised the flowing beards and
+sartorial styles "all the go way up in Ironbark," yet if put Out-Back
+would have been as much new chums as city people, and were wont to
+regard honest unvarnished statements of bush happenings as "snake
+yarns"; while the youths of these parts combined the appearance of the
+far bush yokel and the city larrikin, and were to be seen following
+the plough with cigarettes in their mouths.
+
+The small holdings were cut into smaller paddocks, the style of fence
+mostly patronised being two or three strands of savage barbed wire
+stretched from post to post. This insufficient separation of stock was
+made adequate by the cattle themselves carrying the remainder of the
+white man's burden of fencing around their necks, in the form of a
+hampering yoke made of a forked tree-limb with a piece of plain
+fencing-wire to close the open ends. This prevented them pushing
+between the wires, and it was a pathetically ludicrous sight to see
+the calves at a very tender age turned out an exact replica of their
+elders. All the places opened on to the roads like streets; and to go
+across country was a sore ordeal, as one had to uncomfortably cross
+roughly upturned crop-land, and every few hundred yards roll under a
+line of barbed wire about a foot from the ground, at the risk of
+reefing one's clothes and the certainty of dishevelment. To walk out
+on the main roads and stumble over the loose stones ankle-deep in the
+dust was torture. Some averred they had known no repairs for ten
+years, and that they were as good as they were, because to have been
+worse was impossible. Walking in this case being no pleasure, I
+bethought me of riding for gentle exercise, and inquired of Grandma
+Clay the possibilities in that respect.
+
+"Ride! there ain't nothink to ride in this district, only great
+elephant draughts or little tiddy ponies the size of dogs," she said
+with unlimited scorn; "I never see such crawlers, they go about in
+them pokin' little sulkies, and even the men can't ride. In my young
+days if a feller couldn't ride a buck-jumper the girls wouldn't look
+at him, an' yet down here at one of the shows last year in the prize
+for the hunters, the horses had to be all rode by one man; there
+wasn't another young feller in the district fit to take a blessed moke
+over a fence. I felt like goin' out an' tacklin' it meself, I was that
+disgusted. I never was a advocate for this _great_ ridin' that racks
+people's insides out an' cripples them, there ain't a bit of necessity
+for it, but there is reason in everythink, an' they're goin' to the
+other extreme, and will have to be carried about on feather-beds in a
+ambulance soon if they keep on as they are. There's nothink as good as
+it was in the old days. As for a woman ridin' here, all the town would
+go out to gape like as she was somethink in the travellin' show
+business. I used to ride w'en I come down here first,--that was
+sixteen year ago,--but every one asked me such questions, an' looked
+at me like a Punch an' Judy show, that I got sick of it. I rode into
+Trashe's at the store there one day, an' w'en I was comin' out he
+says, 'Will you have a chair to get on?' an' as he didn't seem to be
+man enough to sling me on, I said I supposed so. He goes for one of
+them tallest chairs--it would be as easy to get on the horse as
+it--an' I sez, 'Thanks, I'm not ridin' a elephant, one of them little
+chairs would do.' But even that didn't seem to content him; he put it
+high on the pavement an' put the horse in the gutter. Then, instead of
+puttin' the reins over the horse's head proper, he left them on the
+hook, an' with both hands an' all his might holds the beast short by
+them in front of its jaw, like as it was the wildest bull from the
+Bogongs. The idiot! Supposin' the beast was flash an' pulled away from
+him, where would I be without the reins? That about finished me, I was
+sick of it, as I could not have believed any man, even out of a
+asylum, could be so simple about puttin' a person on a horse."
+
+For this kind of exercise there seemed no promising outlet, and I was
+put to it to think of some other. As grandma said, with few
+exceptions, the only horses in the district were draughts and ponies.
+Every effect has a cause, and the reason of this was that these big
+horses were the only ones properly adapted to agriculture, and the
+smallness of the holdings did not admit of hacks being kept for mere
+pleasure, so the cheapest knockabout horse to maintain was a pony, as
+not only did it take less fodder and serve for the little saddle use
+of this place, but tethered to a sulky, took the wives and children
+abroad. It was the land of sulkies,--made in all sizes to fit the pony
+that had to draw them, and of quality in accordance with the purse
+that paid for them,--and a pair of horses and a buggy was a rare
+sight.
+
+Andrew suggested that I should go rowing, and glowingly recommended a
+little two-man craft named the _Alice_, and as I could row well in my
+young days, I determined to test her capacity by going up stream very
+gently, as my time was unlimited and my strength painfully the
+reverse. It was a crisp day towards the end of April, so I was feeling
+brisker than usual, and the _Alice_ was deserving of her good
+reputation. The Noonoon was one of the noblest and most beautiful
+streams in the State, and above the substantial and unique old bridge
+its deep, calm waters stretched for about two miles as straight as a
+ribbon, in a reach made historic because it has been the racecourse of
+some of the greatest sculling matches the world has known. Orange and
+willow-trees were reflected in the clear depths of the rippleless
+flow, and lured by its beauty, the responsiveness of my craft, and an
+unusual cheerfulness, I foolishly overdid my strength. I was thinking
+of Dawn. Her girlish confidence regarding the desire of her hot young
+heart had so appealed to me that I was exercised to discover a
+suitable knight, for this and not a career I felt was the needful
+element to complete her life and anchor her restless girlish energy.
+To tell her so, however, would ruin all. Time must be held till the
+appearance of the hero of the romance I intended to shape. With this
+end in view I thought of recommending her grandma to let her voice be
+trained. Two years at the very least would thus be gained, and if
+properly floated and advertised in the matrimonial field, what may not
+be accomplished in that time by a beautiful and vivacious girl of
+eighteen or nineteen? I was recalled from such speculations by finding
+that it was beyond me to row another stroke, and I was in a fix. A
+slight wind turned the boat, and she drifted on to a fallen tree a
+little below the surface, and, though not upsetting, stuck there, and
+was too much for me to get off.
+
+At that time of the year, except very occasionally, the river was free
+from boaters and the fishers who told of the fish that used to be got
+there in other times, so there was nothing to do but wait until my
+absence caused anxiety, when some one would surely come after me. Not
+a very alarming plight if one were well, but I felt one of my old
+cruel attacks was at hand, which was not encouraging. No one was
+within sight, but in case there should be a ploughman over a rise
+within hearing, I coo-eed long and well. My voice had been trained. I
+coo-eed three times, allowing an interval to elapse, and then settled
+into the bottom of the boat to await developments. Soon I was
+disturbed by the plunk! plunk! of a swimmer, and saw a young man
+approaching by strong rapid strokes. It is strange how hard it is to
+recognise any one when only their face is above water and one meets
+them in an unexpected place, and though this face seemed familiar
+there was nothing unusual in that, as I knew so many theatre patrons'
+faces in a half fashion. My rescuer having ascertained the simple
+nature of my dilemma, and easily gaining the boat by reason of the
+log, exclaimed--
+
+"Why, it's never you! What on earth are you doing here?" and I
+responded--
+
+"Ernest Breslaw! It's never you! What are _you_ doing here? _I'm_
+stuck on this log."
+
+"And I've come to get you off it," he laughed.
+
+"Yes, but otherwise? This may be a suitable cove for a damaged hull,
+but what can a newly-launched cruiser like you be doing here?"
+
+"I'm in training, and was just taking a plunge; it's first-class!" he
+said enthusiastically, and looking at his splendid muscles, enough to
+delight the eye of even such a connoisseur in physique as myself, and
+well displayed by a neat bathing-suit, there was no need to inquire
+for what he was in training. 'Twas no drivelling pen-and-ink
+examination such as I could have passed myself, but something needing
+a Greek statue's strength of thew.
+
+"Are you feeling ill?" he considerately inquired, and as I assured him
+to the contrary, though I was feeling far from normal, he put me out
+on the bank while he rowed up stream for his clothes and returned to
+take me home. Having encased himself in some serviceable tweeds and a
+blue guernsey, he rolled me in his coat ere beginning to demolish the
+homeward mile--an infinitesimal bagatelle to such a magnificent pair
+of arms. I enjoyed the play of the broad shoulders and ruddy cheeks,
+and did not talk, neither did he. He was an athlete, not a
+conversationalist, while I was a conversationalist lacking sufficient
+athletic strength to keep up my reputation just then.
+
+"It was very silly of you to come out alone or attempt to row in your
+state of health! It might have been your death," he presently remarked
+in a grandfatherly style. "Where are you putting up?"
+
+"At Clay's."
+
+"I know; the old place with the boats," he replied as the _Alice_
+whizzed along.
+
+"I was aching for diversion," I said, in excuse for the rashness of my
+act.
+
+"Well, I can take you for a pull now. I'll be here for a few weeks.
+Will you come to-morrow afternoon? Would three o'clock suit you?" he
+inquired as he moored. "The scenery is magnificent farther up the
+river."
+
+"Yes, if I'm not here at three o'clock you'll know that I'm not able
+to come. You are very good, Ernest, to waste time with me."
+
+"I'm only too proud to be able to row you about and expend a little
+despised brute force in returning all the entertainment with brains in
+it you have given me in the past."
+
+"Yes, at the cost of anything under 7s. 6d. an evening,--am I to pay
+you that for rowing me?"
+
+"Put it in the hospital-box," he said with a laugh that displayed his
+strong white teeth between his firm bold lips. He was altogether a
+sight that was more than good in my eyes.
+
+I found I was not strong enough to spring ashore, but young Breslaw
+managed that and my transit up the steep bank to the house with an
+ease and gentleness so dear to woman's heart, that the strength to
+accomplish it is the secret of an athlete being in ninety per cent of
+cases a woman's ideal.
+
+"Oh, I say," as he was leaving me at the gate, "if you mention me,
+speak of me as R. Ernest, as I've dropped the Breslaw where I'm
+staying. I don't want wind of my being here to get into the papers.
+I'm practising in the dark, as I'd like to give some of the cracks a
+surprise licking."
+
+"Very well, I'm under an alias too, so please don't forget. To all
+except a few theatre patrons I'm as dead as ditch-water; but some one
+might recognise the old name, and it would be very unpleasant."
+
+"Right O! To-morrow at three, then, I'll give you a pull," he said,
+doffing his cap from his heavy ruddy locks, now drying into waves and
+gleaming a rival hue in the setting sun, as he bounded down the bank
+and made his way along the river-edge to the bridge, as his place of
+sojourn was farther up than Clay's and on the other side.
+
+The excitement of thus meeting him had somewhat revived me, for here
+at once, as though in response to my wish, was a fitting knight to
+play a leading _rôle_ with my young lady, the desire for whose
+wellbeing had taken grip of me. For her sweet sake, and the sake of
+the fragrant manliness of the stalwart and deserving knight, I
+straightway resolved to enter the thankless and precarious business of
+matchmaking, one in which I had not had one iota of experience; but as
+women have to ace marriage, domesticity, and mostly all the issues of
+life assigned them, without training, I did not give up heart. As a
+first effort I determined that Dawn should chaperon me when I went for
+my row on the morrow. As I looked at the sun sinking behind the blue
+hills and shedding a wonderfully mellow light over the broad valley, I
+thought of my own life, in which there had been none to pull a
+heart-easing string, and the bitterness of those to whom that for
+which they had fought has been won so late as to be Dead Sea fruit,
+took possession of me.
+
+The doctors had several long and fee-inspiring terms for my malady,
+but I knew it to be an old-fashioned ailment known as heart-break--the
+result of disappointment, want of affection, and over-work. The old
+bitterness gripped the organ of life then; it brought me to my knees.
+I tried to call out, but it was unavailing. Sharp, fiendish pain, and
+then oblivion.
+
+
+
+
+EIGHT.
+
+GRANDMA TURNS NURSE.
+
+
+When I came to it was dark enough for lights, Dawn's well-moulded
+hands were supporting my head, Grandma Clay's voice was sternly
+engineering affairs, and Andrew was blubbering at the foot of the bed
+on which I was resting.
+
+I tried to tell them there was no cause for alarm, and to beg
+grandma's pardon for turning her house into a "sick hospital," but
+though not quite unconscious, I appeared entirely so.
+
+"I wish you had sense to have gone for Dr Tinker when Dr Smalley
+wasn't in," said the old lady, with nothing but solicitude in her
+voice.
+
+The sternness in evidence when I had been trying to gain entrance to
+her house was entirely absent.
+
+"I'm afraid she's dead," said Dawn.
+
+"Oh, she ain't; is she, Dawn?" sobbed Andrew. "She was a decent sort
+of person. A pity some of those other old scotty-boots that was here
+in the summer didn't die instead." And that cemented a firm friendship
+between the lad and myself. An individual utterly alone in the world
+prizes above all things a little real affection.
+
+Presently there was a clearance in the room, effected by the doctor,
+who, after a short examination, pronounced my malady a complication of
+heart troubles, gave a few instructions, and further remarked, "Send
+up for the mixture. She isn't dead, but she may snuff out before
+morning. She's bound to go at a moment's notice, sometime. Give her
+plenty of air. If she has any friends she ought to be sent to them if
+she pulls through this."
+
+Grandma gave the meagre details she knew concerning me, and as the
+practitioner, whom I took to be a veterinary surgeon called in for the
+emergency, went out, he said--
+
+"If she dies to-night you can send me word in the morning; that will
+be soon enough; and if I don't hear from you I'll call again
+to-morrow."
+
+"She ain't goin' to die if I can stop her," said grandma when he had
+departed. "I'll bring her to with a powltice. I ain't given to be
+cumflummixed by what a doctor says; many a one they give up is walking
+about as strong as bull-beef to-day. I never see them do no good in a
+serious case. They are right enough to set a bone or sew up a cut, but
+when you come to think of it, what could be expected of them? They
+know a little more than us because they've hacked up a few bodies an'
+know how the pieces fit together, but as for knowin' what's goin' on,
+they ain't the Almighty, and ain't to be took notice of. The way they
+know about the body is the same as you and Carry know the kitchen, an'
+could go in the dark an' feel for anythink while all was well, but if
+anythink strange was there you couldn't make it out," and setting to
+work, brewing potions and applying remedies of her own, the practical
+old lady soon brought me around so that I was able to make my
+apologies.
+
+"Good Heavens! What do you take us for?" she exclaimed. "It would be a
+fine kind of a world if we wasn't a little considerate to each other.
+It does the young people good to learn 'em a little kindness. I
+couldn't be askin' people like Carry there to wait on people, but it's
+Dawn's week in the house an' she'll look after you, an' you needn't be
+wantin' to clear out to the hospital. You won't be no better looked
+after there than here."
+
+Never was more tactful kindness on shorter acquaintance.
+
+Little Miss Flipp undertook to sit by my bed during the early watches
+of the night, for they could not be persuaded to leave me alone. Her
+eyes bore evidence of many more sleepless watches, but the poor little
+thing did not unburden her heart to me. Dawn appeared to relieve her
+at 2 A.M., and the engaging child manfully struggled against the sleep
+that leadened the pretty blue eyes till morning, when grandma, brisk
+as a cricket, took her turn.
+
+At eleven I was interested by the doctor's entrance. He came on
+tiptoe, but like a great proportion of male tiptoeing it defeated its
+intention and made more noise than walking. Bearing down upon grandma,
+he inquired in a huge whisper, "How is she?"
+
+At this juncture I opened my eyes, so he cheerfully remarked, in a
+strong twang known by some supercilious English as the "beastly
+colonial accent"--
+
+"So you didn't peg out after all!"
+
+This being the language applied to stock, confirmed me in the notion
+that he was a veterinary. I had once before heard it applied to a
+human being in a far bush place, where a man who lived unhappily with
+his wife one morning remarked to a neighbour that "The missus nearly
+pegged out last night," and it was considered a fitting remark for
+such a monster as this man was supposed to have been, but this doctor
+said it quite naturally.
+
+I found him a friendly and communicative fellow, and as he gave in an
+hour's gossip with grandma and me for one fee, I was willing to take
+it to pass away a dull morning.
+
+"What on earth did you go rowing for?" he asked me.
+
+"The roads are too bad to go walking."
+
+"That's only within range of the municipality. The council wants
+bursting up. They can't do anything with everything mortgaged to old
+Dr Tinker. He holds the whole thing. It's a pity he wouldn't peg out
+one of these nights, and we might get something done. But it's not him
+who has the money--it's the old woman."
+
+"That's her Mrs Bray was tellin' us walloped the girl for bein'
+admired by the old doctor," explained grandma.
+
+"Money, that's what he married her for," continued the doctor. "I
+don't know where he could have picked her up. Some say she is a
+publican's widow, but Jackson, the solicitor here, has a different
+hypothesis. He says he's seen her running along carrying five cups and
+saucers of tea at once, and no one but a ship's waitress could do
+that. At any rate she's a great man of a woman; can swear like a
+trooper if things don't go right. She's got the old man completely
+cowed."
+
+"Am I to infer that cowing her spouse and swearing outrageously makes
+her _man_-like?" I laconically inquired. But the doctor's
+understanding didn't seem to go in for small satirical detail, he
+conversed on a more wholesale fashion, rattling on for a good
+half-hour to a patient for whom quietude was necessary, lest she
+should "peg out."
+
+"Ain't he a bosker?" enthusiastically commented Andrew, coming in to
+see what I had thought of this doctor, who was the idol of Noonoon.
+
+"Has he a large practice?" I cautiously inquired, seeking to discover
+was he really a doctor.
+
+"My word! Nearly all the people go to him, he's so friendly and don't
+stick on the jam--speaks to you everywhere, and has jokes about
+everything."
+
+"He's a fine man!" corroborated grandma.
+
+"Yes; must be more than six feet high," I responded.
+
+"An' such a gentleman, he's never above having a yarn with you about
+anythink and everythink."
+
+"Oh, well," I said, "any time I take these turns just send for him."
+
+One doctor was as harmless as another to me. I knew it would relieve
+the household to have a medico, and he could not injure me, seeing I
+accorded his medicine and advice about as much deference as the hum of
+a mosquito.
+
+"Is he a family man?" I asked.
+
+"Yes; so there are all your chances gone in one slap," said Carry,
+appearing to inquire my state.
+
+I did not tell her there was the most insuperable of all barriers in
+the way of my marrying any one, and that I had no desire if I could.
+The first I did not want known, and the second would not be believed
+if it were, because, though woman is somewhat escaping from her
+shackles, the skin of old crawl subjection still clings sufficiently
+tight for it to be beyond ordinary belief that one could be other than
+constantly on the look-out to secure a berth by appending herself to
+some man, and more especially does this suspicion hang over a spinster
+with her hair as grey as mine, and who takes up a position at a
+boarding-house which is supposed to be the common hunting-ground of
+women forced on to the matrimonial war-path.
+
+"He has seven little children, and one's a baby, an' his wife is a
+poor broken-down little thing near always in the hospital. You'd
+wonder how he married her, _he's_ such a fine-looking man," vouchsafed
+Andrew.
+
+"Such a fine man that you'd wonder concerning several other patent
+facts about him," I responded.
+
+There was quite a chorus in favour of him now. He was evidently a true
+gentleman in his patients' eyes, because he was not above stopping to
+talk to them in their own vernacular about local gossip, and had the
+reputation of great good nature in regard to the bills of the poor,
+and they loved his jokes. They were of the class within grasp of the
+elementary sense of humour of his audience. This type of gentleman he
+undoubtedly was, but to that possessed of graceful tact and expressing
+itself in good diction--by some considered necessary attributes of a
+gentleman--he could lay no claim. Neither could he to that ideal
+enshrined in my heart, who would not have had seven little
+children--one of them a baby--and a poor little broken-down wife at
+the same time; but as to what is really a gentleman depends on the
+attitude of mind.
+
+
+
+
+NINE.
+
+THE KNIGHT HAS A STOLEN VIEW OF THE LADY.
+
+
+Grandma Clay kept me in bed that day, so I forgot all about my
+appointment on the river until some time after three, when Andrew
+announced from the doorway--
+
+"A man wants to know can he see you?"
+
+"Who can he be?"
+
+"He's a puddin'-faced, red-headed bloke, wearin' a blue sweater under
+his coat like the bike riders," was Andrew's very unknightly
+description of the knight whom I had chosen to play lead in the drama
+of the beautiful young lady at Clay's.
+
+"That's a particular friend of mine, you may show him in," I said.
+
+"Oughtn't Dawn to be woke up first and told to scoot out of that?"
+said he.
+
+Dawn was one of those young beings so thoroughly inured to easy living
+that the few hours' sleep she had lost the night before had made her
+so dozy when she had come to keep me company now, that I had persuaded
+her to rest beside me on the broad bed, where, much against Andrew's
+sense of propriety, she was fast asleep.
+
+"I'll hide her thus," I said, covering her with the counterpane, for
+it would not be good stage management to allow the lady to escape
+when a fitting knight was on the threshold. This satisfied Andrew, who
+withdrew to usher in the "puddin'-faced, red-headed bloke," who sat in
+the doctor's chair, and made a few ordinary remarks about the weather
+and some equally kind about my state of health.
+
+When in the company of ladies the only brilliance in evidence about my
+young friend was the colour of his hair, so there was little danger of
+his waking Dawn with his chatter, as he sat inwardly consumed with a
+desire to escape. As I lay with my hand where I could feel the girl's
+healthy breathing, I wondered would she too dismiss my chosen knight
+as pudding-faced and red-headed, or would she see him with my eyes!
+His locks certainly were of that most attractive shade hair can be,
+and his good looks were further enhanced by a clear tanned skin and
+dark eyes. His large clean-shaven features had the fulness and
+roundness of unspent youth in full bloom, and he was far from the
+small bullet-headed type, which accounted for Andrew's designation of
+"puddin'-faced." I had always found him one of the most virile and
+upright young creatures I had ever seen, and he had endeared himself
+to me by his simple, untainted manliness, and the fragrant evidence of
+health his presence distilled. Dawn, too, was so robust that there was
+a likelihood of her being attracted by her opposite, and inclined to
+favour a carpet knight before one of the open field.
+
+Some men have brain and muscle, but this is a combination as rare as
+beauty and high intellect in women, and almost as startling in its
+power for good or evil; but apart from the combination the wholesome
+athlete is generally the more lovable. When his brawn is coupled with
+a good disposition, he sees in woman a fragile flower that he longs
+to protect, and measuring her weakness by his beautiful strength, is
+easily imposed upon. His muscle is an engine a woman can unfailingly
+command for her own purposes, whereas brilliance of intellect, though
+it may command a great public position in the reflected glory of which
+some women love to bask, nevertheless, under pressure in the domestic
+arena, is liable to be too sharply turned against wives, mothers, and
+daughters to be a comfortable piece of household furniture. On the
+other hand, the athlete may have the muscles of a Samson, and yet,
+being slow of thought and speech, be utterly defenceless in a woman's
+hands. No matter how aggravatingly wrong she may be, he cannot bring
+brute force to bear to vanquish a creature so delicate, and being
+possessed of no other weapon, he is compelled to cultivate patience
+and good temper. Also, health and strength are conducive to equability
+of temper, and hence the domestic popularity of the man of brawn above
+the one of brain, who is not infrequently exacting and crossly
+egotistical in his family relations where the other would be lenient
+and go-easy.
+
+The silence of my guest and myself was presently broken by Dawn
+turning about under the counterpane.
+
+"Good gracious! what have you got there?" inquired Ernest. "Is it that
+old terrier you used to have?"
+
+"Terrier, indeed! I have here a far more beautiful pet. Because you
+are such a good child I will allow you just one glance. Come now, be
+careful."
+
+The girl's dress was unbuttoned at the throat, displaying a perfect
+curve of round white neck; her tumbled brown curls strayed over the
+dimpled oval face; the long jetty lashes resting on the flushed cheeks
+fringed some eyelid curves that would have delighted an artist; the
+curling lips were slightly parted showing the tips of her pretty
+teeth, and the lifted coverlet disclosed to view as lovely a sleeping
+beauty as any of the armoured knights of old ever fought and died for.
+The latter-day one, politely curious regarding my pet, bent over to
+accord a casual glance, but the vision meeting his eyes sent the blood
+in a crimson wave over his tanned cheeks and caused him to draw back
+with a start. It was inconsistent that he should have been so
+completely abashed at sight of a fully-dressed sleeping girl who was
+placidly unconscious of his gaze, when it was his custom to regularly
+occupy the stalls and enjoy the choruses and ballets composed of young
+ladies very wide awake, and wearing only as much covering as compelled
+by the law; but where is consistency?
+
+"I had no idea it would--er--be a young lady," he stammered, keeping
+his eyes religiously lowered, and fidgeting in a palsy of shyness such
+as used to be an indispensable accomplishment of young ladies in past
+generations.
+
+"Just take a good look, she'll bear inspection," I said.
+
+"I'd rather not, the young lady might not like it."
+
+"But I'm giving you permission, she's mine, and then run before she
+discovers you have pirated a glance. I will keep the secret."
+
+He lifted his eyes, but so swiftly and hesitatingly that I could not
+be sure that he had discerned the beauty that was blushing half
+unseen, instead of being displayed under limelight and drawn attention
+to by brass trumpets in accordance with the style of this advertisemal
+age.
+
+As Ernest went out Andrew came in and awakened Dawn with a request to
+make him some dough-nuts for tea, but she ordered him to go to Carry
+as it was her week in the kitchen.
+
+"Bust this week in the kitchen! A feller can hear nothing else, it's
+enough to give him the pip; it ought to be put up like a notice so it
+could be known," he grumbled as he departed.
+
+That evening Mrs Bray made one of her calls, which were always more
+good-natured regarding the length of time she gave us than the tone of
+her remarks about people.
+
+The famous Mrs Tinker, it appeared, from the latest account of her
+vagaries, had enlivened the lives of Noonoon inhabitants by swearing
+in a hair-lifting manner at one of the local shows because her horses
+had not been awarded first prize, &c., &c.
+
+Whether, as Carry averred, it was this conversation that did the
+mischief or not, the fact remains that I became too faint to speak,
+and the girls would not leave me all night. I lay that way all the
+next day too, so that when Ernest called to make inquiries and
+discovered my state he took a turn at making himself useful,
+prevailing upon Grandma Clay to allow him to do so by explaining that
+he was a very firm friend of mine, and had had some experience of
+invalids owing to his mother having been one for some years before her
+death, both of which statements were perfectly true.
+
+As I improved, I was anxious to discover what impression he had made
+on the household, and cautiously sounded them.
+
+"He seems to be a chap with some heart in him," said grandma. "He'd
+put some of these fine lah-de-dahs to shame. I always like a man that
+ain't above attending on a sick person. Like Jim Clay, he could put a
+powltice on an' lift up a sick person better'n all the women I ever
+see."
+
+"It's always Jim Clay," said Dawn in an irreverent aside; "I never
+heard of a man yet, whether he was tall or short, or squat or lean, or
+young or old, but he was like Jim Clay, if he did any good. I'm about
+dead sick of him."
+
+"You don't seem to remember Jim Clay was your grandfather," I said, as
+his relict left the room, "and that he is very dear in your
+grandmother's memory. It is pleasing how she recalls him. Wait till
+your hair is grey, my dear, and if you have some one as dearly
+enshrined in your heart it will be a good sign that your life has not
+been without savour."
+
+"Yes, of course, I do forget to think of him as my grandfather, never
+hearing of him only as this everlasting Jim Clay, and if he was like
+that red-headed fellow it would take a lot of him to be remembered as
+anything but a big pug-looking creature that I'd be ashamed to be seen
+with."
+
+This was not a propitious first impression, and as she was inclined to
+be censorious I considered it diplomatic to point out his detractions,
+knowing that the combative propensity of the young lady would then
+seek for recommendations.
+
+"Yes, he is a great, unattractive, red-headed-looking lump, isn't he?"
+
+"Oh, I wouldn't say that. He looks fine and healthy at all events, and
+I do like to see a man that doesn't make one afraid he'll drop to
+pieces if you look at him."
+
+"But he's hopelessly red-headed," I opined.
+
+"But it isn't that sandy, insipid sort of red. It's very dark and
+thick, and his skin is clear and brown, not that mangy-looking sample
+that usually goes with red hair," contended Dawn; and being willing
+that she should retain this opinion, I let the point go.
+
+There is one advantage in a heart trouble, that it often departs as
+suddenly as it attacks, and ere it was again Carry's week in the
+house, I was once more able to stroll round and depend upon Andrew for
+entertainment.
+
+He invited me to the dairy to see him turn the hand cream-separator,
+and I remained to dry the discs out of its bowl while he washed them.
+He had a conversational turn, and in his choice of subjects was a
+patriot. He never went out of his realm for imported themes, but
+entirely confined his patronage to those at hand. This day his
+discourse was of blow-flies; I cared not though it had been of manure.
+I had knocked around the sharp corners of life sufficiently to have
+got a sensible adjustment of weights and measures, refinements and
+vulgarities. Besides, I gratefully remembered the tears Andrew had
+shed during my illness, and bore in mind that many a dandy who could
+please me by his phraseology of choice anecdotes could not be more
+than "bored" though I might die in torture at his feet.
+
+"My word! I'm thankful for the winter for one thing," he began, "and
+that's because there ain't any blow-flies. They'd give you the pip in
+the summer. They used to be here blowin' everything they come across.
+They'd blow the cream if we left it a day. They'd blow you if you
+didn't look sharp. I had Whiskey taught to ketch 'em. Here, Whiskey!
+Whiskey!" and as that mongrel appeared, his master tossed him pellets
+of curds dipped in cream, and grinned delightedly as they were
+fiercely snapped. "He thinks it's blow-flies. Great little Whiskey!
+good little Whiskey, catch 'em blow-flies. By Jove! I've had enough
+of farming," continued he, "it's the God-forsakenest game, but me
+grandma won't let me chuck it. I notice no one with any sense stays
+farmin'. They all get a job on the railway, or take to auctioneering,
+or something with money in it. You're always scratchin' on a farm. You
+should have been here in the summer when the tomatoes was ripe.
+Couldn't get rid of 'em for a song--couldn't get cases enough. They
+rotted in the field till the stink of them was worse than a chow's
+camp, an' what didn't rot was just cooked in the sun. Peaches the
+same, an' great big melons for a shilling a dozen. That's farming for
+you! The only time you could sell things would be when you haven't got
+'em. Whiskey can eat melon like a good 'un, and grapes too." Andrew
+now threw out the wash-up water, pitching it on to Whiskey, who went
+away whimpering aggrievedly, much to the delight of his master, and
+illustrating that even the favourite pet of a youth has something to
+put up with in this imperfect life.
+
+
+
+
+TEN.
+
+PROVINCIAL POLITICS AND SEMI-SUBURBAN DENTISTS.
+
+
+May dawned over the world, and throughout New South Wales awoke a
+stir, reaching even to the sleepy heart of Noonoon. This was owing to
+the fact that the State Parliament was near the end of its term, and
+political candidates for the ensuing election were already in the
+field.
+
+Though not many decades settled, the country had progressed to
+nationhood, England allowing the precocious youngster this freedom of
+self-government, and sending her Crown Prince to open her first
+Commonwealth Parliament. Then the fledgling nation, bravely in the van
+of progress, had invested its women with the tangible hall-mark of
+full being or citizenship, by giving them a right to a voice in the
+laws by which they were governed; and now, watched by the older
+countries whose women were still in bondage, the women of this
+Australian State were about to take part in a political election. Not
+for the first time either,--let them curtsey to the liberality of
+their countrymen!
+
+The Federal elections, for which women were entitled to stand as
+senatorial candidates, had come previously, and though old prejudice
+had been too strong to the extent of many votes to grasp that a woman
+might really be a senatrix, and that a vote cast for her would not be
+wasted, still one woman candidate had polled 51,497 votes where the
+winning candidate had gone in on 85,387, and this had been no
+"shrieking sister" such as the clever woman is depicted by those who
+fear progress, but a beautiful, refined, educated, and particularly
+womanly young lady in the heyday of youth. The cowardly old sneer that
+disappointment had driven her to this had no footing here, as she had
+every qualification, except empty-headedness, to have ensured success
+as a belle in the social world, had she been disposed to pad her own
+life by means of a wealthy marriage instead of endeavouring to benefit
+her generation in becoming a legislator. She was a fitting daughter of
+the land of the Southern Sun, whose sons were among the first to admit
+their sisters to equal citizenship with themselves, and she
+brilliantly proved her fitness for her right by her wonderful ability
+on the hustings, which had been free from any vocal shortcoming and
+unacquainted with hesitation in replying to the knottiest question
+regarding the most intricate bill.
+
+The Federal election, however, in a sense had been farther
+away--fought at long-range, while that of the State was brought right
+to one's back door.
+
+The Federal campaign had been freer from the provincial bickering
+which was a prominent feature of the State election, and made it more
+a hand-to-hand contest, where every elector was worthy of
+consideration; and though women were debarred from entering the State
+Parliament, yet they were now beings worth fawning upon for a vote,
+and their addition to the ranks of the electors gave matters a decided
+fillip.
+
+The first intimation that the campaign had actually started reached me
+one afternoon when Dawn drove me into town to see a dentist. The whole
+Clay household had risen up against me patronising a local dentist.
+
+"They're only blacksmiths," said Andrew. "I could tinker up a tooth as
+good as they can with a bit of sealing-wax."
+
+However, I could get no doctor to give me a longer lease of life than
+twelve months, and as it was not a very important tooth, I considered
+the local practitioners were sufficient to the evil.
+
+The afternoon before, when Ernest had dropped in to see _me_, I had
+_casually_ mentioned that Dawn and I were going up town next day, so
+therefore, what more natural than, as we entered the main street, to
+see him very busily inspecting wares in a saddler's shop--articles for
+which he could have no use, and which if he had, a man of his means
+could obtain of superior quality from Sydney. I diplomatically, and
+Dawn ostentatiously, failed to notice him as we drove past to where
+was displayed the legend--S. Messre, Chemist and Dentist, late C. C.
+Rock-Snake, and where Dawn halted, saying, at the eleventh hour, "You
+ought to go to Sydney, Charlie Rock-Snake was all right, but I don't
+care for the look of this fellow."
+
+Going to Sydney, however, would not serve my ends nearly so well as
+consulting S. Messre; for while I was with him Dawn would remain
+outside, and what more certain than that Mr R. Ernest Breslaw, walking
+up the street and quite unexpectedly espying her, and being such a
+friend of mine, should dawdle with her awaiting my reappearance, while
+growing inwardly wishful that it might be long delayed.
+
+I knocked on the counter of the dusty, dirty shop, and after a time
+an extraordinary person appeared behind it.
+
+"Are you Mr Messre?"
+
+"I believe so. Hold hard a bit."
+
+Probably he went to ascertain who he really was, for I was left
+sitting alone until a splendidly muscular figure in a fashionable
+pattern of tweeds halted opposite the vehicle holding my driver. I was
+quite satisfied with Mr S. Messre's methods, though his initial, as
+Andrew averred, might very well have stood for silly.
+
+The golfing cap came off the heavy red locks, while the bright brown
+ones under the smart felt hat with the pom-poms, bobbed in response,
+and Mr S. Messre came upon me again, wiping his fingers on a soiled
+towel, and tugging each one separately after the manner of childhood.
+
+"Did you want a tooth pulled?"
+
+"Well, I wished to consult you dentally, but not in public," I said,
+as two urchins came in and listened with all their features.
+
+"Well, hold hard a bit and I'll take you inside."
+
+I held or rather sat hard on the tall hard chair, and heard Ernest
+explaining to Dawn that he had been swimming in the sun, which made
+his face as red as his hair, for he gave her to understand that such
+was not his usual complexion. His red locks, very dark and handsome,
+which lent him a distinction and endeared him to me, were such a
+sensitive point with him that his mind was continually reverting to
+them, and that audacious Dawn unkindly replied--
+
+"It wouldn't do to be all red. If my hair were red I'd dye it green or
+blue, but red I would not have."
+
+"But it's a good serviceable colour for a _man_," meekly protested the
+knight.
+
+"Perhaps for a _fighting_ man," retorted the young minx with no
+contradictory twinkle in her eye; "but I could never trust a
+red-headed person: all that I know are deceitful."
+
+I was dismayed. How would a gentle young athlete weather this? To a
+perky little man of more wits than muscle, or to a gay old Lothario,
+it would have been an incentive to the chase, but I feared Dawn was
+too horribly, uncompromisingly given to speaking what she felt,
+irrespective of grace, to expand this young Romeo to love; but much
+merciless fire will be stood from beauty, and he made a valiant
+defence.
+
+"There are exceptions to every rule, Miss Dawn. I never was known as
+deceitful; ask any one who knows me."
+
+"I don't know any one who knows you."
+
+"Ask your friend inside, I think she'll give me a good character."
+
+"Quite the reverse. If you heard what she says about you, you'd never
+be seen in Noonoon again;" but this assertion was made with such a
+roguish smile on eye and lip that Ernest took up a closer position by
+stepping into the gutter and placing one foot on the step of the sulky
+and a corresponding hand on the dashboard railing; and in that
+position I left them, with yellow-haired Miss Jimmeny from the corner
+pub. walking by on the broken asphalt under the verandahs, and casting
+a contemptuous and condemnatory glance at the forward Dawn who
+favoured the men.
+
+Mr S. Messre led the way to a place at the back of the shop which was
+layered with dust and strewn with cotton-wool and dental appliances,
+some of them smeared from the preceding victims, evidently. He did not
+seem to know how to dispose of me, so I placed myself in the
+professional chair and invited him to examine the broken molar.
+
+"The light is bad here," he remarked, fumbling with my head, and
+making towards my face with one of the soiled instruments.
+
+"That is not my fault," I replied.
+
+"This is him!" he further remarked, tapping my cheek with a finger.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"He wants patching."
+
+"So _he_ leads me to imagine."
+
+"The nerve would want killing."
+
+"Quite so, and to attend to its wants I'm here."
+
+"I'd take eight shillings to kill the nerve."
+
+"Would you use them as an apparatus to execute it?"
+
+"Then I'd take twelve or thirteen shillings to fill it," he continued.
+
+I was interested in the uniqueness of his methods.
+
+"Would you purpose to powder the shillings or use them whole--I would
+have thought an alligator's or shark's tooth would scarcely require
+that quantity of material?"
+
+Mr Messre stared at me in a dazed manner.
+
+"I wouldn't touch the tooth under that," he continued.
+
+"Is there another tooth under it? then extract this one and give the
+other a fair chance."
+
+"It would be a lot of trouble," he kept on, without specially replying
+to my remark.
+
+"Perhaps so; when one comes to think of it, teeth, I suppose, are not
+filled without some exercise on the part of the dentist."
+
+"I wouldn't think of touching that tooth for less than a guinea; why
+it would take at least an hour to do it."
+
+"This is the first intimation I've had that dentists calculated to
+mend teeth without spending any time on them," I said.
+
+Mr Messre didn't seem to grasp the drift of my remarks, and as I felt
+unequal to maintaining the conversation for a more extended period, I
+announced my intention of thinking about what he had said. He said it
+would be as well, and I emerged to find Ernest had so far progressed
+as to be seated in the sulky holding my parasol over Dawn.
+
+Youth and beauty is privileged to command an athlete to hold its
+sunshade, while old age has difficulty in finding so much as a small
+boy to carry its basket across the street. Mayhap this is why it is
+largely the elderly and frequently the unattractive people who fight
+for honest rights for their class and sex, while it is from pretty
+young women's lips issues most of the silly rubbish anent it being
+entirely women's fault that men will not conform to their "influence"
+in all matters. Only a very small percentage can regard conditions
+from any but a selfish point of view or conceive of any but their own
+shoe-pinch.
+
+"I happened to see Miss Dawn here and waited to ask you how you are,"
+said Ernest.
+
+"Just what you should have done," I replied; "and now if you can wait
+till I investigate another dentist I want your opinion on a purchase I
+am making."
+
+"Oh, certainly," he hastened to reply; "I'm doing a loaf this
+afternoon. I thought I heard my oar crack this morning, so came for
+some leather to tack round it."
+
+This in elaborate explanation of his presence there.
+
+The second dentist proved the antithesis of his contemporary, being
+short, pleasant, and bright.
+
+"I'll tell you what," he said, laughing engagingly, "the best thing to
+be done with that tooth is to dress it with carbolic acid. Now this is
+a secret."
+
+"One of those that only a few don't know, I suppose."
+
+"Perhaps so," he said, laughing still more pleasantly.
+
+"You can do this tooth just as well as I can. Get three penno'worth of
+acid and put some in once or twice a-day and the nerve will be dead in
+two or three days, and I'll do the rest."
+
+As he proved such an amiable individual, though probably an
+exceedingly suburban dentist, I got rid of half an hour in desultory
+chat, as I could see from the window that the knight and the lady, if
+not progressing like a house on fire, were at least enjoying
+themselves in a casual way.
+
+"Did you have only one tooth to be attended to?" inquired Dawn when I
+appeared.
+
+"Yes; and I fear that it will be one too many for Noonoon dentists," I
+replied. I could think of nothing upon which to ask Ernest's advice,
+so I feigned that I was not feeling well enough for any further worry
+that afternoon, but would command his services at a future date.
+
+I now held the pony while Dawn disappeared into a shop and reappeared
+with an acquaintance who invited us to attend a political meeting that
+night. The electors, alarmed at the prodigal propensities of the
+sitting government, were forming an Opposition League to remedy
+matters, and the first step was to choose one of the two candidates
+offering themselves as representatives of this party for Noonoon. The
+first one was to speak that night in the Citizens' Hall, and by paying
+a shilling one could become a member of the League, and vote for this
+candidate or the other.
+
+"Oh, if I only had a vote!" regretfully exclaimed Dawn.
+
+"He's a young chap named Walker, from Sydney,--very rich, I believe.
+Do you know him?" Mrs Pollaticks inquired of me.
+
+"I've heard of him," I said, exchanging glances with Ernest, "and
+should like to hear him, if convenient."
+
+"I'll drive you in," volunteered Dawn.
+
+"If you're around you might act as groom," I suggested to Ernest, and
+he gladly responding, it was agreed that we should begin
+electioneering that night.
+
+"I knew Ernest would be delighted to be with us, he takes great
+pleasure in my company," I remarked with assumed complacence as we
+drove home; and I watched Dawn smile at my conceit in imagining any
+one took pleasure in my company while she was present, and that any
+normal male under ninety should do so would have been so phenomenal
+that she had reason for that derisive little smile.
+
+"You said he was hopelessly red-headed," she remarked; "why, I think
+he has a handsome kind of red hair. I never thought red hair could be
+nice, but Mr Ernest's is different."
+
+I smiled to myself.
+
+"I never thought much of men, but this one is different," has been
+said by more than one bride; and, "I never could suffer infants, but
+this kid is different to all I've seen," is an expression often heard
+from proud young fathers.
+
+"His young lady thinks so at all events," I innocently remarked, and
+we fell into silence complete.
+
+
+
+
+ELEVEN.
+
+ANDREW DISGRACES HIS "RARIN'."
+
+
+The silence that fell upon Dawn and myself was unbroken when we went
+to tea and seemed to have affected the whole company, or else it was
+the conversational powers of Andrew, who was absent, which were
+wanting to enliven us.
+
+"He ought to be home," said grandma. "He's got no business away, and
+the place can't be kep' in a uproar for him when the girls want to go
+out."
+
+The old lady had determined to take a vigorous interest in politics,
+and spoke of going to hear the meetings later on herself.
+
+It presently transpired that Andrew had not been looking to his
+grandma for all that went into his "stummick" so religiously as he
+should have been. Just as he was under discussion he made a dramatic
+entry, and fell breathlessly in his grandma's arm-chair near the
+fireplace. The usual occupant glared at him in astonishment and
+demanded "a explanation," which came immediately, but not from Andrew.
+Instead there was a loud and imperative knocking at a side door, and
+when Carry, after cursing the white ants which had made the door hard
+to open by throwing it out of plumb with their ravages, at last got
+it open, there appeared an irate old man carrying a stout stick. It
+was plain that he too had been running,--in short, was in pursuit of
+Andrew, who had quite collapsed in the chair.
+
+"I've come, missus, to warn you to keep your boy out of my orange
+orchard," he gulped. "Six or seven times I've nearly caught him an'
+young Bray in it, but to-night I run 'em down, an' only they escaped
+me I'd have give 'em the father of a skelpin'. If I ketch them there
+again I'll bring 'em before the court an' give 'em three months; but
+you being a neebur, I'd like to give you a show of keepin' him out
+first."
+
+The old dame, _à la_ herself, had been in the act of pouring milk and
+sprinkling sugar on some boiled rice which frequently appeared on the
+menu during Carry's week in the kitchen, previous to handing it to
+Miss Flipp, but she waved her hand, thereby indicating that in so dire
+an extremity we were to be trusted with the sugar-basin ourselves,--in
+fact, that any laxity in this item would have to be let slide for
+once.
+
+After the manner of finely-strung temperaments with the steel in them,
+which wear so well, and to the last remain as sensitive as a youth or
+maiden, Mrs Martha Clay then rose from her seat, visibly trembling,
+but with a flashing battle-light in her eyes.
+
+"What have you got to say to this?" she demanded, turning on her
+grandson.
+
+"I never touched none of his bloomin' old oranges. It was Jack Bray,
+it wasn't me."
+
+"Yes," said she; "and if you was listening to Jack Bray it would be
+you done it all, an' he who never done nothink. What's the charge, and
+what damages have you laid on it?" she demanded of the accuser,
+fixing him with a fiery glance.
+
+"I ain't goin' to lay any damages this time, I only thought you'd
+rather me warn you than not; I know I would with a youngster. I
+suppose after all he ain't done no more than you an' me done in our
+young days, an' my oranges bein' ripe so extra early was a great
+temptation," familiarly said the man.
+
+"Well, I don't know what _you_ done in your young days, but I know I
+never took a pin that didn't belong to me, none of me children or
+people neither; and as for Jim Clay, he wouldn't think of touchin' a
+thing--he was too much the other way to get on in the world. An' it
+ain't any fault of my rarin' that me grandson is hounded down a
+vagabond," said the old lady in a tragic manner.
+
+Seeing her fierce agitation, the lad's pursuer was alarmed and sought
+to pacify her by further remarking--
+
+"He ain't done nothink out of the way, an' I admit the oranges was a
+great temptation."
+
+The old lady snorted, and the colour of her face heralded something
+verging on an apoplectic seizure.
+
+"Temptation! If people was only honest and decent by keepin' from the
+things that ain't any temptation, we'd be all fit for jail or a
+asylum. Pretty thing, if he's only to leave alone that which ain't any
+temptation to him! You could put other people's things before me, I
+wouldn't take 'em, not if me tongue was hanging out a yard for 'em.
+That's the kind of honesty that I've always practised to me neighbours
+and rared into any one under me, and that's the only kind of honesty
+that is honesty at all," she splendidly finished. "An' I'm very
+thankful to you for informin' me. I wish you had caught him an'
+skelped the hide off of him. It's what I'll do meself soon as I sift
+the matter."
+
+The old man bade good-night and departed with his stick.
+
+"He's always sneakin' about the lanes, an' only poked his tongue out
+at me w'en I wanted to know where he was," maliciously said Uncle Jake
+in reference to his grand-nephew.
+
+"Mean old hide, always likes to sit on any one when they're down,"
+whispered Dawn and Carry to each other. "A pity Andrew hadn't two
+tongues to stick out at him."
+
+Miss Flipp was too dull to be aroused by even this disturbance. The
+only time she showed any feeling was when her "uncle" paid her
+clandestine visits. Her life seemed to be in a terrible tangle--more
+than that, in a syrtis,--but I did not take a hand in further crushing
+her. She had been kind to me during my indisposition, and except in
+extreme cases, "live and let live" was an axiom I had learned to
+carefully regard. Knowledge of the slight chance of circumstances or
+opportunity--which too frequently is the only difference between a
+good person and a bad one, success and failure--reminds one to be very
+lenient regarding human frailty.
+
+"Now, me young shaver! I'll deal with you," said grandma, turning to
+Andrew, in whom there appeared to be left no defence. Never have I
+seen so old a woman in such a towering rage, and rarely have I seen
+one of seventy-five with vigour sufficiently unimpaired to feel so
+extremely as she gave evidence of doing.
+
+"This is the first time anythink like this ever happened in my family,
+and if I thought it wouldn't be the last I believe I'd kill you where
+you are."
+
+Andrew emitted no sound, he had given himself up with that calmness
+one evinces when the worst is upon them--when there is nothing further
+beyond.
+
+"Go off to bed as you are without a bit to eat," she continued,
+plucking at her little collar as though to get air. "To-morrow I'll
+see the Brays about this, and I'll skelp the skin off of you. I'd do
+it now, only there's no knowing where I'd end, I feel that terrible
+upset. What would Jim Clay think now, I wonder? You God-forsaken young
+vagabond, bringin' disgrace upon me at this time of me life. I'd be
+ashamed to walk up town and give me vote as I was lookin' forward to,
+and me grandson nearly in jail for stealing. _Stealing_! It's a nice
+sounding word in connection with one of your own that you've rared
+strict, ain't it? You snuffed up mighty smart when I asked you your
+doings, now it comes out why you couldn't account for 'em. 'Might as
+well be in a bloomin' glass case as have to carry a pocket-book round
+an' make a map of where he's been,' sez he. It appears a map of your
+doin's wouldn't pass examination by the police. How would you have
+been makin' a honest way in the world if I wasn't here to be
+responsible for you?"
+
+"Oh, grandma!" said Dawn, seeking to calm her, lest the excitement
+would be too much. "After all it mightn't be so bad. Lots of boys take
+a few paltry oranges out of the gardens and no one makes such a fuss
+but that old creature. He just wants to be officious." This was an
+injudicious attempt at peace.
+
+"Is that you speakin', Dawn? '_Lots of boys do it._' Perhaps you will
+also say, 'Lots of girls come home with a baby in their arms.' Once
+you get the idea in your head that there's no harm because lots do it,
+you're on a express train to the devil. Lots of people do things and
+some don't, and that's the only difference between the vagabonds I've
+never been, and the decent folk I'd cut me throat if I wasn't among.
+An' you're the last person I ever would have thought would have upheld
+a _thief_!"
+
+"Well, grandma!" protested Dawn, "I don't uphold him. I'm ashamed to
+be related to him, but don't make yourself ill now. Sleep on it, and
+to-morrow give him rats."
+
+"Remember this," continued grandma, "an' carry the knowledge through
+life with you, that I can't make your character for you. Each one has
+to make their own, but seeing the foundation you've been give, makes
+you a disgrace to it. It takes you all your time for years an' years
+puttin' in good bricks to make a good character, but you can get rid
+of it for ever in one act, don't forget that; an' remember that
+belongin' to a respectable family won't stop you from bein' a thief.
+You are very quick to talk about some of these poor rag-tag about
+town, an' I suppose you an' Jack Bray thought you couldn't be the
+same, but you've found out your mistake! Go to bed now, and I'll
+leather you well to-morrer," she concluded encouragingly; and Andrew
+lost no time in taking this remand, looking, to use his own
+expression, as though he had the "pip."
+
+"Dear me!" sighed the old lady, "them as has rared any boys don't know
+what it is to die of idleness an' want of vexation. If it ain't
+somethink beyond belief, one might be that respectable theirself they
+could be put in a glass case, an' yet here would be a young vagabond
+bringin' them to shame before the whole district."
+
+"But I don't see that he has done anything very terrible," hazily
+interposed Miss Flipp.
+
+"Good gracious! If he had been cheekin' some one or playin' a
+far-fetched joke, I might be able to forgive him, but there must be
+reason in everythink, an' to go an' meddle with other's property is
+carryin' things too far. 'Heed the spark or you may dread the fire,'
+is a piece of wisdom I've always took to heart in rarin' _my_ family,
+and I notice them as are inclined to look leniently on evil, no matter
+how small, never come out the clean potato in the finish," trenchantly
+concluded the old woman; and Miss Flipp was so disconcerted that she
+immediately retired to her room, but noticed by no one but me.
+Probably the poor girl, if gifted with any capacity for retrospection,
+wished that she had heeded the spark that she might not now be in
+danger of being consumed by the fire.
+
+
+
+
+TWELVE.
+
+SOME SIDE-PLAY.
+
+
+As Andrew was banished, and grandma determined to retire to ponder
+upon his sin, she waived it being Carry's week in the kitchen and
+consequently her duty to prepare supper coffee, and suggested that we
+younger women should all go to the meeting, but Miss Flipp refused on
+the score of a headache.
+
+"Poor creature!" observed grandma, "I think she's afraid of a attack
+of her old complaint, she looks that terrible bad, and don't take
+interest in anythink. She wants rousin' out of herself more. She ain't
+a girl that will confide anythink to one, but her uncle is comin' up
+again to-morrer, an' I think I'll speak to him."
+
+When Carry, Dawn, and I arrived at the Citizens' Hall, Ernest was
+already waiting to act groom, while Larry Witcom also accidentally
+hovered near. He quite as casually took possession of Carry, so there
+was nothing for a common individual like myself but to become
+extremely self-absorbed, so that my keen observation might not be an
+interception of any interest likely to circulate between the knight
+and the lady. The latter seemed to be in one of her contrary moods, so
+attached herself to me like a barnacle, settled me in a seat one from
+the wall, and peremptorily indicating to Ernest that he was to take
+the one against it, put herself carefully away from him on the
+outside. A wag would have arranged the party to suit himself, but that
+was beyond Ernest. He meekly sat down beside me, with a helplessness
+possible only to the sturdiest athlete in the room when in the hands
+of a fair and wilful maid. I could have come to his rescue, but deemed
+it wiser not to thrust him upon Dawn for the present. We had arrived
+very early, so there was time for conversation. Encouraged by me,
+Ernest leant forward and addressed a few remarks to Dawn, which she
+received so coolly that he distraitly talked to me instead, and as
+people began to gather, above the majority towered the fair head and
+striking profile of him I had first seen dealing in pumpkins, and who
+was colloquially known as "Dora" Eweword. Dawn beckoned him to the
+seat beside her, which he took with alacrity, a rollicking laugh and a
+crimsoning face, which, in conjunction with a double chin, bespoke the
+further partnership of a large and well-satisfied appetite.
+
+"I haven't seen you for an age," said Dawn with unusual graciousness.
+
+"Are you sure you wanted to see me?" he inquired, with an amorous
+look.
+
+Dawn used her bewitching eyes of blue in a laughing glance.
+
+"You know you only have to give me the wink and you'll see me as often
+as you want," straightforwardly confessed "Dora"; but Dawn having
+encouraged him to a certain distance, had a mind to bring him no
+nearer.
+
+"I don't care if I never saw you again," she said bluntly, "but
+grandma likes yarning with you, that's why I inquired."
+
+"Dora" looked very red in the face indeed.
+
+"How's Miss Cowper?" mercilessly pursued Dawn, going to the point
+about which she was curious, as is characteristic of swains and maids
+of her degree. "I hope she's well."
+
+"So do I," said Eweword.
+
+"You used to ask after her health about twice a-day. I thought you
+would be taking her to Lucerne Farm to relieve your anxiety;" and in
+response to this "Dora" sealed his fate, as far as my feeling any
+compunction whether he singed his wings or not in the light of Dawn's
+bright candle, for he said with a touch of bravado--
+
+"Oh, I was only pulling her leg."
+
+To do the man justice he did not seem down to the full unmanliness of
+this statement; it appeared more one of those nasty and idle remarks
+to which all are prone when in a tight corner, and speaking on the
+spur of the moment.
+
+"Oh, was that all!" said Dawn mockingly. "It was very nice of you. Are
+you always so kind and thoughtful?"
+
+"I'm thinking of clearing out to Sydney in a day or two, I've spent
+enough time loafing. The only thing that has kept me here so long is
+that I wanted to hear how Les. got on in his maiden speech. We're not
+much to each other, but when a fellow has no one belonging to him he
+feels a claim on the most distant connection," said Ernest on the
+other side of me. His interest in Leslie Walker's maiden speech had
+been developed as suddenly as his opinion that he had spent enough
+time in a boat on the river Noonoon.
+
+The connection he mentioned between himself and the candidate about to
+speak was that old Walker, whose only son the latter was, had married
+a widow with one son, by name Ernest Breslaw. Both these parents were
+now dead, leaving the step-brothers as their only offspring. The lads
+had been reared together, and though of utterly different tastes and
+callings, a mutual regard existed between them. Walker had passed his
+examinations at the bar, and Breslaw had been trained to electrical
+engineering, but both being wealthy, neither followed their
+professions except in a nominal way. Walker had put in his time in
+society, motoring, flirting, travelling, dabbling in the arts, and
+building a fine town mansion, while Ernest had spent all his time in
+athletic training, with the result that Walker had fallen a prize in
+the marriage arena, while Ernest was yet in full possession of his
+bachelorhood.
+
+Any further conversation was out of the question, as the candidate--a
+smart, clean-shaven man with clearly cut features--now appeared, and
+announced himself by removing his new straw "decker," and calling
+out--
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen, before we begin I would like to follow the
+democratic principle of asking you to choose a chairman from among
+yourselves."
+
+"We propose Mr Oscar Lawyer!" called several voices, naming a popular
+townsman, and this being seconded, the candidate and the people's
+chairman, two very gentlemanly-looking men for the hustings, ascended
+to the stage side by side.
+
+The chairman took up a position behind a little red table supporting a
+water-bottle and smudgy tumbler, while Leslie Walker sat on another
+chair at the end of it.
+
+Many members of parliament, having risen to their position from
+coal-heaving or hotel-keeping, when going on the war-path a second
+time, take great pains to get themselves _up_ in accordance with
+their idea of the dignity of their office. Many old fellows, roaring
+"Gimme your votes, I'm the only bloke to save the country and see you
+git yer rights," dress this modest _rôle_ in a long-tailed satin-faced
+frock-coat, a good thing in the trouser line, and a stylish
+button-hole; but Leslie Walker, one of the champagne set, had made
+equally palpable efforts to dress himself _down_ to his present
+_début_.
+
+For sure! his suit, which comprised an alpaca coat with a crumpled
+tail, must have been the shabbiest he had, while the glistening new
+white sailor hat had probably been procured at the last moment in the
+vain imagination that, dress as he would, it was not evident at a
+first glance that he had had the bread-and-butter problem solved for
+him by a provident parent before his birth, and that he had lived what
+is designated the cultured life, far and autocratically above sympathy
+with the vulgar and despised herds, upon whose sweat his class build
+the pretty villas fronting the harbour, charge haughtily along the
+roads in automobiles, and sail the graceful yachts on the idyllic
+waters of Port Jackson.
+
+"By Jove! Les. has different ambitions from mine," said Ernest. "I'd
+rather have to stand up to a mill with the champion pug. than face
+what he's on for to-night. Doesn't he look a case in that get up?
+Supposing he gets in, what the devil good will it do then, and it
+takes such crawling to get into parliament nowadays. There are too
+many at the game. I could never face the way one has to flatter some
+of these old creatures for their vote. I'd rather plug them under the
+jaw."
+
+Mr Oscar Lawyer having introduced the speaker, he came forward, and
+after explaining it was his first appearance in politics, charmingly
+proceeded, "I hope I shall not bore you with my remarks as I
+endeavour to outline the various planks in the platform of the party
+to which I have the honour to belong."
+
+Quite superfluous for him to explain that he was a new chum in
+politics. Only a fledgling from a Brussels or Axminster carpeted
+reception-room would stand on the hustings and publish a fear that he
+might be boring his audience. One familiar with the trade of
+electioneering, as it has always been conducted by men, would strut
+and shout and brag, never for a moment worrying whether or not he came
+anywhere near the truth or feeling the slightest qualm, though he
+deafened his hearers with his trumpeting or bored them to complete
+extinction, and would refuse to be silenced even by "eggs of great
+antiquity."
+
+"Les. ought to stick to society," observed his step-brother; "flipping
+around a drawing-room and making all the girls think they were equally
+in the running was more in his line."
+
+"He's a nice, clean, good-looking young fellow at any rate, and
+doesn't look as if he gorged himself--hasn't that red-faced, stuffed
+look," said Dawn. "If I had a vote I'd give it to him just for that,
+as I'm sick of these red-nosed old members of parliament with
+corporations."
+
+"He's the real lah-de-dah Johnny, isn't he?" laughed "Dora" Eweword.
+
+"Don't you say he's any relation of mine," said Ernest. "It would give
+me away, and he thinks I'm in Melbourne. I told every one that's where
+I was bound. I hope he won't catch sight of me."
+
+There was little fear of this; one has to be accustomed to facing a
+crowd before they can distinguish faces.
+
+After the meeting, which dispersed early, Ernest and I hurried out
+into the galvanised iron-walled yard, in which those coming from a
+distance put their horses and vehicles.
+
+Having noted the disconsolate manner in which a pair of dark eyes
+below a thatch of generous hue surreptitiously glanced towards a
+tormentatious maiden with ribbons of blue matching her eyes and
+fluttering on her bosom, I thought it time to come to his rescue.
+
+"If you would care to talk to your friend, he can drive you home while
+I walk with 'Dora'; he says he has something to say to me," said Dawn
+in an aside.
+
+"Are you sure you want to hear it?" I asked.
+
+"How could I tell until I hear it?"
+
+"That is not a fair answer, Dawn."
+
+"Well, it wasn't a fair question," she pouted.
+
+"Very well, I will not press you more, but you'll tell me of it after,
+will you not?"
+
+"Well, what would you like me to do?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, I'd like you to be naughty. Mr _Dora's_ complacence inspires me
+to inveigle him into having to drive me home while you walk with some
+one else."
+
+"Very well, anything for fun," she responded with dancing eyes; and as
+Ernest had the horse in I got into the sulky and said--
+
+"There is room for three here, Mr Eweword, and we would be glad of you
+to put the horse out when we get home."
+
+He took the reins and a seat, and moved aside to make room for the
+loitering Dawn, but she said--
+
+"No, I'll walk; I must keep Carry company, and she doesn't want to
+come just yet."
+
+"Drive on," I commanded, and there was nothing for the entrapped
+"Dora" to do but obey.
+
+I saw Carry go on with another escort. "Will you permit me to see you
+to your gate?" I heard Ernest saying as we went, and Dawn asserting
+that it was unnecessary.
+
+It was a beautiful starry night, with a prospect of a slight frost, as
+we turned down the tree-lined streets of the friendly old town, whose
+folk on their homeward way dawdled in knots to discuss the
+interposition of the women's vote.
+
+"Now the women will do strokes," said one.
+
+"The men have things in such a jolly muddle it will take a long time
+to improve them," another retorted.
+
+"The women will make bloomin' fools of themselves!"
+
+"Couldn't be worse than the men!"
+
+"The women'll all go for this chap because he's good-looking."
+
+"Just as good a reason as going for another because he shouted grog
+for you," and similar remarks, drifted to my ears, but "Dora's" mind
+did not seem to be running on politics.
+
+"Who was that red-headed fellow sitting the other side of you?" he
+inquired.
+
+"Which one?"
+
+"A short block of a fellow with a clean face."
+
+"Oh, he's a man I know."
+
+"Pretty cool of us leaving Dawn. The old dame won't like it."
+
+"She won't mind, considering Dawn has about the most reliable escort
+procurable."
+
+"I suppose it's all right if you know him, but to me he looked like a
+bagman or bike-rider or something in the spieler line."
+
+"Oh no," and pulling my boa about me I smiled to think of the chagrin
+of Dora. He was so beautifully transparent too, but to do him justice
+did not seem to resent the scurvy trick I had played him, as soon his
+equanimity was restored, and we laboured cheerfully but unavailingly
+to promote a conversation.
+
+"Do you really like farming--take a pleasure in it?" I inquired.
+
+"When I'm knocking a decent amount of money out of it I do. There's
+not much fun in anything when it doesn't pay."
+
+"Quite true."
+
+"There might be a frost to-night, but they're nothing here--always
+disappear as soon as the sun is up. Great Scott! aren't these roads?
+The council want stuffing in the Noonoon. It would be an all right
+place only for the roads."
+
+This brought us to Clay's gate, and no further conversational effort
+was necessary. I lingered outside till Eweword had disposed of the
+pony and trap, and by that time Ernest and Dawn, bearing evidence of
+quick walking, appeared, and we went into grandma and Uncle Jake in a
+body.
+
+"The women are going to form a committee to work for Mr Walker if he's
+selected," announced Dawn, "and I want to join it, grandma. I am not
+old enough to vote, but I'd like to work for Mr Walker. He looks worth
+a vote. He's nice and thin, and speaks beautifully without shouting
+and roaring,--not like these old beer-swipers who buy their votes with
+drink."
+
+"He is a decent-looking fellow," said Eweword.
+
+"Oh, well, he'll go in then; that's all the women will care about,"
+said Uncle Jake in one of his half-audible sneers.
+
+"Well," contended Dawn, "men always sneer at women for doing in a
+small degree what men do fifty times worse. If a pretty barmaid comes
+to town all the men are after her like bees, and if a pretty woman
+stood for parliament the men would go off their heads about her, and
+yet they get their hair off terribly if a woman happens to prefer a
+nice gentlemanly man to a big, old, fat beer-barrel, with his teeth
+black from tobacco and his neck gouging over his collar from eating
+too much. Can I join the committee, grandma?"
+
+"If it's proper, and he's my man, you can, an' work instead of me, but
+I must hear them both first."
+
+"If Walker could get you to make a speech for him, we'd all vote for
+him in a body," laughed Eweword; but Dawn replied--
+
+"Oh, you, I suppose you say that to every girl."
+
+Eweword sizzled in his blushes, while Ernest's face slightly cleared
+at this rebuff dealt out to another.
+
+Grandma brought in the coffee and grumbled to Dawn about Carry's
+absence.
+
+"That Larry Witcom ain't no monk, and while a girl is in my house I
+feel I ought to look after her. I believe in every one having liberty,
+but there's reason in everythink."
+
+The girl did not appear till after the young men had gone and Dawn and
+I had withdrawn, but we heard grandma's remonstrance.
+
+"That feller, I told you straight, was took up about a affair in a
+divorce case, an' it would be as well not to make yourself too cheap
+to him. I don't say as most men ain't as bad, only they're not caught
+and bowled out; but w'en they are made a public example of, we have to
+take notice of it. Marry him if you want--use your own judgment; he'll
+be the sort of feller who'll always have a good home, and in after
+years these things is always forgot, and it would be better to be
+married to a man that had that against him (seein' they're all the
+same, only they ain't found out) and could keep you comfortable, than
+one who was _supposed_ to be different an' couldn't keep you. But if
+you ain't goin' to marry him, don't fool about with him. An' unless he
+gets to business an' wants marriage at once, don't take too much
+notice to his soft soap, as you ain't the only girl he's got on the
+string by a long way."
+
+"He acknowledges about the fault he did in his young days, and he says
+it's terribly hard that it's always coming against him now," said
+Carry.
+
+"Well, if a woman does a fault she has to pay for it, hasn't
+she?--that's the order of things," said grandma.
+
+"But this was when he was young and foolish," continued Carry.
+
+"Yes, the poor child, he was terribly innocent, wasn't he? an' was got
+hold of by some fierce designing hussy--they always are--and it was
+all her fault. It always is a woman's fault--only for the women the
+men would be all angels and flew away long ago," said grandma
+sarcastically. "They'll give you plenty of that kind of yarn if you
+listen to 'em; an' if you are built so you can believe it, well an'
+good, but the facts was always too much of a eye-opener for me," and
+with that the contention ended.
+
+"Yes, Carry's the terriblest silly about that Larry Witcom," said
+Dawn; "she swallows all he says. She said to me yesterday, 'He seems
+to be terribly gone on me.' 'Yes,' I said. 'You keep cool about his
+goneness. Wait till he gets down on his knees and bellows and roars
+about his love, and take my tip for it he could forget you then in
+less than a week.' I've seen men pretending to be mad with love, and
+the next month married to some one else. Men's love is a thing you
+want to take with more discount than everything you know. You might be
+conceited enough to believe them if you went by your own lovers, but
+you want to look on at other people's love affairs, and see how much
+is to be depended on there, and measure your own by them, and it will
+keep your head cool," said this girl, who had the most sensible head I
+ever saw in conjunction with her degree of beauty.
+
+She had contracted the habit of slipping into my room for a talk
+before going to bed, and as her bright presence there was a delight to
+me, I encouraged her in it. The gorgeous kimono was a great
+attraction; she loved it so that I had given it her after the first
+night, but did not tell her so, or she would have carried it away to
+her own room, where I would have been deprived of the pleasure of
+seeing it nightly enhance the loveliness of her firm white throat and
+arms.
+
+"How did you and Dora get on together?" she presently inquired.
+
+"Well, you see we didn't elope; how did you and Ernest manage?"
+
+"Well, you see we didn't elope," she laughed.
+
+"No, but you might have arranged such a thing."
+
+"Arranged for such a thing!" she said scornfully. "I'm not in the
+habit of trucking with other people's belongings."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"It was you who said something about his young lady this afternoon--as
+far as I can see he doesn't behave much as if he had one."
+
+So it was my chance remark that had run her wheel out of groove during
+the last few hours!
+
+"Does he not?" I replied. "I think he appears more as though he has a
+young lady now than he did during my previous knowledge of him."
+
+"Well, I don't know how you see it," she said, as she tore down her
+pretty hair.
+
+"What!" I ejaculated in feigned consternation. "He has not been making
+love to you, has he, Dawn? I always had such faith in his manliness."
+
+"Well, he doesn't _say_ anything," said Dawn, with a blush. "But he
+glares at me in the way men do, and when I mention anything I like or
+want, he wants to get it for me, and all that sort of business."
+
+"Perhaps he's falling in love unawares. Young men are often stupid,
+and do not recognise their distemper till it is very ripe. He ought to
+be removed from danger."
+
+"Well, if I ever had a lover, and he liked another girl better, I'd be
+pretty sure he hadn't cared for me, and would not want him any more,"
+she said off-handedly.
+
+"But would it not be better to let him go away and be happy with the
+maid who loves him than to spoil his life by wasting his affection on
+you, when you only think him a great pug-looking creature that you'd
+be ashamed to be seen with?"
+
+"Yes, I don't care for him," she said still more off-handedly; "but he
+doesn't look so queer now I've got used to him. I suppose any one who
+liked him wouldn't think him such a horror."
+
+"No; I for one think him handsome."
+
+"Handsome?"
+
+"Yes, _handsome_."
+
+"Well, I'll go to bed after that and think how some people's tastes
+differ."
+
+"Well, take care you don't think about Ernest."
+
+"Thank you; I don't want the nightmare," she retorted, tossing her
+head.
+
+
+
+
+THIRTEEN.
+
+VARIOUS EVENTS.
+
+
+The following day was eventful. To begin with, after Andrew had
+discharged his early morning duties, he was to appear before his
+grandma for the execution of the sentence she had passed upon him the
+night before. I was assisting him to dry the parts of the
+cream-separator, a task which had become chronic with me, when Carry
+shouted from the kitchen, where she was putting in her week--
+
+"Your grandma says not to be long; she's waiting for you."
+
+Andrew unburdened his soul to me.
+
+"Lord, ain't I just in for it! I'll hear how me grandma rared me since
+I was born! I'm dead sick of this born and rared business. It would
+give a bloke the pip. I didn't make meself born, nor want any one else
+to do it; there ain't much in bein' alive," he said with that
+pessimism which, like measles and whooping-cough, is indigenous to
+extreme youth.
+
+"How could I help being rared? I didn't ask 'em to rare me. I didn't
+make meself a little baby that couldn't help itself, and they needn't
+have rared me unless they liked. Goodness knows, I'd have rather died
+like a little pup before his eyes were opened," he continued so
+tragically that I took the opportunity of smiling behind his back as
+he threw out the dish-water.
+
+"Hurry up! your grannie is waiting!" called Carry once more.
+
+"Blow you! you'll have to wait till I'm done," retorted the boy in a
+tone the reverse of genial.
+
+"People is always chuckin' at their kids how much they owe them. I'm
+blowed if ever I can see it. I didn't want 'em to have me, and don't
+see why it should be everlasting threw at me."
+
+It is a wise provision that youth cannot see what it owes the previous
+generation. This is a chicken that comes back to roost in heavier
+years.
+
+"I wish I had a grandma like Jack Bray's ma. He nicked over to me w'en
+I was after the cows, an' Mrs Bray ain't goin' to kick up any row
+about the oranges. She says she never knew of a boy that didn't go
+into orchards in their young days, and that his dad did, and people
+don't think no more of a boy pickin' up a little fruit than they do of
+pickin' up a stick. Yet grandma will tan the hide off of me. She done
+it once before, and I was stiff for a week."
+
+"Take a tip from me, Andrew! March into your grandma bravely; she's
+the best woman I've seen; you ought to be proud to have such a
+grandma! She's in the right and Mrs Bray's in the wrong. Let her
+hammer you for all she's worth, and every whack you get feel proud
+that she's able to give it at her time of life, and I bet when you're
+a man you'll be telling every one that you had a grandma who was worth
+owning. When she leaves off tell her that this is the last time she'll
+ever have to do it for anything like that, and see if you don't feel
+more a man than you ever did before. Promise me that's what you'll
+do."
+
+"Is that what _you'd_ do if you was me?" he inquired with surprise.
+
+"That's what you'd do if you were me," I replied with a smile. "Just
+try that. Never mind if your grandma does go for you hot and strong."
+
+Andrew wiped the table, wrung out his dishcloth in the back-handed
+manner peculiar to his sex, hung it on a nail behind the door, dried
+his hands on his trousers, which for once were not "busted up," and
+with a less rueful expression than he had exhibited for several hours,
+went forth to meet his grandma.
+
+About ten minutes later he returned blubbering, but it was a sunshiny
+shower, and I did not despise the lad for his tears, for he had a soft
+nature, and was quite a child despite his big stature and sixteen
+years.
+
+"Well?" I inquired, recognising that he was anxious to relate his
+experience.
+
+"She banged away with the strap of the breechin' till she was winded,
+and then I said I hoped she'd never have to beat me again for acting
+the goat in other people's gardens that didn't concern me, an' she
+didn't beat me no more then, but I had plenty as it was," he said,
+rubbing his seat and the calves of his legs.
+
+"Well done, stick to that, and be thankful for such a grandma!"
+
+"She ain't a bad old sort when you come to consider," he said with
+that patronage, also an attribute of extreme youth or unsubdued
+snobbishness, and when compared, snobbishness and youth have some
+similar characteristics.
+
+Next item on the programme was Mr Pornsch, whom grandma invited to
+remain to midday dinner, and the old lady being sufficiently human to
+denounce a swell far more fiercely behind his back than to his face,
+in consideration of this one's presence, once more entrusted us to
+sugar our own puddings, regardless of consequences.
+
+After luncheon she interviewed him about his niece's health. Mr
+Pornsch seemed really concerned, and said perhaps she needed to be
+diverted, and that he would see about a further change, which might
+prove beneficial. He then put up his eyeglass to inspect Dawn's
+beauty, and ogling her, attempted to engage her in conversation; but
+the girl didn't seem at all attracted by him or thankful for the
+favours he brought her in the form of an exquisite box of bonbons and
+the latest song.
+
+"I don't accept presents, thank you," she said uncompromisingly.
+
+"Do you never make exceptions?"
+
+"Only from people I like _very_ much."
+
+"Well, I trust I may some day be among the exceptions," he said, in a
+gruesome attempt to be ingratiating; but the girl replied--
+
+"Then you hope for impossibilities."
+
+Somewhat disconcerted though not the least abashed, Mr Pornsch
+persevered by asking if she ever went to Sydney, and stated the
+pleasure it would be to him to provide her with tickets for any of the
+plays; but even this could not overcome her unconquerable horror of
+the various intemperances suggested by his person, so he had to
+retreat.
+
+Dawn's grandmother remonstrated with her afterwards.
+
+"You ought to be a little more genteeler, Dawn, and you could refuse
+presents just as well. Even if he isn't the takin'est old chap, that
+is not any reason for you to be ungenteel."
+
+"Well, I don't care," replied Dawn, whose exquisitely moulded chin,
+despite an irresistible dimple, was expressive of determination. "If I
+was a great old podge and had a blue nose from swilling and gorging,
+and was fifty if I was a day, and then went goggling after a young
+fellow of eighteen, he wouldn't be very civil to me, or be lectured if
+he spoke to me the way I deserved, and I think these old creatures of
+men ought to be discouraged by all the girls. What's sauce for the
+goose is the same for the gander."
+
+Mr Pornsch had not long departed when Mrs Bray favoured us with a
+call, so grandma was spared a pilgrimage to her house. She and Carry
+exchanged a stiffly formal greeting, but the visitor beamed upon the
+remainder of us and seated herself in our midst.
+
+"Oh, I say, ain't it a blessed nark to the men us going to have a
+vote? He! he! Ha! ha! It fairly maddens 'em to see us getting a bit of
+freedom--makes 'em that wild they don't know how to be sneerin' an'
+nasty enough. Every one of us will just roll up an' use our power now
+we've got it,--they've kep' our necks under their heel long enough."
+
+"I wasn't thinkin' of the vote at present," said Grandma Clay. "I was
+just off to see you about what our noble nibbs have been doin' in that
+old Gawling's orchard; but I beat Andrew already in case. What did you
+think of 'em?"
+
+Mrs Bray put back her handsome head, decorated by an extremely
+fashionable hat, and laughed boisterously.
+
+"Fancy the old toad runnin' 'em down,--gave 'em a bit of a scare,
+didn't it? Old mongrel, to kick up a fuss over a few paltry oranges!
+As if we don't all know what boys is; why, there'd be no chance of
+rarin' them without touchin' nothing, unless you carted them off to
+the back-blocks where there wasn't no one within reach. I told him
+what I thought of him. 'How dare you!' says I. 'Bring witnesses of
+this,' said I."
+
+Grandma Clay arose.
+
+"Well, if that's your idea of rarin' a family, it ain't mine. Why,
+can't you hear the parson's everlastin' preaching and giving examples
+how taking a pin has been the start of a feller coming to the gallows;
+and this is a much worse beginning than a pin! If the only way of
+rarin' them not to steal was to put 'em where there was no possibility
+of stealing nothink, a pretty sort of honesty that would be; you might
+as well say the only way to rare a girl modest was to let her never
+have a chance of being nothink else. Some people, of course, has
+different views, but I believe in holding to mine; they've brought me
+up to this time very well."
+
+"Oh, you are terrible strict; you wouldn't have no peace of your life
+rarin' boys if you cut things so fine as that. Now w'en women gets the
+rule it might become the fashion for men to be more proper. Look here,
+the men are that mad--"
+
+Uncle Jake here interrupted her by appearing for four o'clock tea.
+
+"Well, Mr Sorrel, now the women has come to show you how to do things,
+there might be something done in the country."
+
+"Nice fools they'll make of themselves," he sneeringly replied.
+
+"They couldn't make no greater fools of themselves than the men has
+always done,--lying in the gutter an' breakin' their faces," said Mrs
+Bray.
+
+"Wait till the women go at it, they'll fight like cats," continued
+Uncle Jake, whose power to annoy depended not so much upon what he
+said as his way of saying it.
+
+Dawn chipped into the rescue at this point.
+
+"I'm dead sick of that yarn about women fighting. It's a mean lie.
+They never fight half as much as men; and girls always love each other
+more, and are more friendly together than men. The only women who
+fight with their own sex and call them cats are a few nasty things who
+are trying to please men by helping them to keep women down and make
+little of them; and the fools! that sort of meanness never pleases any
+men, only those that are not worth pleasing."
+
+"Well, now that women has the vote they ought to plough, an' drive the
+trains, and let the men sit down inside," continued Jake. But Mrs Bray
+descended upon him.
+
+"Yes; an' the men ought to come inside an' sweep, an' sew, and have
+their health ruined for a man's selfishness, an' be tied to a baby and
+four or five toddlers from six in the mornin' till ten at night, day
+in and day out, like the women do. What do you think, Mr Eweword?" she
+inquired of this individual, who had joined the company and awaited
+the conclusion of her remarks ere he greeted us.
+
+"I think the women ought to vote if they want to. There's nothing to
+stop 'em voting and doing their housework as well; and the Lord knows
+it doesn't matter who they vote for, as all the members are only a
+pack of 'skytes,' after a good billet for themselves. Think I'll have
+a go for it to see if it would pay better than farmin'," he said, with
+his mouth extended in a laugh that redeemed the weakness of this
+feature by exhibiting the beauty of a perfect set of teeth.
+
+"What about women havin' to keep theirselves in subjection?" persisted
+Uncle Jake. This subject apparently lay near his heart.
+
+"I always think that means for them to take care of themselves, and
+not bust over the hard dragging work that men were meant for," said
+Mrs Bray; "for I've always noticed that any man who puts his wife to
+man's work never comes to no good in the finish. If a man can't float
+his own boat, and thinks a woman can keep his and her own end up at
+the same time, she might as well fold her hands from the start, as the
+little she can do will never keep things goin' and only pave the way
+for doctors' bills."
+
+"You might try to argue it, but if you believe the Bible you can see
+there in every page that women ain't meant only to be under men," said
+the gallant Jake.
+
+"It ain't a case of not believin' the Bible, it's only that we ain't
+fools enough to believe all the ways people twists it to suit
+theirselves; men as talks that way is always the sort would be in a
+benevolent asylum only for some woman keepin' 'em from it," said
+grandma, coming to the rescue. "Cowards always drag in the Bible to
+back theirselves up far more than proper people does; and there's
+always one thing as strikes me in the Bible, an' that is w'en God was
+going to send His son down in human form. He considered a woman fit to
+be His mother, but there wasn't a man livin' fit to be His father. I
+reckon that's a slap in the face from the Almighty hisself that ought
+to make men more carefuller when they try to make little of women."
+
+Even Uncle Jake collapsed before this, and Mrs Bray ceased contention
+and veered her talk to gossip.
+
+"Young Walker has been chose by the Opposition League in Noonoon, an'
+we're goin' to form a committee at once and work for him. Ada
+Grosvenor is goin' to form a society for educating women how to vote."
+
+"Ada Grosvenor!" exclaimed grandma. "I thought she would be too much a
+upholder of the men to be the start of anythink like that."
+
+"I don't see how educating one's self how to vote would be making them
+a putter down of the men," said Dawn.
+
+"Well, it's much the same thing," said Mrs Bray. "For if a woman
+educates herself on anything it will show her that a lot of the men
+want puttin' down--a long way down too. You'll see the men will think
+it's against 'em, and try to squash her and her society, for they're
+always frightened if you begin to learn the least thing you will find
+out how you're bein' imposed upon; but they don't care how much you
+learn in the direction of wearin' yourself out an' slavin' to save
+money for them to spend on themselves."
+
+"Oh, come now," laughed "Dora"; "we're not all so bad as that!"
+
+"Not at your time of life w'en you're after the girls and pretendin'
+you're angels to catch 'em; it's after you've got 'em in your power
+that things change," said Mrs Bray.
+
+The company was now further enlarged by the arrival of Ernest, soon
+followed by a young lady I had not previously met--a tall brown-eyed
+girl, with pleasant determination in every line of her well-cut face,
+and who proved to be the young lady under discussion--Miss Ada
+Grosvenor, daughter of the owner of the farm adjoining Bray's and
+Clay's.
+
+Her errand was to invite Dawn to join the society she was promoting.
+
+She explained it was not for the support of a party, but for the
+exchange and search of knowledge that should direct electresses to
+exercise their long-withheld right in a worthy manner. I listened with
+pleasure to the thoughtful and earnest ideals to be discerned
+underlying the girl's practically expressed ideas, and delighted in
+the humorous intelligence flashing from her clear eyes, and was
+altogether favourably impressed with her as a type of womanhood--one
+of the best extant.
+
+She conversed with the elder members of the party and Ernest, and this
+left "Dora" Eweword in charge of Carry and Dawn. His giggle was much
+in evidence. Between blasts of it he could be heard inviting the girls
+to a pull on the river, and they presently set off round the corner of
+Miss Flipp's bedroom leading to the flights of wooden steps down to
+the boats under the naked willows. The nature of the one swift glance
+that travelled after them from Ernest's eyes did not escape my
+observation, so I suggested that he, Miss Grosvenor, and myself should
+follow a good example, and we did. I knew it would be a relief to him
+to overtake Eweword, pull past him with ease, and leave him a speck in
+the distance, as he did. I felt a satisfaction in noting Dawn watch
+his splendid strokes, and Miss Grosvenor's animated conversation with
+him and enthusiastically expressed admiration of his rowing. She was
+not so exacting in the matter of detail as Dawn, and red hair did not
+prevent her from enjoying the company of a splendid specimen of the
+opposite sex when she had the rare good fortune of encountering him.
+
+"That's a fine stamp of a girl," he cordially remarked as, having at
+her request pulled the boat to the edge of the stream, she landed and
+sprang up the bank for ferns; but not by any inveiglement could I
+induce him to give an opinion of Dawn, which was propitious of her
+being his real lady. When we pulled down stream again between the
+fertile farm-lands spread with occasional orange and lemon groves,
+beautiful with their great crops of yellowing fruit, we found that the
+other party were already deserting their craft.
+
+"We had to give it best. Mr Eweword soon got winded. I never saw any
+one pull a boat so splendidly as you do, Mr Ernest," called the
+outspoken Carry, who had not acquired the art of paying a compliment
+to one member of a party without running _amok_ of the feelings of
+another. Eweword, despite his shapely and imposing bulk, had not
+developed his athletic possibilities so much as those of the gourmand,
+and, reddening to the roots of his stubbed hair, he looked the reverse
+of pleased with the tactless young woman,--an expression usually to be
+found on the countenance of one or more members of a company following
+the publication of her opinions.
+
+Miss Grosvenor and Ernest continued to chat with such apparent
+enjoyment that Dawn said pointedly--
+
+"Pooh! there's no art in pulling a boat; any galoot with a little
+brute force can do that,"--a remark having the desired effect, for the
+young Breslaw feigned not to hear, his face rivalled the colour of
+"Dora's," and his remarks grew absent.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," persisted Carry, "I know plenty of
+galoots,--they're the only sort of men there are in the Noonoon
+district, and they can't row for sour apples."
+
+Dawn singled out "Dora" Eweword, and went up the bank with him,
+leaving the remainder of us together. Miss Grosvenor favoured us with
+a cordial invitation to partake of the hospitality of her home during
+the following evening; and delighted with the intelligence and go of
+the girl, I was pleased to accept. Ernest said he would be delighted
+to escort me, but Carry said she had her work to do, and had no time
+to run about to people's places. Miss Grosvenor received this with a
+merry twinkle in her eye, and said to me--
+
+"Well, Dawn will come to show you the way. It is an uncomfortable path
+if you don't know it;" and with this she bade good afternoon and ran
+around the orchard among the square weed and wild quince, across an
+area abounding in lines of barbed-wire.
+
+Ernest too departed in a triangular direction leading to the curious
+old bridge spanning the stream.
+
+"What makes him hang about here so long?" asked Carry. "Has he a girl
+in the district? Do you think he seems gone on Dawn?"
+
+"Perhaps it's Carry?"
+
+"No such luck. I wish he were. I suppose he has money. They say over
+where he boards he has a set of rooms to himself, and is very liberal.
+What would he be doing up here so long?"
+
+"He doesn't publish his business. Perhaps he's staying in this nice
+quiet nook to write a book or something," I said idly, by way of
+accounting for his idleness, or the curious might have set to work to
+discover more of his doings than he wished to get abroad just then.
+
+"He doesn't look much like the fools that write books, but every one
+is writing one these days. I know of five or six about Noonoon even;
+it seems to be a craze."
+
+"Perhaps a cycle!"
+
+"I often wonder who is going to read 'em all and do the work."
+
+This brought us to Clay's, Carry supporting me on her arm, and thus
+ended her discourse.
+
+Dora stayed for tea, but it was a dull meal, as Dawn now appeared
+desirous of repelling him.
+
+Andrew, who on account of his drubbing had been very subdued during
+dinner, had regained his usual form, and when Uncle Jake, to whom the
+freeing of women seemed an unabating irritation, remarked--
+
+"Who's this young Walker? All the women will be mad for him because
+he's good-looking and got a soft tongue. They ought to stick to the
+present member who is known, this other fellow hasn't been heard of;"
+his grand-nephew replied--
+
+"Like Uncle Jake; he's been in the municipal council fifteen years and
+never got heard of; he ought to put up an' see would the women go for
+him, because he's never been heard of an' is a bit good-lookin'."
+
+"Well, there's one thing to his credit, an' that is, he's lived over
+sixty years an' never been heard of stealing fruit out of people's
+gardens, an' as for looks--'Han'some is who han'some does,'" said
+grandma, which effected the collapse of Andrew. In the Clay household
+there were ever current reminders of the truth of the old proverb,
+warning people in glass-houses to abstain from stone-throwing.
+
+Dawn did not appear before me that night until I opened my door and
+called--
+
+"Lady Fair, the kimono awaits thy perfumed presence!"
+
+"I don't want to come to-night; I feel as scotty as a bear with a sore
+head."
+
+"But I want you--youth must ever give way to grey hairs."
+
+With that she appeared, and throwing herself backward on my bed,
+thrust her arms crossly above her head amid a tumble of soft bright
+hair.
+
+"Youth, health, beauty, and lovers not lacking, what excuse have you
+for being out of tune? I want you to pilot me to tea at Grosvenor's
+to-morrow evening. Miss Grosvenor has invited you, Ernest, and
+myself."
+
+"She just wants Ernest--she's terribly fond of the men."
+
+"Well, did you ever see a normal girl who wasn't, and Mr Ernest is a
+man worth being fond of--I dearly love him myself."
+
+"Pooh! I don't see anything nice about him," said Dawn aggressively.
+
+"But you'll come to tea, won't you?"
+
+"No, I can't. I never go to Grosvenors. Grandma doesn't care for them.
+She says he was only a pig buyer, and settled down there about the
+time she came here, and now they try to ape the swells and put on
+airs. They only come here to try to get on terms with some of the
+swell men. I wouldn't take him over there to please her if I were
+you."
+
+"That's where you and I differ. I would just like to please them, and
+I'm sure it will do Ernest good to be in the company of such a
+pleasant and sensible girl as Ada Grosvenor."
+
+"Yes, he'd want something to do him good, if I'm any judge."
+
+Dawn's pretty mouth and chin were so querulous that I had to turn away
+to smile.
+
+"So you won't come to tea?"
+
+"I can't; I'd like to please you," she said somewhat softening, "but
+I've promised 'Dora' Eweword I'll go out rowing with him again
+to-morrow. He says he has something to say to me."
+
+"He's been going to say this something a long time."
+
+"Yes, but I stave him off. I know what it is right enough, and I don't
+want to hear it; but I suppose I had better please grandma."
+
+"So you like him?"
+
+"No, I detest him, and feel like smacking him on the mouth just where
+his underlip sticks out farther than the top one, every time he
+speaks; but what am I to do? I'd never be let go on the stage, and I
+might as well marry him as any one."
+
+"Why marry any one? At nineteen, or ninety for that matter, there is
+no imperative hurry. To marry a man you dislike because you cannot
+attain your ambition is surely very silly indeed. Would you not love
+'Dora' if you could go on the stage?"
+
+"I wouldn't be seen in a forty-acred paddock with him. I'd like some
+man who had travelled, not an old Australian thing just living about
+here. I'd like an Englishman who'd take me home to England."
+
+"You mustn't disparage your countrymen while I'm listening, as you'll
+find no better in any country or clime. Always remember they were
+among the first to enfranchise their women, and thus raise them above
+the status of chatteldom and merchandise."
+
+"They only gave us the vote because they had to. Women have had to
+crawl to them for it, and pretend it was a great privilege the sweet
+darling almighties were allowing us, when all the time it has been our
+right, and they were selfish cowards who deserve no thanks for
+withholding it so long. And they gave it that grudgingly and are that
+narked about it, it makes me sick."
+
+"Of course, when the matter is stripped to bare facts, the truth of
+your remarks is irrefutable, but we must gauge things comparatively,
+and remember how many other nations won't even grudgingly free their
+women. If you don't like Eweword I can't see any pressing necessity to
+think of marriage at all."
+
+"Oh, well, I'd have it done then and wouldn't be everlasting plagued
+on the subject," she said with the unreasonableness of irritability.
+
+"Would it not be better though to wait a little while in hopes of a
+better choice?"
+
+"But I suppose it will always be the same. Any man at all worth
+consideration is sure to be married or at any rate is engaged."
+
+Here was the clue to her irritation. It was that imaginary young lady
+of Ernest Breslaw's. Had she been a man, ere this she would have
+plunged into vigorous attempt to dislodge that or any other rival, no
+matter how assured his position, but being a woman and compelled to
+await "The idiot Chance her imperial Fate," the effect of such
+suppression on so robust and strenuous a nature was this form of
+hysteria.
+
+"Well, what about a struggle for the desire of your heart? Undoubtedly
+you have, if well trained, sufficient voice to be a great asset on the
+stage, but it would take at the very least two years' hard work under
+a good master before it would be in the least fit for public use."
+
+"I'd be twenty-one then."
+
+"You are just at a good age to stand vigorous training."
+
+"But what's the use of talking," she said hopelessly, "you don't know
+how mad grandma is against the stage. She says she'd rather see me in
+my grave, and I feel I'd never prosper if I went against her."
+
+"Very likely her point of view is founded on hard facts, but training
+your voice isn't going on the stage, and in two years, if you are able
+to sing decently, perhaps no one will be so anxious as your grandma
+that you should be heard,--I've heard of such a case before;" and I
+didn't add that two years was a long way ahead for an old woman of
+seventy-six, and also for a girl to whom study was not quite a fetich,
+and ample time for the or some knight to have come to the rescue.
+These thoughts were not for publication, as they might have made me
+appear a traitor to the prejudices of one party and the desire of the
+other, whereas I was loyal to them both.
+
+"It would be lovely if you could get on the soft side of grandma, but
+I'm afraid it's impossible. Fancy being able to sing and please
+people, and travel about in nice cities away from dusty, dreary, slow
+old Noonoon," said the girl, the crossness melting from her pretty
+face and giving place to radiance.
+
+She toyed with some silk scarves of mine, and between whiles said--
+
+"Isn't it funny some people think one thing good and others don't. No
+one around here wants to be on the stage but me, or seems to
+understand that actresses are made out of ordinary people like you and
+me. 'Dora' doesn't know anything about the stage, but Mr Ernest does.
+He doesn't think them terrible women, and says that his best woman
+friend was an actress once. If you thought grandma could be brought
+round at all I wouldn't go out with Dora to-morrow, I'd go with you to
+get out of it. Mr Ernest seemed to be very pleased with Ada
+Grosvenor; is she the same style as his young lady?"
+
+This question wasn't asked because Dawn was transparent, but because I
+had led her to believe I was dense.
+
+"No, not at all," I replied.
+
+"What is she like?"
+
+"She's about five feet five, and has a plump, dimpling figure. Her
+hair is bright brown, and her nose is an exquisitely cut little
+straight one. (Here I observed Dawn casting surreptitious glances in
+the mirror opposite.) Her eyes are bright blue with long dark lashes,
+and she has a mouth too pretty to describe, fitted up with a set of
+the loveliest natural teeth one could see in these days of the
+dentist; it is so perfect that it seems unnatural and a sad pity that
+it should sometimes be the outlet of censorious remarks about less
+beautiful sisters, but its owner is very young and not surrounded by
+the best of influences at present, and no doubt will have better sense
+as she grows older."
+
+"What's her name?"
+
+"Now you want to know too much, but I never knew another girl with
+such a beautiful one."
+
+"She must be a beauty altogether," said Dawn rather satirically.
+
+"She would be if she would only guard against being cross at times,
+but you must not breathe this to a soul as I'm only going on
+supposition. Young Ernest isn't engaged to her, but I've seen him with
+her once or twice, and he looked so pleased that I suspected him of
+kind regards, as no man could help admiring her."
+
+"Is that all?" she said in a tone of relief; "he mightn't care for
+her at all. Just walking about with her and looking happy isn't any
+criterion. Men are always doing that with every girl."
+
+"Dora didn't look happy with me to-night then--how do you account for
+that?"
+
+She accounted for it with a merry laugh, as curled in the silk kimono
+she remained in possession of my nightly couch.
+
+I was espousing this girl's cause because I could not bear to see her
+honest, wholesome youth and beauty making fuel for disappointment and
+bitterness as mine had done. There had been no one to help me attain
+the desire--the innocent, just, and normal desire of my girlhood's
+heart,--no one to lend a hand, till my heart had broken with slavery
+and disappointment, and at less than thirty-five all that remained for
+me was a little barren waiting for its feeble fluctuating pumping to
+cease.
+
+The girl presently fell asleep, so I covered her, kimono and all, and
+extinguishing the light, lay down beside what had once been a tiny
+baby, whose feeble life opening with the day had been nurtured on the
+milk of old Ladybird, the spotted cow with a dew-lap and a crumpled
+horn. She was now, I trusted, enjoying the reward of her earthly
+labours in that best of heavens we love to picture for the dear
+animals that have served us well, and but for whose presence the world
+would be dreary indeed, while the sleep of her beautiful
+foster-daughter had advanced to hold dreams of jewelled gowns,
+thrilling solos, travel, and splendid young husbands who could do no
+wrong, but she knew no room for thought of "Dora," who on the morrow
+was to row her on the Noonoon. He might as well have relinquished the
+chase, for his chances here had grown as faint as those of pretty Dora
+Cowper--whose leg he classically stated he had pulled--had grown with
+him.
+
+Ah, well, there is a law of retribution in all things, direct or
+indirect, visible or invisible.
+
+I lay awake a long time contemplating the best way of approaching
+Grandma Clay in regard to Dawn's singing lessons. One by one the
+passenger trains streamed into Noonoon, halted a panting five minutes
+at the station, then rumbled over the strange old iron-walled bridge,
+slowed down again to the little siding of Kangaroo on the other side,
+from whence up, up, the mountain-sides above the fertile valley,
+leaving the peaceful agriculturists soundly asleep after their toil.
+The heavy "goods" lumbered by unceasingly, the throbbing of their
+great engines, their signalling, shunting, and tooting proving a
+perennial delight to me, comforting me with the knowledge that I still
+could feel a pulsation from the great population centres where my
+fellows congregate.
+
+It had lulled me to doziness, when I was aroused by the electric alarm
+bell, the purpose of which was to warn folk when a train neared the
+bridge. A very necessary device, as there was but one bridge for all
+traffic, it being cut into two departments by three high iron walls
+that shut out an exquisite view of the river, and confined and
+intensified the rumble of trains in a manner well calculated to
+inspire the least imaginative of horses with the fear that the powers
+of evil had broken loose about them. The alarm-bell was humanly
+contrary in the discharge of its duty, and rang long and loudly when
+there was no train, and was not to be heard at all when they were
+rushing by in numbers. On this occasion, there being no train to drown
+its blatant voice, it so disturbed me that I was keenly alive to a
+dialogue that was proceeding in Miss Flipp's room.
+
+"You must go away, I tell you," said Mr Pornsch. "A nice thing it
+would be if a man in _my_ position were implicated."
+
+"I didn't think a man of _your_ class would be so cruel," sobbed the
+girl.
+
+In rejoinder the man admitted one of the truths by which our
+civilisation is besmirched.
+
+"There's only one class of men in dealing with women like you."
+
+Then fell a silence, during which Dawn turned in her sleep, and I
+placed her head more comfortably lest she should awake and hear what
+was proceeding.
+
+Not that it would in any way have sullied her, for her virtue, by
+sound heredity and hardy training, was no hothouse plant, liable to
+shrivel and die if not kept in a certain temperature, but was a sturdy
+tree, like the tall white-trunked young gums of her native forests, on
+which the winds of knowledge could blow and the rains of experience
+fall without in any way mutilating or impairing its reliability and
+beauty. It was for the sake of our poor sister wayfarer who was on a
+terrible thoroughfare, amid robbers and murderers, but who did not
+want her plight to be known, that I did not wish Dawn to awake.
+
+
+
+
+FOURTEEN.
+
+THE PASSING OF THE TRAINS.
+
+
+Next morning, when Andrew and I had finished the separator, grandma
+came over to inspect the work. She sniffed round the dishes and cans,
+which barely passed muster, and then descended upon the table by
+running her slender old forefinger along the eaves, with the result
+that it came up soiled with the greasy slush that careless wiping had
+left there.
+
+"Look at that, you dirty good-for-nothink young shaver; if the
+inspector came round we'd most likely lose our licence for it, an'
+it's no fault of mine. If a great lump your age can't be depended on
+for nothink, I don't know what the world is coming to. I have to be
+responsible for everythink that goes on your back and into your
+stummick, and yet you can't do a single thing. You think I'm
+everlastin' joring, but I have to be. Some day, if ever you have a
+house of your own, you'll know how hard it is."
+
+"I'm goin' to take jolly fine care I never have no house of me own.
+The game ain't worth the candle," responded Andrew; "I reckon them as
+comes and lives in the place, like some of them summer-boarders, and
+orders us about as if they was Lord Muck an' we wasn't anybody, has
+the best of it."
+
+"That ain't the point. I'm ashamed of that table. W'en I was young no
+one ever had to speak to me about things once, before I knew. Once I
+left drips round the end of my table, and me mother come along and
+'Martha,' says she--"
+
+"It's a wonder the wonderful Jim Clay didn't say it," muttered the
+irreverent representative of the degenerate rising generation _sotto
+voce_.
+
+"'If that's the way you wash a table,' says she, 'no blind man would
+choose you for his wife,' for that was the way they told if their
+sweetheart was a good housekeeper, by feelin' along the table w'en
+they was done washin' up."
+
+"An' what did you say?" interestedly inquired Andrew.
+
+"I didn't say nothink. In them days young people didn't be gabbing
+back to their elders w'en they was spoke to, but held their mag an'
+done their work proper," she crushingly replied.
+
+"But I was thinkin'," said Andrew quite unabashed, "that you was a
+terrible fool to be took in with that yarn. For who'd want to be
+married by a blind man, an' I reckon that blind men oughtn't be let to
+marry at all, and I think anyhow he ought to have been glad to get any
+woman, without sneakin' around an' putting on airs about being
+particular," he earnestly contended.
+
+"But that ain't the point, anyhow," said she.
+
+"Well, what did you tell it to me for, grandma?"
+
+"Hold your tongue," said the old lady irately; "sometimes you might
+argue with me, but there's reason in everythink, an' if you don't
+have that table scrubbed and cleaned proper by the next time I come
+round you'll hear about it."
+
+With this she walked farther on towards the pig-sty and cow-bails, and
+considering this a good opportunity for private conversation I went
+with her, remarking in a casual manner--
+
+"Your granddaughter has a very good voice."
+
+"Yes; a good deal better than _some people_ that think they can sing
+like Patti, and set theirselves up about it."
+
+"Yes; but she badly needs training."
+
+"She sings twice as well as some that has been trained and fussed
+with."
+
+"Probably; but she requires training to preserve the voice. She
+produces it unnaturally, and in a few years the voice will be cracked
+and spoilt."
+
+"All the better, an' then she'll give up wanting to go on the stage
+with it."
+
+"Is there anything frightful in that?" I said gently. "A great many
+mothers would give all they possessed to get their daughters on the
+stage. It is an exploded idea to think the stage a bad place."
+
+"A lot is always tellin' me that, an' I believed them till I went to
+see for meself, and the facts was too much of a eye-opener for me.
+I'll keep to me own opinions for the future. It will be three years
+ago this month, Dawn prevailed upon me to go to a play there was a lot
+of blow about, an' I was never so ashamed in me life. I didn't expect
+much considerin' the way I was rared regardin' theayters, but it beat
+all I ever see."
+
+"What was it?"
+
+"I don't know the name, but it was a character of a play. There was
+women in it must have been forty by the figure of them, and they had
+all their bosoms bare, and showed their knees in little short skirts.
+They stood in rows and grinned--the hussies! They ought to have set
+down an' hid theirselves for shame! I thought we must have made a
+mistake and got into a fast show, but we read in the paper after that
+among the audience was all the big bugs, an' they seemed to be
+enjoyin' theirselves an' laughing as if it was a intellectual,
+respectable entertainment. I wanted to get up an' leave, but Dawn
+coaxed me an' I give in, an' thought the next might be better, but it
+was worse. I give you my word for it, there was hussies there on that
+stage, before respectable people's eyes, trying all they knew to make
+men be bad. They was fast pure and simple, just the same as some Jim
+Clay told me about once when he went to Sydney on his own. The way he
+described their carryin's on was just like them actresses on the
+stage, an' me a respectable married woman who's rared a family, havin'
+paid to look at them! I was ashamed to hold me head up after it for a
+long time. 'It's only actin', grandma,' says Dawn, but to think that
+people would act things like that; no good modest woman would ever do
+it, an' the Bible strictly warns us to abstain from the appearance of
+evil. An' even that wasn't all; they come out an' kissed one
+another--married women supposed to be kissing other men. What sort of
+a example was that to be setting other men an' women? It was the
+lowerin'est thing I ever see. I told Dawn she was not to breathe where
+we had been, an' from that day to this I never would have a actor or a
+actress in my house. I'd just as soon have a _real_ loud woman as one
+who gets out on a stage where every one is lookin' at her and
+pretends to be one. She'd have no shame to stand between her and the
+bad. Oh no! there must be reason in everythink. I was prepared for a
+terrible lot of fools and rot, but that I should be so lowered was a
+eye-opener."
+
+"I feel exactly the same in regard to the stage, Mrs Clay, but I like
+concerts, when the singers just come out and sing--do you not?"
+
+"That ain't so bad, I admit."
+
+"You would not object to Dawn singing on a platform, would you?"
+
+"No; doesn't she often sing on the platform in Noonoon? They're always
+after her for some concert or another. It's a bad plan to sing too
+much for them. They don't thank you for it. They'd only say we're
+tired of him or her, and the one who'd be sour an' wouldn't sing often
+would be considered great."
+
+"Well, let her have lessons, so she could sing with greater ease at
+these concerts."
+
+"She can sing well enough for that. It would be throwing away money
+for nothink."
+
+"But if trained she could sometimes command a fee."
+
+"I've got plenty to keep her without that," said the old lady,
+bridling, "and it might give her stronger notions for the stage."
+
+I was thankful that I had never published my calling.
+
+"I had me own ideas of them before--walkin' about, and everythink they
+do or say they're wonderin' what people is thinkin' of them, and if
+they're observin' what great bein's they are. An' I've seen 'em
+here--goin' in fer drink an' all bad practices, and w'en I remonstrate
+with 'em, 'It's me temperament,' says they, an' led me to believe by
+the airs of them that this temperament makes 'em superior to the likes
+of ordinary human bein's like me an' you; an' this temperament that
+makes 'em not fit to do honest common work, but is makin' 'em low
+crawlers, is the thing that at the same time makes 'em superior. I
+don't see meself how the two things can be reconciled. There must be
+reason in everythink."
+
+"If you want to turn your granddaughter from the stage, let her start
+vocal training. You'll see that before twelve months she'll have
+enough of it. It would keep her content for the present, and in the
+meantime she might marry," I contended.
+
+"If I could be sure she wouldn't come in contact with them actin' and
+writin' fools; if she was to marry one of them it would be all up with
+her. Do you know anythink about teachers?"
+
+"Yes; I would be only too pleased to see to that part of it. Your
+granddaughter is a great pleasure to me. She gives me some interest in
+life which, having no relations and being unfit for permanent
+occupation, I would otherwise lack."
+
+"Well, I'm sure Dawn would interest anybody, and I think you're a good
+companion for her. She seems to have took up with you, and you've
+evidently been a person that's seen somethink, an' can tell her this,
+that, an' the other, but as for that she don't want no tellin' to be
+better than most. _Some people!_--" Grandma always worked herself up
+to a pitch of congested choler when these unworthy individuals were
+mentioned.
+
+"I'll think about the singin' lessons if they ain't beyond reason.
+She's been terrible good lately, and deserves somethink. Here's Larry
+Witcom arrove, an' there's Carry gone out to him. I want to see him
+meself; he's been a little too strong with his prices lately, but he's
+the obliginest feller in many ways. I don't hear anythink about it not
+bein' Carry's week in the kitchen w'en Larry comes. She's always ready
+to give Dawn a hand then. But we was all young once; I can remember
+w'en I worked a point, whether it was me turn or not, to get near Jim
+Clay."
+
+"Dawn, I think the battle for the singing lessons is half won," I said
+to that individual when I met her privately a few minutes later.
+
+"Really, it can't be true!" said the girl with an intonation of
+delight, as she drew a tea-towel she had been washing through her
+shapely hands and wrung it dry.
+
+Uncle Jake then entered, and cut short further private discussion.
+
+"There, Dawn!" he said, tossing a pair of trousers on the
+kitchen-table, "the seat of them is out, an' I want to put 'em on to
+do a little blacksmithin'--they're dirty."
+
+"That's easy to be seen and known too, as some people's things are
+always dirty," said she. "When do you want them?"
+
+"At once."
+
+"At once! You'd come in the middle of cooking some pastry and want a
+woman to put patches on a dirty old pair of trousers, and then want to
+know why the dinner wasn't up to tick; and besides, it's Carry's week
+in the house."
+
+For Dawn's sake I would have offered to do the patching, but feared
+Uncle Jake might suspect me of matrimonial designs upon him, such
+being the conceit of old men.
+
+"I never go to Carry," he snapped, "an' it's a pity your mother
+wasn't alive instead of you, she could put a patch on in five minutes
+any time you asked her, but she never spent her time in roarin' and
+bellerin' round after a vote;" and so saying Uncle Jake disappeared,
+leaving his grandniece with her pretty pink cheeks deepened to
+scarlet, and a spark in her blue eyes.
+
+"The old dog! if he wasn't grandma's brother I'd hate him. It's always
+these crawling old things who can do nothing themselves, and have to
+be kept by a woman, who are always the worst at trying to make women's
+position lower, and talk about them as inferior. He's always after a
+woman to do this and to do that, and comparing her--I'd like to see
+the woman, mother or father--who could put a patch on those pants in
+five minutes."
+
+"There's one way it could be done in the time," I said, calling to
+mind a prank related by a gay little friend--"clap it on with
+cobbler's wax."
+
+Dawn's eyes danced, and the irritation receded from the corners of the
+pretty mouth as, procuring a piece of cloth and a lump of cobbler's
+wax, she did the deed in less than five minutes, and Uncle Jake
+contentedly received his trousers, while I departed to put in some
+more time with my friend Andrew, without telling her there might be a
+sequel to patching trousers with cobbler's wax.
+
+"Well, Andrew, how goes the scrubbing?"
+
+"Oh, great! Look at that!" said he, drawing back to exhibit a really
+clean table; and as it would not have conduced to our friendship had I
+pointed out that it had been arrived at at the expense of slushing the
+lime-washed wall and the stand of the separator, I wisely kept
+silent.
+
+"There! I reckon me grandma nor Jim Clay neither never done a table
+better," he said with enviable self-appreciation. "You know I reckon
+them old yarns about the people bein' so good w'en they was young is a
+little too thin to stand washin'--don't you? You've only got to take
+the things the wonderful Jim Clay and me grandma done w'en they was
+courtin',--you get her on a string to tell you,--an' if Dawn done the
+same with any of the blokes now, she'd jolly soon hear about it; an'
+as for old Jake there, I reckon I'd be able to put him through meself
+at his own age--don't you? Anyhow, I'm full of farmin'. It's only
+fools an' horses sweat themselves, all the others go in for
+auctioneering, or parliament, or something, and have a fine screw
+comin' in for nothing."
+
+"But think of those water-melons," I said; for as a subject of
+conversation he most frequently and most lovingly referred to these.
+
+"But I could buy a waggon-load of 'em for one day's pay, an' not have
+any tuggin' and scratchin' with 'em. Melons ain't too stinkin', but
+lor', tomatoes is a stunner! They rotted till you couldn't stand the
+smell of them, and it would give a billy-goat the pip to hear them
+mentioned. There was no sale, and the blow-flies took to 'em. One man
+down here had thirty acres. I'm goin' to be somethink, so I can make a
+bit of money. No one thinks anythink of you if you ain't got plenty
+money. You know how you feel if a person has plenty money, you think
+twice as much of him as if he hasn't any. There's nothink to be made
+at farmin', delvin' and scrapin' your eyeballs out for no return,"
+said this youngster, who did barely enough to keep him in exercise,
+who had been fed to repletion, and comfortably clothed and bedded all
+his sixteen years.
+
+Luncheon or dinner was enlivened by an altercation between Dawn and
+her uncle.
+
+The blacksmithing to which he had referred was the act of sitting down
+beside the forge, where he had grown so warm that the sequel to
+mending trousers with cobbler's wax had eventuated. The melted wax had
+attached the garment to the old man's person, and he had sat--his
+sitting capacity was incalculable--until it had cooled again, and on
+rising suffered an amount of discomfort it would be graceful to leave
+to the imagination. Uncle Jake however was not so considerate, and
+aired his grievance in a manner too brutally real for imagination.
+
+To do her justice Dawn did not think of the joke going thus far, so I
+attempted to take the blame, but she would not have this.
+
+"I want him to think I knew how it would turn out. I'd do it to him
+every day if I could."
+
+Grandma fortunately took her part, and the mirth of Andrew and Carry
+was very genuine.
+
+"I reckon I was as smart as my mother that time," giggled Dawn, as she
+carried in the dinner.
+
+"It would have been a funny joke if you played it on some
+good-humoured young feller," said grandma, "but Jake there is entitled
+to some kind of consideration, because he is old and crotchety."
+
+"I'd play it on 'Dora' Eweword," said Dawn, "only that he might stick
+here so that he'd never move at all if I didn't take care."
+
+The first moment we had in private she took opportunity of saying--
+
+"I think I'll go over to Grosvenor's with you this evening, but not
+to tea. I'll go over to bring you home, if you'll help me make some
+excuse to get out of going rowing with 'Dora.'"
+
+"Why not come to tea? that would be sufficient excuse."
+
+"Oh, but they try to ape the swells, and grandma doesn't like them;
+but I'll be sure to go for you after it, and that will save Mr Ernest
+coming round with you."
+
+I thanked her, though her escort was not at all necessary, seeing that
+instead of saving Ernest it would only make his presence surer. There
+being nothing else to do during the afternoon, I awaited the time of
+setting out for the Grosvenor's, who tried to ape the swells--the
+swells of Noonoon! These being, as far as I could gather, the doctors,
+the lawyer, a couple of bank managers on a salary somewhere about £250
+per annum, the Stip. Magistrate, and one or two others--surely an
+ordinarily harmless and averagely respectable section of the
+community, in aping whom one would be in little danger of being called
+upon to act up to an etiquette as intricate and tyrannous as that in
+use at court.
+
+In the old days the town had been the terminus of the train, and it
+had squatted at the foot of the mountains, while strings of teams
+carried the goods up the great western road out to Bathurst and
+beyond, to Mudgee, Dubbo, and Orange. Nearly all the old
+houses--grandma's and Grosvenor's among them--had been hotels in those
+days, when the miles had been ticked off by the square stones with the
+Roman lettering, erected by our poor old convict pioneers, who blazed
+many a first track. Every house had found sufficient trade in giving
+D.T.'s to the burly, roystering teamsters who lived on the roads,
+dealt in no small quantities, and who did not see their wives and
+sweethearts every week in the year.
+
+As the afternoon advanced, true to appointment, "Dora" Eweword arrived
+to take Dawn for a row. His chin was red from the razor, and he looked
+well in a navy-blue guernsey brightened by a scarlet tie knotted at
+the open collar, displaying a columnar throat which, if strength were
+measured by size, announced him capable of supporting not only a Dawn,
+but a Sunset. He sat on an Austrian chair, for which he was some sizes
+too large and too substantial, and reddened as he laughed and talked
+with Carry, till I appeared and spent some time in talking and
+admiring his appearance until Dawn came upon the scene.
+
+"Well, Dawn," he said, "I'm waiting for this row; are you ready?"
+
+Dawn glanced at me.
+
+"Dawn has promised to chaperon me to-night," I said. Dawn decamped.
+
+"Miss Grosvenor has invited Mr Ernest and me to tea, and to go without
+a representative of Mrs Grundy, I believe, is not correct in the
+social life of Noonoon."
+
+Eweword laughed; but his face fell, and his reply showed him less
+obtuse than he appeared on the surface, seeing he was the first and
+only person to see through my matchmaking tactics.
+
+"Touting for the red-haired bagman," he said, as Ernest could be seen
+swinging up the path.
+
+"Supposing I am, what then?" I asked, regarding him with a level
+glance, and feeling more respect for his intelligence than I had
+heretofore experienced.
+
+"Oh, well, I suppose all is fair in some things."
+
+He would not say _love_, as that would have admitted too much, and a
+lover admitting his passion and a drunkard confessing his disease are
+exceptions that prove the rule.
+
+His remark was uttered with a broad good nature that would lead him to
+do and leave undone great things. In a desire to please the present
+girl he was not above saying he had been "pulling the leg" of the one
+absent, but he would also be capable of standing aside when he felt
+deeply--as deeply as he could feel--to allow a better man sea-room;
+and he was further capable of sufficient humility to think there could
+be a better man than himself, or so I adjudged him, and being the only
+narrator of this, the only history in which he is likely to receive
+mention, this delineation of his character will have to remain
+unchallenged.
+
+Ernest had a geranium in his button-hole, and looked more immaculately
+spruce than ever, and even his red hair could not obliterate the fact
+of his being a goodly sight, and as such grandma recognised him.
+
+"That's a fine sturdy chap," she afterwards observed. "It's a pity he
+ain't got somethink to do to keep him out of mischief. Is he a
+unemployed? He don't look like one of these Johnnies that has nothink
+to do but hang around a street corner and smoke a cigarette."
+
+The two young men measured glances every whit as critically as girls
+do under similar conditions, and then equally as casually made
+reference to the weather. Ernest was somewhat overshadowed by Eweword,
+as the latter was superior in size and cast of features, being fully
+six feet, while Ernest was not more than five feet nine inches; but as
+a girl very rarely, if she has a choice, cares most for the handsomest
+of her admirers, I was not in the least cast down about this.
+
+When it was time for me to depart, Ernest rose too, but not Dawn.
+Ernest's face went down, Eweword's brightened.
+
+"Miss Dawn is not coming over now, but later on," I said.
+
+The men's glances reversed once more. As the former and I
+departed--Ernest carrying a wrap for me--I heard Eweword say--
+
+"Well, come on, Dawn, you're not going to Grosvenor's after all. It
+seems that old party was only pulling my leg."
+
+Ernest good-naturedly struggled to talk with me, but I spared him the
+ordeal, and, arrived at Grosvenor's, interestedly studied them to
+discover what manner of procedure "trying to ape the swells" might
+be--the swells of Noonoon--the doctor who thought I might "peg out"
+any minute, and the bank managers and the parsons.
+
+The only difference to be observed between the tea-table at Clay's and
+Grosvenor's was that at the latter the equivalents of Uncle Jake and
+Andrew did not appear in a coatless condition, were treated to the
+luxury of table-napkins, and Mrs Grosvenor, who served, attended to
+people according to their rank instead of their position at the table,
+and entrusted them with the sugar-basin and milk-jug themselves.
+Farther than this there was no distinction, and this was not an
+alarming one. Certainly Miss Grosvenor, who had not enjoyed half
+Dawn's educational advantages, did not as glaringly flout syntax, and
+slang was not so conspicuous in her vocabulary. She and Ernest got on
+so well that none but my practised eyes could detect that as the
+evening advanced his brown ones occasionally wandered towards the
+entrance door, which showed that much as Miss Grosvenor had got him
+out of his shell, she had not obliterated Dawn.
+
+That young lady arrived at about a quarter to ten, and we started
+homewards, determining to go a long way round, first by way of the
+Grosvenor's vehicle road to town, by this gaining the public highway,
+along which we would walk to the entrance to grandma's demesne. This
+was preferable to a short-cut and rolling under the barbed-wire
+fencing in the long grass sopping with dew, which at midnight or
+thereabouts would stiffen with the soft frosts of this region that
+would flee before the sun next morning.
+
+Dawn's cheeks were scarlet from rowing on the river with "Dora"
+Eweword, and she spoke of her jaunt as soon as we got outside,
+apparently pregnant with the knowledge innate in the dullest of her
+sex, that the most efficacious way of giving impetus to the love of
+one lover is to have another.
+
+This, however, is another art which, like good cooking, must be "done
+to the turn," and in this instance there was danger of it being done
+too soon, as Ernest's amour had not taken firm root yet; and a man,
+unless he be either of gigantic pluck or no honour at all, will not
+hurry to interfere with the secured property of another man.
+
+They chatted in a desultory fashion while I manoeuvred to relieve
+them of my presence. The night was lit by a million stars, paling
+towards the east, where behind the hills a waning moon was putting in
+an appearance. The electric lights of the town scintillated like
+artificial stars, and away down the long valley could be seen here and
+there the twinkle of a farmhouse light, showing where some held mild
+wassail or a convivial evening; for there were not many of the
+agriculturalists, tired from their heavy toil, who were otherwise out
+of bed at this ungodly hour of the night.
+
+The crisp winter air agreed with me, and I felt unusually well.
+
+"Let me walk behind, this night is too glorious to waste in talking
+politics, so you young people get out of my hearing and thresh out
+your candidate's merit and demerit and leave me to think," I said, for
+politics were in the air and they were touching upon them. They obeyed
+me, and soon were lost to view in the dark of the osage and quince
+hedges grown as breakwinds on the west of Grosvenor's orangery. Soon I
+could not hear their footfalls, for I stood still to watch the trains
+pass by. 'Twas the hour of the last division of the Western passenger
+mail, bearing its daily cargo of news and people to the great plains
+beyond the hills that loomed faintly in the light of the half moon.
+Haughtily its huge first-class engine roared along, and its carriage
+windows, like so many warm red mouths, permitted a glimpse of the folk
+inside comfortably ensconced for the night. It slowed across the long
+viaduct approaching the bridge, and crossed the bridge itself with a
+roar like thunder, then it swerved round a curve to Kangaroo till the
+window-lights gave place to its two red eyes at the rear. As it
+climbed the first spur of the great range, and all that could be seen
+was a belch of flame from the engine-door as it coaled, something of
+the old longing awoke within me for things that must always be far
+away. The throbbing engines spoke to my heart, and forgetting its
+brokenness, it stirred again to their measure--the rushing, eager
+measure of ambition, strife, struggle! I was young again, with youth's
+hot desire to love and be loved, and as its old bitter-sweet
+clamourings rushed over me I rebelled that my hair was grey and my
+propeller disabled. The young folks ahead had put me out of their life
+as young folks do, and, measuring the hearts of their seniors by the
+white in their hair and the lines around their eyes, would have been
+incredulous that I still had capacity for their own phase. Only the
+royalty of youth is tendered love in full measure; those who fail to
+attain or grasp it then find this door, from which comes enticing
+perfume and sound of luring music, shut against them for all time, and
+no matter how appealingly they may lean against its portals, it will
+rarely open again, for they have been laid by to be sold as remnants
+like the draper's goods which have failed to attract a buyer during
+the brief season they were displayed. I stood under the whispering
+osage and listened to the now distant train puffing its way over the
+wild mountains, also to be crossed by the great road first cut by
+those whose now long dead limbs had carried chains--members of a
+bygone brigade as I was one of a passing company. But probably they
+each had had their chance of love, and the old bitterness upsprung
+that mine had not fallen athwart my pathway. Fierce struggle had
+always shut me away from similar opportunity to that enjoyed by the
+young people ahead.
+
+"Put back your cruel wheel, O Time!" I cried in my heart, "and give me
+but one hour's youth again--sweet, ecstatic youth with the bounding
+pulse, led by the purple mirage of Hope, whose sirens whisper that the
+world's sweets are sweet and its crowns worth winning. Let me for a
+space be free from this dastard age creeping through the veins,
+dulling the perspective of life and leadening the brain, whose carping
+companions draw attention to the bitters in the cups of Youth's
+Delights, and mutter that the golden crowns we struggle for shall
+tarnish as soon as they are placed on our tired brows!" Suddenly my
+bitter reverie was broken by the knight and the lady calling in
+startled tones. I replied, and presently they were upon me, Dawn very
+much out of breath.
+
+"Oh, goodness, we thought you were ill again. You have given us such a
+shock. You should not have been left behind. I was a terrible brute
+that I didn't harness the pony and drive over for you;" and Ernest
+came in a slow second with--
+
+"You should have taken my arm," and he wrapped my cloak about me with
+the high quality of gentleness peculiar to the best type of strong
+man.
+
+Despite my assurance that I never had felt better, they insisted upon
+supporting me on either side; so slipping a hand through each of the
+young elbows conveniently bent, I playfully put the large hand on the
+right of me over the dimpling one on the left.
+
+"There!" I said, taking advantage of the liberties extended a probable
+invalid, "I've made a breastwork of the hands of the two dearest young
+friends I have, so now I cannot fall;" and seeing I put it at that, at
+that they were content to let it remain, and the big hand very
+carefully retained the little one, so passive and warm, in its shy
+grasp. At the gate I dismissed Ernest, and Dawn condescended to remark
+that he wasn't _quite_ such a fool as usual, which interpreted meant
+that he had not been so guardedly stand-off to her as he sometimes
+was.
+
+The trains once more entertained my waking hours that night. Under
+Andrew's tutorage I had learned to distinguish the rumble of a "goods"
+from the rush of a "passenger," a two-engine haul from a single, and
+even the heavy voice of the big old "shunter" that lived about the
+Noonoon station had grown familiar; but the haughtiest of all was a
+travelling engine attended only by its tender, and speeding by with
+lightsome action, like a governor thankfully free from officialdom
+and hampered only by a valet.
+
+Musing on what a little time had elapsed since the work of the
+passenger trains had been done by the coaches with their grey and bay
+teams of five, swinging through the town at a gallop, and with their
+occupants armed to the teeth against bushrangers, I dozed and dreamt.
+I dreamt that I was in one of the sleeping-cars which had superseded
+Cobb & Co.'s accommodation for travellers, and that from it I could
+see in a bird's-eye view not only the magnificent belt of mountains,
+the bluest in the world, but whirling down their westward slopes with
+a velocity outstripping the scented winds from sandal ridges and myall
+plains, I slid across that great western stretch of country where a
+portion of the railway line runs for a hundred and thirty-six miles
+without rise or fall or curve in the longest straight ribbon of steel
+that is known. But ere I reached its end I wakened with a start
+through something falling in Miss Flipp's room.
+
+Surely I had not slept for more than half an hour, because the light
+which had shone in the adjoining room as we returned from Grosvenor's
+was still burning. Presently Miss Flipp put it out, and closing her
+door after her, stealthily made her way from the house. She trod
+cautiously and noiselessly, but her gown caught on the lower sprouts
+of the ragged old rose-bushes beside the walks, and though she took a
+long time to open the little gate opening towards the wharves and the
+narrow pathway running along the river-bank to the bridge, it creaked
+a little on its rusty hinges, so that I heard it and fell to awaiting
+the girl's return.
+
+I waited and waited, and beguiled the time by counting the trains that
+passed with the quarter hours. There were so many that I soon lost
+count. This line carried goods to the great wheat and wool-growing
+west and brought its produce to the city. Many of the noisy trains
+were laden with "fifteen hundred" and "two thousand" lots of "fats,"
+and the yearly statistics dealing with the sales at Homebush
+chronicled their total numbers as millions. From beyond Forbes,
+Bourke, and Brewarrina they came in trucks to cross the bridge
+spanning the noble stream at the mountain's base, but they never went
+back again to the great plains where they had basked in plenty or
+staggered through droughts as the fickle seasons rose and fell. The
+voracious, insatiable maw of the city was a grave for them all, and
+the commercial greed which falls so heavily on the poor dumb beasts in
+which it traffics, caged them so tightly for their last journey that
+by the time they reached Noonoon they were bruised and cramped and not
+a few trodden under foot. The empty trucks going west again made the
+longest trains, as they could be laden with nothing but a little
+wire-netting for settlers who were fighting the rabbits, and were
+easily distinguishable from other "goods," as when they clumsily and
+jerkily halted the clanking of their couplings and the bumping of
+their buffers could be heard for a mile or more down the valley. The
+splendid atmosphere intensified all sounds and carried them an unusual
+distance, and many a time at first I was wont to be aroused from sleep
+in the night with a notion that the thundering trains were going to
+run right over the house.
+
+On the night in question I had not heard Miss Flipp return from her
+midnight tryst, though all the luggage trains had passed and it neared
+the time of the first division of the up or citywards mail from the
+west, which was the earliest train to arrive in town from the country
+daily. It passed Noonoon in the vicinity of 4 A.M.--a radiant hour in
+the summer dawn, but then in winter, the time when bed is most
+alluring, when the passengers' breath congeals on the window-panes,
+they complain that the foot-warmers have got cold, and give yet one
+more twist to their comforters and another tug at their 'possum or
+wallaby rugs. This train passed with its shaking thunder, drew into
+Noonoon for refreshments, then on and on with noisy energy, but still
+Miss Flipp did not return.
+
+I concluded that she must have decided to leave us in this fashion, or
+that I had missed her entry during the rumble of a passing train, or
+mayhap I had snoozed for a moment, or perhaps an hour, as the
+unsympathetic heavy sleepers aver the insomnists must do; and ceasing
+to be on the alert any longer, I really slept.
+
+
+
+
+FIFTEEN.
+
+ALAS! MISS FLIPP!
+
+
+I hastened to appear at the half-past seven breakfast, as no excuse
+for non-appearance was taken, and the only concession made to Miss
+Flipp, who had not been present at it for some time, was that she
+could make herself a cup of cocoa when she chose to rise. For this
+meal grandma ladled out the porridge and flavoured it with milk and
+sugar in the usual way.
+
+"I say, Dawn, which of them blokes, Ernest or Dora, is the best
+boat-puller?" inquired Andrew as he received his portion. "You were
+mighty stingy with the sugar, grandma!"
+
+"Dora isn't in it," responded Carry. "Mr Ernest could get ahead of him
+every time."
+
+"So he ought!" said Dawn. "His ears are the size of a pair of sails,
+and would pull him along."
+
+Thus was published another defect in my knight, till I feared that it
+must be only my partial gaze that discerned a knight at all.
+
+"Dear me," interposed grandma, "a man can't look or speak or walk but he's
+this, that, and the other. Things weren't so in my day. Of course there
+were some things that were took exception to, but there must be reason in
+everythink, an' I don't see what difference a man's ears being a little big
+makes. My father's ears--your great-grandfather's--was none too small, an'
+he was always a good kind man."
+
+"I don't care if my own ears were big, it wouldn't make me like them,"
+said the irrepressible Dawn; and grandma had just finished what she
+termed "dosing" the last plate of porridge, when we were interrupted
+by the appearance of policeman Danby at the French Lights. There was
+nothing strange in this appearance of the embodiment of the law, even
+at that early hour of the morning; for the huge young man with the
+rollicking face and curly hair, though a good officer in attending to
+his work, was a better in admiring a girl, which, after all, taking
+matters at the base, is the chief and most vital business of life, as,
+were it neglected, there would be no police or populace.
+
+Well, as I said, policeman Danby knew a pretty girl when he saw one,
+and there being two at Clay's, that household, in the way of the law,
+was very well looked after indeed; and for the purpose of escaping the
+annual registration fee, Andrew's little dog, "Whiskey," had remained
+a puppy as long as some young ladies tarry under thirty.
+
+Carry on rising to admit the caller had the usual tussle with the
+door, while grandma reiterated uncomplimentary remarks about the
+"blessed feller" who should some time since have effected repairs, and
+Danby upon entering wore an extremely grave face, looked neither at
+Dawn nor Carry, but addressed himself straight to Mrs Martha Clay.
+
+"I have to trouble you about a very unpleasant matter," he said, and
+cruelly all eyes went to poor Andrew, as it was but recently he had
+to be chased home for breaking the law.
+
+"Yes," said grandma, rising actively, and though a flurried colour
+came to the old withered cheek, the spark of battle flashed in the
+stern blue-grey eye.
+
+"Could I see you privately?" said Danby.
+
+"Certainly," said Mrs Clay: "but I'm not fond of secrecy; things is
+better open, and this is the first time in my life I've had to be seen
+secret by the police. Come this way."
+
+We said nothing, but dropped our feeding tools and waited in suspense,
+till in less than a minute grandma thrust her head in the dining-room
+door.
+
+"For mercy's sake, Dawn, look in Miss Flipp's room and see is she
+there."
+
+Dawn rose in a hurry and boxed Andrew's ears as she passed, because he
+too rose and tumbled over his chair in her way.
+
+"Some people ought to tie themselves up to be out of the way," she
+ejaculated.
+
+"Miss Flipp is not in her room," she presently called, "and her bed is
+smooth and made up."
+
+"God save us, then! Mr Danby says she's drownded in the river,"
+exclaimed her grandma. "What's to be done?"
+
+"We'll spare you all the trouble possible, Mrs Clay," said the man,
+with the respect always tendered the old dame; "but I'm afraid it's a
+suicide. Some men going to work on the new viaduct just noticed her
+clothes sticking up as they crossed the bridge at daylight and
+reported it, and I was sent down. We've taken the body to Jimmeny's
+pub., and sent for the coroner, at all events."
+
+Dawn and Andrew howled together in a frightened manner, while the
+sensible Carry, who never lost her head, admonished them--
+
+"Don't be jackdaws. That won't mend matters. Perhaps it isn't half as
+bad as some make out. Things never are when you get the right hang of
+them."
+
+"Things are bad enough anyhow, but the way to mend 'em ain't to be
+snivelling," rapped out grandma, giving Dawn and Andrew a shaking that
+braced them up.
+
+Things were indeed bad enough, and nothing could mend them. They had
+gone beyond repair. It transpired that my senses had been correct, and
+poor Miss Flipp had _not_ returned that moonlit night as I lay
+listening to the passing trains. She had ended her ruined life by
+weighting her feet and dropping into the pretty stretch of water under
+the bridge, where the locomotives rushed by like thunder, and from
+where could be seen the twinkling electric lights of one of the oldest
+towns in Australia.
+
+The inquest, at which we all had to appear, elicited information that
+fairly stood poor grandma's hair on end. It was a great blow to find
+that she had been harbouring a woman who was not as Cæsar's wife, and
+that it was fear of the penalty of her divergence from what is
+accepted as virtue, had driven her to take her life ere she had
+transmitted the tribulation of being to a nameless child.
+
+Nothing was cleared up regarding her antecedents. The person by whom
+she was supposed to be recommended to Mrs Clay knew of no such
+individual, and no one came to claim her.
+
+Her uncle, it was discovered, had a day or two previously sailed for
+America on urgent business, and after the girl's death an affectionate
+letter for her arrived from him. She had left nothing to fix the blame
+where it belonged, but with a misdirected loyalty so common in her
+sex had paid all the debt her frail self.
+
+The post on the day of her death brought me a pathetic little note, in
+which she stated that she wished to bear the whole blame; a woman
+always had to in any case, and as she could not face it she had
+decided upon death. She had written this to me because she felt I had
+had an inkling of how matters had been with her, and she thanked me
+that I had kept silent, in conjunction with the observation that it
+was not usual for such as she to meet with forbearance from those who
+had had sense to preserve their respectability. Ah, the regret that
+consumed me that I had not risked the unpopularity of interference and
+sought her confidence. I might have been able to have saved her from
+such an end!
+
+I kept my knowledge to myself. It would scarcely have hurt Mr Pornsch.
+Under the British Constitution property is far more sacred than women.
+But having a fatality in belief that there is a law of retribution in
+all things, I hoped to be able to sheet this crime home to its
+perpetrator in a way that should put him to confusion when he least
+expected it.
+
+There was ample money for burial among the girl's belongings, which
+were taken in charge by the police, and there let the cruelly common
+incident rest for the present.
+
+The affair so upset Dawn that she refused to occupy her usual room any
+longer, and at her suggestion she and I determined to occupy a big
+upstairs room, up till that time filled with rubbish. This being
+agreed upon we forsook the apartments opening into the river garden,
+and betook ourselves to an altitude from which we had even a better
+view of the valley, river, and trains.
+
+Dawn so perceptibly went "off colour" that I persuaded her
+grandmother to let the singing lessons begin by way of diverting her
+mind.
+
+The old lady would not contemplate paying more than two guineas per
+quarter, so I saw a six guinea teacher, arranged with him to take the
+pupil at four, two of which I privately paid myself, and Dawn at last
+set out for the city for her first lesson in the arduous and
+unattractive boo-ing and ah-ing that lie at the foundation of a
+singer's art.
+
+
+
+
+SIXTEEN.
+
+ADVANCE, AUSTRALIA!
+
+
+In the career of a prodigy there invariably comes a time when it is
+compelled to relinquish being very clever for a child, and has to
+enter the business of life in competition with adults.
+
+This crisis had arrived in the career of the prodigy Australia.
+
+It is at the time of electing new or re-electing old representatives
+of the people to the legislature that the state of a country's affairs
+is more prominently before the public than at any other, and preceding
+the State election in which Grandma Clay was to exercise the rights of
+full citizenship for the first time, it was a lugubrious statement.
+
+That the country had gone to the dogs was averred by each candidate
+for the three hundred a-year given ordinary State members, and each
+described himself as the instrument by which it could be restored to a
+state of paradisaical prosperity.
+
+This is an old bogey, unfailingly revived at elections. The
+Ministerialists invariably roar how they have improved the public
+finances, while the Opposition as blatantly tries to drown them by
+bellowing that the retiring government has damned the country, and
+that the Opposition has the only recipe of satisfactory
+reconstruction, but in spite of this threadbare election scare the
+Commonwealth remained the freest and one of the wealthiest
+abiding-places in the world.
+
+Just then its business affairs were undoubtedly badly managed, and
+mismanagement, if continued, inevitably leads to bankruptcy. Undeniably
+there was an unwholesome percentage of unemployed--inexcusable when there
+abounded vast areas of fertile territory quite unpeopled, mines as rich as
+any known to history all untouched; the sugar, grape, timber, and other
+industries crying aloud for further development, and countless resources on
+every hand requiring nothing but that these and men should meet on healthy
+and enterprising business terms. The population, instead of gaining in
+numbers, was foolishly leaving the country, like over-indulged, spoiled
+children, imagining themselves ill-treated, while others hesitated to come
+in because the Australian trumpet was not blown loudly enough nor in the
+right key.
+
+The administration, like a young housewife tossed into an overflowing
+storehouse, had spent lavishly, but the bank of a multi-millionaire
+will come to an end in time, and so with the play-days of Australia.
+
+The hour had arrived for her to be up and doing, to marshal her
+forces, advertise her wares, and take her place as a worker among the
+nations.
+
+There are always old bush lawyers and city know-alls beside whom
+Chamberlain and Roberts are but small tomahawks as empire-builders,
+and these now were predicting that to make a nation of her Australia
+needed war and many other disasters to harden her people from the
+amusement-loving, sunny-eyed folk they were; but this was an
+extremist's outlook. She was in greater need of a land law that would
+sensibly and practically put the right people on the soil, and entice
+population of desirable class--independent producers--so that the
+development of the industries would follow in natural sequence. In
+short, Australia was languishing for a few patriotic sons with strong,
+clear, business heads to apply the science of statecraft, as
+distinguished from the self-seeking artifices of the mere job
+politician at present sapping her vitals, and all the elements for
+success were within her gates.
+
+I had long had an eye open for the discernment of such an embryo
+statesman, and looked forward with interest to the study of the
+present crop of political candidates.
+
+As soon as Leslie Walker--Ernest Breslaw's step-brother--had been
+elected as the Opposition candidate for Noonoon, canvassing,
+"spouting," war-whooping, and all manner of "barracking" began with
+such intense enthusiasm that fortunately Miss Flipp's sad fate was
+speedily driven out of our thoughts.
+
+Dawn and Mrs Bray were on Walker's committee, and nearly every night
+there was an advocate of one party or the other gasconading in
+Citizens' Hall.
+
+To Noonoon residents it became what the theatre is to city patrons of
+the drama, and more, for this was invested with the dignity of a
+certain amount of reality. To women being in the fray many attributed
+the unusual interest distinguishing this campaign, but the real cause
+was that public affairs had come to such a deadlock that legislature,
+as the medium through which they might be moved, had become a vital
+question to the veriest numskull, and all were mustering to ascertain
+who put forth the most favourable policy.
+
+With politics and her newly started singing lessons, Dawn was too
+thoroughly engrossed for thought of any knight to pierce her armour of
+indifference, which was the outcome of full mental occupation. I
+invested in a nice little piano, that was carried upstairs to our big
+room, and had undertaken to superintend her practising, but she was a
+more enthusiastic politician than a vocal student, as I pointed out to
+her grandmother's satisfaction. These happenings had eventuated during
+the first fortnight of May, and in the third week of this month Leslie
+Walker imported a couple of experienced ranters to renew the attack
+and denounce the villainy of the present government in loud and
+blustering vote-catching war-whoops.
+
+In the town itself, nearly every third person was employed on the
+railway, and their only care in casting their vote was to secure a
+representative who would not in any way reduce the expenditure of the
+railways. Thus a parliamentary candidate in Noonoon had to trim his
+sails to catch this large vote or be defeated. It was the same with
+other factions: any man with a common-sense platform, impartially for
+the good of the State at large, might as well have sat down at home
+and have saved himself the labour of stumping an electorate and
+bellowing himself hoarse for all the chance he had of being returned.
+
+We turned out _en masse_ from Clay's to hear the second speech of
+young Walker, assisted by two M.P.'s belonging to his party. Grandma
+and I drove in the sulky, while the girls and Andrew walked ahead, the
+latter under strict orders to behave with reason, and not make "a fool
+of hisself with the larrakins."
+
+It was well we arrived early, as there was not sitting room for half
+the audience, though more than half the hall being reserved for the
+ladies, we got a front seat, and long before the time for the speakers
+to appear every corner was packed, and women as well as men were
+standing in rows fronting the stage. A great buzz of conversation at
+the front, and stampeding and cat-calling among the youths at the
+back, was terminated by the arrival of the three speakers of the
+evening, who were received amid deafening cock-a-doodling, cheering,
+stamping, and clapping. An old warrior of the class dressed _up_ to
+the position of M.P. sat to one side, and next him was the barrister
+type so prolific in parliament, who had himself dressed _down_ to the
+vulgar crowd, while third sat Leslie Walker.
+
+Surely not the first Leslie Walker who had appeared a week or two
+previously! His bright, restless eye, though too sensitive for that of
+an old campaigner, now took in the crowd with complete assurance, and
+there was no hint of hesitation discernible. Having once smelt powder
+he was ready for the fray.
+
+"By Jove! hasn't Les. bucked up!" whispered Ernest, who sat on one
+side of me, where he had landed after an ineffectual attempt to sit
+beside Dawn.
+
+"Yes; if he can only roar and blow and wave his arms sufficiently he
+may have a chance."
+
+"But he's still nervous," said the observant Andrew from the rear.
+"You watch him go for that flea in the leg of his pants!"
+
+Sitting in full view of a "chyacking" audience is a severe ordeal to
+an inexperienced campaigner with a sensitive temperament, and this
+action, indeed peculiarly like an attempt to detain an annoying insect
+in a fold of his lower garment, was one of those little mannerisms
+adopted to give an appearance of ease.
+
+Behind the speakers came, as chairman, one of the swell class almost
+extinct in this region, and he, too, had rather an effete attitude and
+physique, as he took up his position behind the spindley table
+weighted by the smeared tumblers and water-bottle. He rose with the
+intention of flattering the speakers and audience in the orthodox way,
+but the electors, among whom a spirit of overflowing hilarity was at
+large, took his duties out of his mouth.
+
+"Don't smoodge, old cockroach, let the other blokes blaze away, as we
+(the taxpayers) are paying dear for this spouting."
+
+The barrister man M.P. burst upon them first with the latest trumpet
+blare with which speeches were being opened. Having been primed as to
+the magnitude of the railway vote in Noonoon, first move was to throw
+a bone to it, and, metaphorically speaking, he got down on his knees
+to this section of the electors, and howled and squealed that all
+civil servants' wages would be left as they were.
+
+He took another canter to flatter the ladies regarding the remarkably
+intelligent vote they had cast in the Federal elections, and asserted
+his belief that they would do likewise in the present crisis, and
+introduce a nobler element into political life.
+
+Creatures, a few months previously ranked lower than an almost
+imbecile man, and with no more voice in the laws they lived under than
+had lunatics or horses--it was miraculous what a power they had
+suddenly grown! The man at the back saw the point--
+
+"Blow it all, don't smoodge so. It ain't long since you was all rared
+up on yer hind legs showin' how things would go to fury if wimmen had
+the vote."
+
+Having got past this prelude, he proceeded with a vigorous volley of
+abuse against the sitting government, and showed how Walker, the
+Opposition candidate, was the only man to vote for. He shook his
+fists, stamped and raved, and illustrated how much a voice could
+endure without cracking, the back people carefully waiting till he had
+to pull up to take a drink out of one of the glasses on the spindley
+table, when they got in with--
+
+"You're mad! Keep cool! You'll bust a blood-vessel! When are you going
+to give Tomato Jimmy a show to blow his horn?" This being a reference
+to the calling of the other speaker, who was a middleman in the
+vegetable and fruit-market. The first speaker, however, was not nearly
+exhausted yet--he had to thump his fists on the unfortunate spindley
+table, and work off several other oratorical poses and a deal of
+elocutionary voice-play, ere he was finished. I fairly rolled with
+enjoyment of the wonderful wit and humour of the crowd at the back,
+which, unless it be put down as the critical faculty, is an
+inexplicable phenomenon. Not one of the interrupters, if drafted on to
+the hustings, could have given a lucid or intelligent statement of his
+views, or indication that he was furnished with any, and yet not one
+slip on the part of a candidate, one inconsistent point, personal
+mannerism or peccadillo, but was remarked in an astonishingly humorous
+and satirical style.
+
+The barrister man having finished "spouting," the common-sense
+individual, who always sits half-way down the hall, and who, when he
+asks a question, has to face the double ordeal of the crowd and the
+candidate, said--
+
+"The speaker has shown us all the things the other fellows _can't do_,
+we'd like another speech now stating what _he can_ do." The chairman
+rose to say this was out of order, but his voice was lost in the din.
+
+"You sit down, old chap, we can manage this meetin' ourselves."
+
+"But out of respect to the ladies present!"
+
+"We'll look after the ladies too," was the good-humoured rejoinder.
+"Why, they're enjoyin' it as much as we are. They've got a vote now,
+you know, and are going to use it in an intelligent manner."
+
+"Did you know Queen Anne was dead?" said another.
+
+"The ladies won't be harmed. Any one that disrespects the ladies will
+be chucked out."
+
+The ladies had to laugh at this, and the meeting went right merrily,
+and more merrily in that half the "blowing" from the stage was drowned
+by the interjectory din from the rear of the building, where lads and
+men stood chock-a-block, the former, and the latter too, making right
+royal use of their licence to be rowdy; but such a good-natured crowd
+could not often be seen. There were no altercations, only laughter and
+the crude repartee of such a gathering.
+
+The first speaker having returned to his seat and sanity, the second
+took his place.
+
+"Hullo, Tomatoes! What's the price of onions and spuds?"
+
+"Now begin and tell the ladies how intelligent they are, so you'll get
+their vote."
+
+"Tomatoes" did butter the ladies, next yelled that the civil servants
+would not be retrenched, and then upheld the virulent attack on the
+government. Keeping in time with the utterances of "Tomato Jimmy," the
+boys at the back grew so boisterous that at one time it appeared
+inevitable that the meeting must break up in disorder. The chairman,
+the candidates, the ladies, the whole house rose, and one man towards
+the front made himself heard amid the babel to the effect that the
+ladies ought to walk out to show their resentment of the insults that
+had been offered their presence by this disorderly behaviour.
+
+"Ladies, don't go. _Dear_ ladies, don't go," called some wags. "We're
+only educatin' you in politics,--learning you how to be like your
+superiors--men."
+
+This evoked a round of laughter, and order was restored.
+
+"That's right, ladies, don't go; if you was to turn dawg on us now,
+we'd be so crestfallen we couldn't think about politics and save the
+country at all."
+
+Once more "Tomatoes" belched forth the infamy of the government, and
+louder and louder he yelled, till one marvelled at his endurance.
+Rougher and hotter grew his repartee till, by sheer abuse, he gained
+the ascendancy; but there was no sane statement of what he would
+propose as a remedy. Grandma Clay happened to rise as he neared the
+finish to see about a reticule she had dropped, and proved a target
+for those at the rear.
+
+"Hello, grandma! are you going to contradict him? Give us a straight
+tip about women's rights while you're up;" and poor grandma sat down
+very precipitately with an exceedingly deep blush.
+
+"If I could only get the chance," she gasped, "I'd give 'em a piece of
+me mind."
+
+Third on the list came Leslie Walker, whose improvement was beyond
+belief. No notes or hesitation this time. Each sentence was crisp and
+clear, and in every detail he evinced the facility for enacting his
+_rôle_ which is supposedly a feminine accomplishment.
+
+The chairman, in closing the meeting, rose to say--
+
+"In reference to the interjector who said the speaker was mad--"
+
+"Oh, that's what every one said about _you_ when you were in the
+council, and so you were too, and so are they all. Look at the roads
+we've got in the municipality," said a voice.
+
+So the chairman had to let the meeting terminate with the candidates
+thanking the electors for the extraordinarily good hearing they had
+been accorded; it being part of the humour of politics that the worse
+a candidate is boo-hooed the more stress he lays upon the _good
+hearing_ given him, and the more scurrilous he is regarding his
+opponent the more frantically he assures one that he is a bosom
+_personal_ friend.
+
+Andrew and I had the distinction of going home under grandma's
+tutelage, while Carry and Dawn stayed behind to go to the ladies'
+committee rooms, and Ernest lingered to escort them.
+
+"I say, grandma, are you goin' to vote for that bloke?" inquired
+Andrew.
+
+"I'm goin' to hear the other side first, and give me opinion after.
+There wasn't one of the swells there, was there?"
+
+"Dr Smalley and Dr Tinker both was."
+
+"Yes; but I mean the wimmen: an' how on earth did old Tinker ever get
+away from Mrs Tinker for that length of time? You'll never see one of
+them kind of wimmen at anythink that makes for progress. That's the
+way they make theirselves superior to the likes of you an' me--by
+never doin' nothink only for theirselves. 'Oh, we've got all we want
+as it is, an' don't want the vote; a woman's place is home,' they say
+if you ask 'em. It's all very fine for them as has a man to keep them
+like in a band-box; they would have found it different if they had to
+act on their own like me. I'm sick of this intelligence in women they
+make a fuss about all of a sudden. I've rared a family and managed me
+business better than a man could; and what's there been all along to
+prevent a woman from stroking out a name on a paper I never could see.
+And it never seems to me much difference which name was struck out,
+for they're mostly a lot of impostors that only think of featherin'
+their own nests. You'll always hear of wimmen not bein' intelligent
+enough to do this and that, and these things is only what men like
+doin' best theirselves, and the things they make out God intended
+women to do is them the men don't like doin'. You don't ever hear of
+them thinkin' women ain't intelligent enough to do seven things at
+once." Grandma was in great form that night, and not only led but
+maintained the conversation.
+
+"I rather like this young feller, but he ain't no sense much either.
+All he thinks of is buttoning for the railway people, and it's the
+people on the land that ought to be legislated for first. They are the
+foundation of everythink; other things would work right after. Every
+one can't live in Sydney, an' that's what they're all makin' for now.
+Every one is getting some little agency--parasite business. They've
+got sense to see the people on the land is the most despised and sat
+upon. You don't hear no squallin' about they'll protect the farmer.
+No, he's a despised old party that them scuts of fellers on the
+railway would grin at and think theirselves above, and scarcely give
+him a civil answer if he asked a question about his business what he's
+payin' them fellers there to do for him, and which only for the
+prodoocers wouldn't be there at all. Things is gettin' pretty tight on
+farms now. It means about sixteen hours hard graft a-day to make not
+half what a railwayman makes in eight hours. If you happen to have
+grapes or oranges, if they manage to escape the frost, an' hail, an'
+caterpillar, then the blight ketches 'em, or there's a drewth, and
+there ain't none; an' if there's any, there's so much that there ain't
+no sale for 'em; and the farmer's life I reckon ought to be stopped as
+gamblin', for a gambler's life ain't one bit more precarious."
+
+"Then why the jooce do you want me to go on the land?" said Andrew.
+
+"That ain't the point."
+
+"It's the most sticking out point to me," protested the lad. "I reckon
+bein' on the land is a mug's game; scrapin' like a fool when a feller
+could be sittin' in an office an' gettin' all they want twice as
+easy."
+
+"Here, you don't know what's good. It's more respectabler bein' on the
+land. You get the pony out, an' make the coffee, an' hold your
+tongue."
+
+Andrew and I had undertaken to make the coffee for supper, and thus
+give Carry, whose week in the kitchen it was, a chance to go to the
+meeting.
+
+They all arrived from it after a time--Dawn and the knight together,
+Carry and Larry Witcom following. Oh, where was "Dora"?
+
+"Who's that with you, Carry?" asked Andrew. "There was a young lady
+named Carry, who had a sweetheart named Larry; at the gate they often
+would tarry, to talk about when they would marry."
+
+But this remark of Andrew's to parry, Dawn good-naturedly plunged into
+an account of the meeting.
+
+"What did they do?" asked grandma.
+
+"Do?--they only blabbed. Mr Walker was there to-night. We asked that
+Jimmeny girl from the pub. to join, and she delivered a great parable
+at us, looking round all the time to see if the boot-licking tone of
+it was pleasing the men. She said that women ought to bring up their
+children to respect them--"
+
+"The most commonest idea some people has of bringin' up their children
+to respect them," grandma chipped in, "is to let youngsters make
+toe-rags of their mother; and boys only as high as the table think
+they can cheek their mother because she's only a woman an' hasn't as
+much right to be livin' in the world as them, and when they are
+twenty-one the law confirms this beautiful sentiment. Leastways, until
+just lately," she concluded.
+
+"And this Jimmeny piece," continued Dawn, "said women ought to treat
+their husbands decently, and she thinks a woman disgraces her sex by
+getting up on a platform to speak. I asked her if she thought they did
+not disgrace themselves and the other sex too by standing behind a bar
+and serving out drinks and grinning at a lot of goods that ought to be
+at home with their families,--and that was a bit of a facer. Then she
+said it was only the ugly old women who wanted to shriek round and get
+rights,--that men would give the young pretty ones all they wanted
+without asking! Of all the old black gin ideas, I always think that
+the terriblest. A nice state of affairs, if people couldn't get honest
+civilised rights without being young and pretty; and _the fools_!"
+said the girl heatedly, "can't they look round and see how long the
+beauty and youth business will work! 'Men,' she says, 'ought to rule;
+they're the stronger vessel.'" And Dawn gave inimitable mimicry of
+Miss Jimmeny of the pub. "If you take my tip for it, those girls that
+sing out that men are the stronger vessel are the sort that have a
+dishcloth of a husband, and never let him off a string."
+
+This attitude of mind was one of Dawn's distinctive characteristics.
+Having that beauty, which in the enslaved condition of women has
+always been an unfair asset to the possessor, to the exclusion of
+worthier traits, she was not like most beauties, content to sit down
+and trade upon it, but had wholesomer, honester, workaday ideals in
+regard to the position of her sex.
+
+She was going to Sydney in the morning for her second singing lesson,
+and as Ernest, by a strange coincidence, happened to have business
+that would take him on the same journey by the same train, I
+accompanied him to the gate to warn him against inadvertently
+divulging that I had been an actress by trade.
+
+"I want to take you into my confidence," I said, as we passed several
+naked cedar-trees, and halted in the shelter of some fine peppers that
+grew to perfection in this valley, where I related the trouble I had
+had to bring the old lady round to the idea of Dawn's singing lessons,
+and mentioned the girl's ambition regarding the stage.
+
+"Now," I continued, "if the old dame were to discover I had been on
+the stage, she would think I was leading Dawn to the devil, and would
+not credit that no one is more anxious than I am to save her from the
+footlights, or that the best way to stave her off is this training.
+My secret ambition regarding her," I said, critically observing the
+strong knobby profile, "is that within the next five years she should
+marry some nice youngster with means to place her in a setting
+befitting her intelligence and beauty."
+
+"Have you got any one in your eye now?" he irrelevantly inquired. And,
+considering he stood where he filled my entire vision, as he rose
+between me and the light shed by the last division of the western
+passenger mail as it self-importantly crossed the viaduct, I
+answered--
+
+"Yes; I think I know a man who would just fill the bill."
+
+He did not ask for further particulars, but remarked warningly--
+
+"Decent fellows with cash are scarce. They are inclined to get into
+mischief if they have too much time and money on their hands."
+
+"That's it; and I would not like to make a mess of things now that
+I've taken up matchmaking. You'll have to advise me when matters get
+out of hand; a little practice may come in handy some day when you
+have half a dozen daughters."
+
+"It would come in still handier now."
+
+"Pshaw, now! You'd only have to ask to receive, at your time of life
+and with your qualifications."
+
+"I'm not so sure. You're the only one who has such an opinion of me,"
+he said disconsolately. "Others look upon me as a red-headed fool with
+big ears, &c.;" and thus I knew Dawn's idle words had returned to his
+ears, as these things invariably do, and had stung.
+
+"Silly-billy! I'll take you in hand when I've settled Dawn. I'm the
+one to advertise your wares, for could I turn back the wheel of time
+eight or nine years and make us of an age, I'd make it leap-year and
+propose to you myself."
+
+"I'd like to propose to you without altering the time," he gallantly
+responded, apparently not in such deadly fear of a breach of promise
+action as was Uncle Jake.
+
+"If I don't move in the matter Dawn will be marrying that Eweword, and
+though he's a most handsome and worthy--"
+
+"Soft as a turnip," contemptuously interposed Ernest; "eats too much.
+It would take twelve months hard training to make any sort of a man of
+him."
+
+"It would be a pity to see Dawn just settling down into the dull,
+drudging life of a farmer's wife, going to an occasional show or
+tea-meeting in a home-made dress, with two or three children dragging
+at her skirts and looking a perfect wreck, as most of the mothers do."
+
+"By Jove, yes!"
+
+"She has a right to be on the lawn on Cup Day or in the front circle
+on first nights. She'd surprise some of the grandees, and with her
+vivacity and courage she'd make a furore for a time."
+
+"She'd make a good sport if she were a man," assented Ernest. "No
+running stiff or jamming a jock on the post or anything like that from
+her--she'd always hit straight out from the shoulder and above the
+belt."
+
+"Yes; she has particularly infatuated me, and I'd like to save her
+from Eweword."
+
+"Marry him to the girl Grosvenor while you're about it and that will
+dispose of him and suit her, for she strikes me as anxious for
+matrimony."
+
+"She hasn't been--" I began.
+
+"Oh, no, I think she's a splendid woman in every way, but--"
+
+"_But_, even the finest and most chivalrous man, while he thinks the
+only sphere for women is matrimony, yet is shocked if a woman betrays
+in the least way that her ambitions lie in the domestic line--strange
+inconsistency. However, you will not let Dawn know my ideas of
+disposing of her;" and with the want of perspicacity of his sex, or
+else with a wonderful power of covering his thoughts excelling that of
+women, and of which women never suspect men, Ernest promised without
+sensing what I had in view.
+
+
+
+
+SEVENTEEN.
+
+MRS BRAY AND CARRY COME TO ISSUES.
+
+
+Contention arose in the Clay household next day, Dawn's singing
+lessons being at the root of the trouble. It was her week in the
+kitchen, and that she should be two days absent from the cooking,
+displeased Carry.
+
+"Well, if you don't think the place fair, you can go!" said grandma.
+"But I think you're a fool, an' you're giving me a lot of worry. It's
+all very fine in other people's places, but some day w'en you have a
+home of your own you'll know the worry of it. Next time I make a
+arrangement with a girl she'll have to take a extra day in the kitchen
+without humbuggin'."
+
+"I'll vote for me grandma on that bill," said Andrew, "for I've often
+been give the pip by who is in the kitchen an' who is out of it.
+Grandma, did you hear the latest? Young Jack Bray's been in another
+orange orchard and didn't do a get quick enough, and has got took up,
+and his father will have to pay money to keep him out of quod."
+
+The old lady bristled.
+
+"Didn't I tell you! Who knows how to receive these things best now?
+I've always believed in rarin' me family me own way, an' Mrs Bray is a
+fine woman, moral and decent, but she's got too many stones to throw
+at others and doesn't see to it sharp enough that less stones can't be
+threw at her. I thought she didn't take it serious enough. You'd have
+been in this too only for me dreadin' the spark. What are they goin'
+to do?"
+
+"Pay the money, of course; an' Mr Bray is goin' to tan the hide off
+Jack."
+
+"Some people don't get frightened of dishonesty unless it costs 'em
+something," said the old lady.
+
+"Well, I'll vote for me grandma every time," said Andrew, "and Jim
+Clay every second time," as he went out the door, "and meself the most
+times of all," he concluded in the back yard.
+
+Mrs Bray dropped in that afternoon for a chat, and grandma mentioned
+that we were without afternoon tea because Carry had "jacked up" about
+getting it, for reasons before mentioned.
+
+"Just like her!" said Mrs Bray; "she gives herself as much side as if
+she was one of us. She's the sort of girl who wouldn't think twice of
+telling you to do a thing yourself, and you've made an awful fool of
+her by making so much of her. Them things of girls _earnin' their own
+livin'_ ought to be kept in their place more," was the utterance of a
+woman who believed herself a staunch advocate for the freedom of her
+sex; but when Mrs Bray spoke of sex she meant self.
+
+"That ain't the point," said grandma; "I never think it anythink but a
+credit to a girl to be earnin' her living, an' would never be narrer
+enough to make them feel it. I always make a practice of treatin' the
+girls as near equal as within reason, for Carry's every bit as
+fine-lookin' an' good a girl as me own, an' if I wasn't here, wouldn't
+Dawn have to be foragin' for herself too? but there's reason in
+everythink, and Carry might be a bit obligin'."
+
+"Of course she ought to be; but what could you expect of her, took up
+with that Larry Witcom, an' does the ass think he really wants her?
+He's only got her on a string for his own amusement? He goes to see
+that Dora Cowper at the same time; Jack seen him there. I wonder will
+_he_ be scared off by being thought a ketch before the pot's boiled,
+so to speak. Good ketches, eh? I don't see nothing in none of them.
+They're only thought something because men is scarce here; they've all
+cleared out to the far out places, and West Australia. It's like a
+year the pumpkins is scarce, you can sell little things you'd hardly
+throw to the pigs another time, and that's the way it is with the few
+paltry fellers round here. It makes me mad to see the girls after
+them--_the fools!_ and the men grinnin' behind their backs. There's
+that Ada Grosvenor, if Eweword just calls up and talks to her she
+tells you about it as if it was something, and inviting him down
+there, an' then the blessed fellers gets to think they're gods. It
+makes me sick!"
+
+"Yes," said grandma; "I see the girls after fellers now,--there's that
+Danby for instance, he's a fine lump of a man, but w'en I was a girl I
+wouldn't have made toe-rags of a policeman."
+
+"Yes, a blessed feller strollin' up and down the street lookin' at his
+toes or runnin' in a drunk. I say, did you hear the latest about old
+Rooney-Molyneux? He didn't believe in women having the vote, didn't
+consider they had intellect to vote, so _he_ says (not as much brain
+as he has, don't you see, to marry a woman, and a baby to be coming
+and nothing to put on its back, while he strolls round and gets
+drunk), but now they've got the vote, he says (the great Lord Muck
+Rooney-Molyneux says it, remember) that it is their _duty_ to use it,
+and he intends to _make_ (mind you, _make_; I'd like to hear a man say
+he'd _make_ me do anything; I'd scald him, see if I wouldn't, and
+that's what wants doing with half the men anyhow, for the way they
+carry on to women), and he's going to _make_ his wife go round
+canvassing, _Now_! Men make me sick; w'en they're boys they're that
+troublesome they ought to be kep' under a tub, and we'n they get older
+they're that cantankerous and self-important they all want killin'
+off."
+
+"I'll bet Mrs Rooney won't be workin' for a different man to him. If
+her convictions led her that way, you'd see he'd have a flute about
+her not bein' fit to be out of her home," said grandma astutely.
+
+"Yes, that's the way with 'em; first they thought the world would
+tumble to pieces if women stirred out of the house for a minute to
+vote, and now that we've got the vote in spite of them, they'd make
+their wives walk round after votes for their side whether they was
+able or not."
+
+"They kicked agen us having the vote, and now we've got it they think
+we ought to vote with them like as if we was a appendage of theirs;
+men will be learnt different to that by-and-by, but it's best to go
+gradual; they've had as much as they can swaller for a time."
+
+"Ain't it just the very devil to them to think women is considered as
+important as themselves now, instead of something they could just do
+as they like with? Old Hollis there says he won't vote this year
+because the women have one. Did you ever hear of an insult like that?
+He says the monkeys will have a vote next, and that shows you what men
+think of women,--like as if they was some sort of animals."
+
+"Well, if you ask me," said grandma, "the monkeys have been havin' a
+vote all along in the case of old Hollis."
+
+Any further discussion in this line was terminated by the entrance of
+Carry, with her good-looking face flushed and hard set, as, rolling
+down her sleeve and buttoning it aggressively as the finishing touch
+to her toilet after completing her afternoon's work, she confronted
+Mrs Bray, on battle bent.
+
+"Well, Mrs Bray, I'd like to have given my opinion of you to your teeth
+long ago, but I held my tongue as it wasn't my house, and some people have
+different tastes and have folk around that I'd be a long time having
+anything to do with. Now, I think things do concern me, and I'm going to
+have my say; I couldn't have it sooner because I'm a _thing_ earning my
+living and had to finish my work. I haven't got a home of my own, and like
+some people, if I had, I'd be in it teaching my dirty rude brats not to be
+thieves. I wouldn't for everlasting be at other people's places
+scandalising people twice as good as myself. I didn't think Mrs Clay was
+the sort of person to go tittle-tattling--she can please herself; but it
+doesn't concern you if I do put on airs. I want to know what you mean by
+that I should be kept in my place. I'll swear I know how to carry my day as
+well as you do, and to keep in my place too well to be going round meddling
+with other people's business."
+
+"I didn't say nothing but was correct, an' what right have you to come
+bullying me? It's like your impudence--you a hussy out to work for
+your living at a few shillings a-week, and calling yourself a _lady_
+help when you're a servant, that's what you are; to bully _me_, a
+woman with a good home, and the mother of a family."
+
+Carry snorted contemptuously.
+
+"That old 'mother of a family' racket needn't be brought forward. It
+doesn't hold as much water as it used to. Women are thought just as
+much of now who are good useful workers in the world, and not tied up
+to some man and the mother of a few weedy kids that aren't any credit
+to king or country."
+
+"Mercy!" exclaimed grandma. "What am I to?"
+
+"Let 'em fight it out," I laconically advised in an aside, and she
+seemed disposed to take my advice.
+
+"You dare," blustered Mrs Bray. "And what else have you got to say?"
+
+"I want an explanation of the aspersion on my character when you said
+I had taken up with Larry Witcom. I'm not going to stand anything on
+my character in that line if I _am_ earning my living, and you _are_
+the mother of one or fourteen families, all as great a credit to you
+as the one Jack represents. And as for me earning my living, what are
+_you_ doing? If a man wasn't keeping you to suit himself, how would
+you be earning your living? I could earn my living the same way as you
+are doing to-morrow if I liked; but of the two, I think my present
+occupation is the decentest and less dependent. Apart from your
+bullying selfishness, a nice sensible way you have of talking! If you
+killed off the men, who would you have to keep you? And that's a nice
+civilised way to speak about your fellow creatures anyhow; whether
+they be men or black gins, they've just as much place in the scheme of
+creation as you have. We would have been a long time getting the vote
+or any other decent right if the men were like you. It's because you
+are the same stamp as so many of the men that we've been kept down so
+long as we have; and now, what about me taking up with Larry Witcom?"
+
+"Well, it's well known what Larry is."
+
+"Well, what is he?"
+
+"You ask him about Mrs Park's divorce case."
+
+"I hope you don't think your old man is a saint, do you? As big a fool
+as you are, you're surely not fool enough for that, are you? Perhaps
+he isn't as clean a potato as Larry if it was all brought out."
+
+"But he's a married man this many a year, with a married daughter, and
+his young days are lived down long ago."
+
+"Well, so would Larry be married many a year and have things lived
+down in time, and not as many to live down either as your husband has
+at present, if things are true; for all your everlasting shepherding
+he gets off the chain sometimes."
+
+Hoity-toity! this was putting a fuse to gunpowder.
+
+"You hussy! What have you got to say about my husband? Prove it, and
+I'd make short work of him; and if it's lies, I'll bring you into
+court for it."
+
+"I'll leave it for you to prove; you're one of those who thinks every
+yarn entertaining till they touch yourself."
+
+"Two to one on Carry every time when me grandma's the umpire," grinned
+Andrew round the corner.
+
+"Carry, you've had enough to say. I forbid any more in my house," said
+grandma, rising to order.
+
+"I declare this a drawn fight," said Andrew.
+
+"You can have it out with Mrs Bray in her own house if you want, but
+no more of it here," continued grandma.
+
+"Don't you dare come to my house," said Mrs Bray.
+
+"_Your_ house! no fear; I never associate with scandal-mongers,"
+contemptuously retorted Carry, as Mrs Bray made a precipitate
+departure, emitting something about a hussy who didn't know her place
+as she went.
+
+"I'm surprised at you!" said grandma. "Her tongue does run on a little
+sometimes, but you ought to remember she's old enough to be your
+mother, and girls do owe somethink to women with families."
+
+"And women with families and homes ought to remember they owe
+something to girls that aren't settled, because they haven't got a man
+caught yet to keep them."
+
+"Well, this ain't my quarrel, an' don't you bring it up to me again. A
+woman that's rared a family, and two of them like I have done, has
+enough with her own dissensions."
+
+It was rather a sullen party at tea that evening, so Dawn's return
+from Sydney immediately after, with her cheeks radiant from travel in
+the quick evening express, and herself brimming over with her day's
+adventures, formed a welcome relief.
+
+"I had a great time coming home," said she. "Mr Ernest and Dora
+Eweword both went to Sydney this morning, and Mr Ernest and I raced
+into a carriage to escape Dora, and we did; and he must have asked the
+guard, for he found our carriage, but he had only a second-class
+ticket, and wouldn't be let in."
+
+"And how came you to be in a first-class carriage?" inquired grandma.
+"I can't stand that; there's expense enough as it is, and your betters
+travel second."
+
+"It wasn't my fault. Mr Ernest bought the tickets like a gentleman
+should (it says in the etiquette book), and I couldn't fight with him
+there and then,--you're always telling me to be more genteel."
+
+"But I don't want strangers paying anything for my granddaughter."
+
+"You needn't mind in this instance," I interposed.
+
+"Mr Ernest probably wished to be gentlemanly to Dawn because she has
+been so good to me." Once more I saw the little derisive smile flit
+across the exquisite face, but she said--
+
+"Yes; he said that you're looking so well it must be our nursing, and
+that he will try and get grandma to take him in if he falls ill."
+
+"I wonder if he's going to get took bad--love-sick--like the other
+blokes," said Andrew.
+
+Dawn cast a murderous glance at him, and covered the remark by making
+a bustle in sitting to her tea, and in retailing minute details of her
+singing lesson.
+
+We retired early, and she produced from the basket in which she
+carried her music a most pretentious box of sweets and various society
+newspapers.
+
+"Mr Ernest said you might like some of these, and I was to have a
+share because I carried them home, though he got the 'bus and brought
+me to the door, so I hadn't to walk a step."
+
+"Good boy! What did he talk about to-day?"
+
+"I asked him about all the actresses he has seen. He's going to give
+me the autographed photos he has of them. You wouldn't think he'd like
+to part with them, but he says he's tired of them all now--they're
+nearly all married, and are back numbers. Actresses are only thought
+of for a little while, he says."
+
+"That is the natural order of things, and applies to others as well as
+actresses. Pretty young girls are not pretty for long. They should see
+to it that they are plucked by the right fingers while their bloom is
+attractive. The old order falls ill-fittingly on some, but is fair in
+the main,--we each have our fleeting hour."
+
+"Yes; but where is there a desirable plucker?" said the practical
+girl. "There are scarcely any good matches and the few there are have
+so many running after them that I wouldn't give 'em the satisfaction
+of thinking I wanted them too."
+
+True, good matches are few. In these luxurious times the generality of
+girls' ideas of a good match being very advanced--in short, a man of
+sufficient wealth to keep them in petted idleness. There can be no
+shade of reproach on women for this ambition, it is but one outcome of
+the evolution of civilisation, and is merely a species of common-sense
+on their part; for the ordinary routine of marriage, as instanced by
+the testimony of thousands of women ranked among the comfortably and
+happily married, is so trying that girls do well to try for the most
+comfortable berths ere putting their heads in the noose.
+
+"And Dora, where was he all this time?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, he brought Ada Grosvenor home; thought that would spite me. She
+was in town too, and you should just hear her after this. The silly
+rabbit can't open her mouth but she tells you what this man did and
+that one said to her, when all the time it's nothing but some ordinary
+courtesy they ought to extend to even black gins."
+
+
+
+
+EIGHTEEN.
+
+THE FOUNDATION OF THE POULTRY INDUSTRY.
+
+
+Peace was restored in the Clay household through my interviewing Carry
+and offering to teach her music and allow her the use of my piano if
+she would do some of Dawn's work for two days during every second
+week. The next irritation arose from the male portion of the family.
+
+Now, we had all been so vigorously on political entertainment bent,
+that no one had given a thought to Uncle Jake and his doings or
+political opinions, or whether he had any, but it transpired, though a
+"mere man," he had been pursuing his course with as much attention to
+electioneering technique as the most emancipated woman among us.
+
+On the afternoon following Carry's little difference with Mrs Bray,
+Ada Grosvenor called to invite us to accompany her to hear Olliver
+Henderson, the ministerial candidate, who was to address the women at
+the hall first, and the men at Jimmeny's pub. afterwards, and we all
+went. Next morning at breakfast, when we had set to work upon the
+"dosed" porridge, Andrew again catechised his grandma concerning the
+casting of her vote.
+
+"I'm goin' for young Walker of course; as for that other feller!"
+said she cholericly, "I was that sick of his stuttering and muttering,
+an' holdin' his meetin's at Jimmeny's (we all know that that means
+free drinks), an' after waitin' all my life fer it I'm not goin' to
+cast the only vote that maybe I'll live to have, for a feller that
+buys his votes with grog. There's precious little to choose between
+them. They only want the glory of bein' in parliament for theirselves,
+and for the time bein' have rose a flute about the country goin' to
+the dogs and them bein' the people to save it; but once the election's
+over that's all we'll hear of 'em, and though they'd lick our boots
+now, they're so glad to know us, they'd forget all about us then. The
+one who can blow the loudest will get in, and as it must be one it
+might as well be this feller that can talk, an' could keep up his end
+of the stick in parliament, as there's no doubt this talkin' an' blow
+has become such a great trade one has to go to the wall without it."
+
+"Well, I'm going for Walker too, because he's something to look at,"
+said Carry.
+
+"The women was goin' to put in _clean_ men an' do strokes," sneered
+Uncle Jake, "an' it turns out they'd vote for the best-lookin'
+man,--nice state of affairs that is."
+
+"Ah! it's all very fine for a man to buck w'en a thing treads on his
+own toes; it would be thought a terrible thing for a woman to vote for
+a good-lookin' man an' pass over merit, but that's what's been done to
+women all the time. The good-lookin' ones got all the honours, whether
+they deserved 'em or not, and those complainin' agen this was jeered
+at an' called 'Shrieking sisters,' but it's a different tune now."
+
+"Uncle, _darling_, who are you going to vote for?" inquired Andrew.
+
+"For Henderson, of course, an' I reckon all the women here with votes
+ought, too."
+
+"And why, pray?" asked grandma, her eyes flashing a challenge, while
+her faithful guardswomen, Carry and Dawn, suspended work to see how
+the argument ended.
+
+"For the look of the thing to start with. It don't look well to see
+the wimmen of the family goin' agen the men."
+
+"No, it don't look like Nature as men make believe it ought to be, for
+once to see a woman have a opinion of her own, and not the man just
+telling that his opinion wuz hers too, without knowing anythink about
+it, an' women having to hold their tongue for peace' sake because they
+wasn't in a position to help theirselves. An' if it seems so dreadful
+that way, you better come over to our side, as there's more of us than
+you, an' majority ought to rule."
+
+"What did you do at _your_ meeting last night, uncle?" inquired Dawn.
+
+"Old Hollis is head of the committee, an' he says the first thing for
+all the committee men to do was to see the women of the men goin' for
+Henderson was the same way," he replied.
+
+"Oh, an' so you thought you could come the Czar on us, did you? an'
+the Government, accordin' to Hollis's make out, is a fool to give
+women a vote; like in your case instead of giving me an' Carry a vote
+each, it ought to have give you three."
+
+"Oh, Mr Sorrel!" said I, "what a joke! Was he really so ignorant as
+that; surely he was joking too?"
+
+Uncle Jake had sufficient wit to take this opportunity of changing his
+tactics.
+
+"No," he said, "some people is terrible narrer; for my part I always
+believe in wimmen holdin' their own opinion."
+
+"So long as they didn't run contrary to yours," said grandma with a
+sniff. "There's heaps more like you. Women can always think as much as
+they like, an' they could get up on a platform an' talk till they
+bust, as long as they didn't want the world to be made no better, an'
+they wouldn't be thought unwomanly. It's soon as a woman wants any
+practical good done that she is considered a unwomanly creature."
+
+Uncle Jake was outdone and relapsed into silence.
+
+"An' that's just what I would have expected of old Hollis," continued
+grandma, who seemed to have a knowledge of people's doings rivalling
+that necessary to an efficient police officer. "I'll tell you what he
+is," and the old dame directed her remarks to me. "He is the old chap
+Mrs Bray was sayin' ain't goin' to vote this time because the women
+has got one and the monkeys will be havin' one next. Just what the
+likes of him would say! He's a old crawler whose wife does all the
+work while he walks around an' tells how he killed the bear, an'
+that's the sort of man who's always to be heard sayin' woman is a
+inferior animal that ought to be kep' on a chain as he thinks fit.
+You'll never hear the kind of man like Bray (who is a man an' keeps
+his wife like a princess) sayin' that sort of thing--it's only the old
+Hollises and such. I'll tell you what old Hollis is. He got out of
+work here a few years back, w'en things was terrible dull, an' so his
+wife had to keep him, and with a child for every year they had been
+married. She rared chickens an' plucked 'em and sold 'em around the
+town, an' went without necessaries w'en she was nursin' to keep him in
+tobacco. That's the kind of man _he_ is, if you want to know. Of
+course, bein' a animal twice her superior, he had to go about suckin'
+a pipe, and of course he couldn't deny hisself anythink. What do you
+think of that?"
+
+"That its pathos lies in its commonness."
+
+"I reckon you didn't hear of him goin' out an' pluckin' the fowls then
+an' sayin', 'Wife, a woman's place w'en she has a young family is in
+the house.' No fear! She worked at this poultry business, an' it was
+surprisin' how she got on--worked it up to a big poultry farm, till he
+took a hand in doin' a little of the work an' takin' _all_ the credit.
+Now they live by it altogether; an' he was interviewed by the papers a
+little while ago, and it was blew about the reward of enterprise,--how
+he had started from nothink, an' it never said a word how she started
+an' rared his babies an' done it all, an' does most now, while he
+walks about to illustrate what a superior bein' he is. That's the way
+with all the poultry industry. Women was the pioneers in it, an' now
+it's worked up to be payin', men has took it over and think they have
+done a stroke. Not so far back a man would consider hisself disgraced
+that knew one kind of fowls from another,--he would be thought a old
+molly-coddle. The women tried to keep a few hens an' the men always
+tried to kill them, an' said they'd ruin the place, an' at the same
+time they hunt them was always cryin' out an' gruntin' that there
+wasn't enough eggs to eat, an' why didn't the hens lay the same as
+they used w'en they was boys. They expected the women to rare them on
+nothink, or at odd moments, the same way as they expect them to do
+everythink else. Now, even the swells is gone hen mad, an' the papers
+are full of poultry bein' a great industry, but it was women started
+it."
+
+Upon strolling abroad that morning we found a huge placard bearing the
+advice--"Vote for Olliver Henderson, M.L.A., the Local Candidate,"
+decorating the post of the gateway through which we gained the
+highroad.
+
+Uncle Jake was credited with this erection, so Andrew made himself
+absent at a time when there was need of his presence, and thereby
+caused a deal of friction in the vicinity of grandma, but with the
+result that by midday Uncle Jake's placard was covered by another,
+reading: "Vote for Leslie Walker, the Opposition Candidate, and Save
+the Country!"
+
+At three o'clock this was obscured by a reappearance of Henderson's
+advertisement, which was the cause of Uncle Jake being too late to
+catch that evening's train with a load of oranges he had been set to
+pack. At the risk of leaving the milking late, Andrew was setting out
+to once more eclipse this by Walker's poster, only that grandma
+adjudicated regarding the matter.
+
+"Jake, you have one side of the gate, an' Andrew you take the other.
+Put up your papers side by side and that will be a good advertisement
+of liberty of opinion; an' Jake, if you haven't got sense to stick to
+this at your time of life, I'm sorry for you; and if you haven't
+Andrew at yours, I'll have to knock it into you with a strap,--now
+_mind_! An' if you don't get your work done you'll go to no more
+meetin's."
+
+"Right O! I'll vote for me grandma every time," responded Andrew.
+
+This proved an effective threat, for political meetings had become the
+joy of life to the electors of Noonoon. As a tallow candle if placed
+near can obscure the light of the moon, so the approaching election
+lying at the door shut out all other worldly doings. The
+Russo-Japanese war became a movement of no moment; the season, the
+price of lemons and oranges, the doings of Mrs Tinker, the inability
+of the municipal council to make the roads good, and all other
+happenings, became tame by comparison with politics. They were
+discussed with unabating interest all day and every day, and by
+everyone upon all occasions. Even the children battled out differences
+regarding their respective candidates on the way home from school,
+rival committees worked with unflagging energy, and all buildings and
+fences were plastered with opposing placards. This pitch of enthusiasm
+was reached long before the sitting parliament had dissolved or a
+polling day had been fixed; for this State election was contested with
+unprecedented energy all over the country, but in no electorate was it
+more vigorously and, to its credit, more good-humouredly fought than
+in the fertile old valley of Noonoon.
+
+It was the only chance the unfortunate electors had of bullying the
+lordly M.P.'s and would-be M.P.'s, who, once elected, would fatten on
+the parliamentary screw and pickings without showing any return, and
+right eagerly the electors took their present opportunity.
+
+Zest was added to the contest by both the contestants being wealthy
+men, and with youth as well as means to carry it out on expensive
+lines. They were equally independent of parliament as a means of
+living, and being men of leisure were merely anxious for office to
+raise them from the rank and file of nonentityism. Independent means
+are a great advantage to a member of parliament. The penniless man
+elected on sheer merit, to whom the country could look for good
+things, becomes dependent upon politics for a living, is often
+handicapped by a family who are loth to leave the society and comfort
+to which their bread-winner's official position has raised them, and
+he, held by his affection, is ready to sacrifice all convictions and
+principle to remain in power. To this man politics becomes a desperate
+gamble, and the country's interests can go to the dogs so long as he
+can ensure re-election.
+
+Another advantage in the Noonoon candidates which should have silenced
+the pessimists, who averred there were no good clean men to enter
+parliament, was that these men were both such exemplary citizens,
+morally, physically, and socially, that it seemed a sheer waste of
+goodness that only one could be elected.
+
+The newspapers went politically mad, and those not any hysterical
+country rags, but the big metropolitan dailies, and there was one
+thing to be noted in regard to their statements that seriously needed
+rectifying. What is the purpose of the great dailies but to keep the
+people correctly informed as to the progress of public affairs and
+events of the community at large? Most of the people are too hard at
+work to forage information for themselves, or even to be thoroughly
+cognisant of that collected in the newspapers, and therefore
+parliamentary candidates, if not correct in their figures and
+statements, should be publicly arraigned for perjury. The
+Ministerialists gave one set of figures dealing with national
+financial statistics and the Oppositionists gave widely different. How
+was an elector to act when the platform of the former contained
+nothing but a few false statements and glowing promises, and the
+policy of the latter was only a few counter-acting war-whoops, and
+there was no honesty, common-sense, or matter-of-fact business in the
+campaign from end to end?
+
+In this connection that remote rag, 'The Noonoon Advertiser,' shone as
+a reproach to its great contemporaries. Not by their grandeur and
+acclamations shall they be judged, but by the quality of their
+fruits.
+
+No bias or spleen seemed to sway the mind of this journal to one side
+or the other. It recognised itself as a newspaper, not as a political
+tout for this party or that, and so kept its head cool and its honour
+bright and shining.
+
+Three days after Leslie Walker's second speech he sent up a woman
+advocate to address _the ladies_ and start the business of
+house-to-house canvassing. This plenipotentiary, a person of rather
+plethoric appearance, made herself extremely popular by assuring every
+second _vote-lady_ she met that she was sure she (the vote-lady) was
+intended by nature for a public speaker. This worked without a hitch
+until the votresses began to tell each other what the great speaker
+had said, when it naturally followed that Mrs Dash, though she thought
+that Mrs Speaker had been discerning to discover this latent
+oratorical talent in herself, immediately had the effervescence taken
+out of her self-complacence on finding that that stupid Mrs Blank had
+been assured of equal ability.
+
+Then the Ministerialists discovered Mrs Speaker's place of abode in
+Sydney, and averred her children ran about so untended as to be
+undistinguishable from aboriginals, and that her housekeeping was
+sending her husband to perdition; and such is the texture of human
+nature unearthed at political crises, that some even went so far as to
+suggest that she was a weakness of Walker's, and sneered at the
+_ladies'_ candidate who had to be "wet-nursed" in his campaign by
+women speakers. Henderson, they averred, had not to do this, but
+fought his own battle.
+
+"Yes," said Grandma Clay; "he mightn't be wet-nursed, but he is
+bottled, _brandy_-bottled, by the men." And this could not be denied.
+
+The women rallied round Walker because he was a temperance candidate,
+whereas the tag-rag rolled up _en masse_ for Henderson, who shouted
+free drinks and carried the publican's flag.
+
+Each candidate, while praising his opponent, wound up with _but_--and
+after that conjunction spoke most damningly of his policy.
+
+Underneath the ostensible war-whoops many private and personal
+cross-fires were at work to intensify the contest. The people on the
+land quite naturally had a grudge against the railway folk, who only
+had to work eight hours per day for more than a farmer could make in
+sixteen; further, the perquisites of the railway employés were
+inconceivable. By an unwritten but nevertheless imperative etiquette,
+farmers had to render them tribute in the form of a portion of
+whatever fruit or vegetables were consigned at Noonoon, and the
+townspeople also had little to say in favour of them, averring they
+were a floating population who had no interest in the welfare of the
+town in which they resided, were bad customers--patronising the
+publicans more than the storekeepers, and by means of their connection
+with the railway were able to buy their meat and other necessaries
+where they listed--where it was cheapest, and frequently this was
+otherwhere than Noonoon, and yet they were in such numbers that they
+could rule the political market.
+
+Then the men on the Ministerial side were nearly gangrene with
+disgust, because, as one put it, "nearly all Walker's men were women,"
+and rallied round him thick and strong, and with a thoroughness and
+energy worthy of their recent emancipation.
+
+Dawn's next day for Sydney fell on another night when Leslie Walker
+was speaking, but she and I did not attend this meeting, the family
+being represented on this occasion by Andrew, and we went to bed and
+discussed the Sydney trip while waiting for his return.
+
+Ernest Breslaw, it appeared, had again had urgent business in Sydney
+that day.
+
+"Dawn," I said, "this is somewhat suspicious. Are you sure you are not
+flirting with Ernest? I can't have his wings singed; I think too much
+of him, and shall have to warn him that you are booked for 'Dora'
+Eweword." This was said experimentally, for to do Dawn justice, though
+she had every temptation, she had nothing of the flirt in her
+composition.
+
+"I can't go and say to him, 'Don't you fall in love with me,'" said
+Dawn contentiously.
+
+"Are you sure he has never in any way attempted to pay you a lover's
+attentions?"
+
+"Well, it's this way," she said confidentially--"you won't think me
+conceited if I tell you everything straight? There have been two or
+three men in love with me, and I was always able to see it straight
+away, long before _they_ knew; but with Ernest, sometimes he seems to
+be like they were, and then I'm afraid he's not,--at least not
+_afraid_--I don't care a hang, only I wonder does he think he can
+flirt with me, when he is so nice and just waltzes round the subject
+without coming up to it?"
+
+Ah! ha! In that _afraid_, which she sought to recover, the young lady
+betrayed that her affections were in danger of leaving her and
+betaking themselves to a new ruler, and this sudden inability to see
+through another's state of mind towards her was a further sign that
+they were not secure.
+
+We are very clear of vision as to the affection tendered us, so long
+as we remain unmoved, but once our feelings are stirred, their
+palpitating fears so smear our sight that it becomes unreliable.
+
+"Oh, well, it does not matter to you," I said; "you are not likely to
+think of him, he's so unattractive, but I must take care that he does
+not grow fond of you. If I see any danger of it, I'll tell him
+something about you that will nip his affections in the bud. You won't
+mind me doing that--just some little thing that won't hurt you, but
+will save him unnecessary pain?" And to this she replied with seeming
+indifference--
+
+"I wish you'd tell Dora Eweword something that would shoo him off that
+he'd never come back, and then I would have seen the last of him,
+which would be a treat."
+
+After this we were silent, and I thought she had gone to sleep, for
+there was no sound until Andrew came tumbling up the stairs leading
+from his room.
+
+"I say!" he called, "have you got any more of that toothache stuff
+from the dentist?"
+
+"Come along," I answered, "I'll put some in for you."
+
+"I think it's the oranges that's doin' it, I eat nearly eight dozen
+to-day."
+
+"Enough to give you the pip; you ought to slack off a little," I said,
+extending him the courtesy of his own vernacular.
+
+"I bet I'd vote for Henderson after all if I could," he continued, in
+referring to the meeting, "only I'll gammon I wouldn't just to nark
+Uncle Jake. Henderson is the men's man, that other bloke belongs to
+wimmen. You should have heard 'em to-night! The fellers behind was
+tip-top, and made such a noise at last that Walker could only talk to
+the wimmen in the front. We gave him slops because he gets wimmen up
+to speak for him, an' we can't give _them_ gyp. One man asked him was
+he in favour of ring-barkin' thistles, and another wanted to know was
+he in favour of puttin' a tax on caterpillars. He thinks no end of
+himself, because he's one of these Johnnies the wimmen always runs
+after," gravely explained Andrew, aged sixteen.
+
+"We cock-a-doodled and pip-pipped till you couldn't hear your ears.
+Half couldn't get in, they was climbed up an' hangin' in the
+windows--little girls too along with the boys. I suppose now that
+they're as near got a vote as we have, they'll be poked everywhere
+just the same as if they had as good a right as us," said the boy with
+the despondence of one to whom all is lost.
+
+"It's a terrible thing they can't be made stay at home out of all the
+fun like boys think they ought to be. No mistake the woman having a
+vote is a terrible nark to the men--almost too much for 'em to bear,"
+said Dawn, whom I had thought asleep.
+
+"I reckon I'm goin' to every meetin', they're all right fun,"
+continued Andrew. "At the both committee room they're givin' out
+tickets with the men's names on, an' whoever likes can get them an'
+wear 'em in their hats. Me an' Jack Bray went to this Johnny Walker's
+rooms and gammoned we was for him, an' got a dozen tickets, an' when
+we got outside tore 'em to smithereens; that's what we'll do all the
+time."
+
+After this Andrew disappeared down the stairs, spilling grease, and
+being admonished by Dawn as he went as the clumsiest creature she had
+ever seen.
+
+Silence reigned between us for some time, and in listening to the
+trains I had forgotten the girl till her voice came across the room.
+
+"I say, don't tell that Ernest anything not nice about me, will you?
+I'll take care not to flirt with him, and I wouldn't like him to think
+me not nice. I wouldn't care about any one else a scrap, but he's such
+a great friend of yours, and as I hope to be with you a lot, it would
+be awkward; and you know he has _said_ nothing, it might only be my
+conceit to think he's going the way of other men. He took me to
+afternoon tea to-day at such a lovely place,--he said he wanted to be
+good to your friends, that's why he is nice to me. I don't suppose he
+ever thinks of me at all any other way," she said with the despondence
+of love.
+
+So this had been chasing sleep from Beauty's eyes, as such trifles
+have a knack of doing!
+
+"Very likely," I said complacently, and smiled to myself. The only
+thing to be discovered now was if the young athlete's emotions were at
+the same ebb, and then what was there against plain sailing to the
+happy port where honeymoons are spent?
+
+Fortune favours the persevering, and next afternoon an opportunity
+occurred for procuring the desired knowledge.
+
+Ernest and Ada Grosvenor came in together, and to the casual observer
+seemed much engrossed with each other, but I noticed that Dawn could
+not speak or move, but a pair of quick dark eyes caught every detail.
+So far so good, but it was necessary for Dawn to think the prize just
+a little farther out of reach than it was to make it attractive to her
+disposition, so I set about attaining this end by a very simple
+method.
+
+Miss Grosvenor had called to invite us to a meeting she had convened,
+to listen to a public address by a lady who was going to head a
+deputation to Walker afterwards, and we had decided to go. Mrs Bray's
+husband also dropped in, and to my surprise proved not the hen-pecked
+nonentity one would expect after hearing his wife's aggressive
+diatribes, but a stalwart man of six feet, with a comely face
+bespeaking solid determination in every line. And when one comes to
+think of it, it is not the big blustering man or woman that rules, but
+the quiet, apparently inane specimens that look so meek that they are
+held up as models of propriety and gentleness. Miss Grosvenor
+immediately nailed him for her meeting, and politics being the only
+subject discussed, he aired his particular bug. This was his disgust
+at the top-heaviness of the Labour party's demands, and the railway
+people's easy times as compared with that of the farmer.
+
+"I believe," said he, "in every man, if he can, working only eight
+hours a-day--though I have to work sixteen myself for precious little
+return, but these fellows are running the country to blazes. The rules
+of supply and demand must sway the labour or any other market all the
+world over, and they'll have to see that and haul in their sails."
+
+"Who are you going to vote for?" inquired Andrew.
+
+"I'm goin' for Henderson, and the missus for Walker."
+
+"It's a wonder you don't compel Mrs Bray to vote for your man."
+
+"No fear; I'm pleased she's taken the opposite chap, just to
+illustrate my opinion on what liberty of opinion should be; but I
+won't deny," he concluded, with a humorous smile, "that I mightn't be
+so pleased with her going against me if I was set on either of them,
+but as it is neither are worth a vote, so that I'm pretty well
+sitting on a rail myself."
+
+"I thought your first announcement almost too liberal to be true,"
+laughed Miss Grosvenor.
+
+"No, I will say that Mr Bray is a man does treat his women proper, and
+give 'em liberty," said grandma.
+
+"An' a nice way they use it," sniffed Carry _sotto voce_.
+
+As we set out to the meeting Miss Grosvenor mentioned to me that she
+was endeavouring to find suitable speakers to address her association,
+and asked did I know of any one. Here was an opening for a thrust in
+the game of parry I was setting on foot between Dawn and Ernest
+Breslaw.
+
+"Ask my friend Mr Ernest to deliver an address: 'Women in Politics,'"
+I said, "that is his particular subject. He is a most fluent speaker,
+and loves speaking in public, nothing will delight him more."
+
+"I'll ask him at once," said she.
+
+This was as foundationless a fairy-tale as was ever spun, for Ernest
+could not say two words in public upon any occasion. That he was
+usually tendered a dinner and was called upon to make a speech, he
+considered the drawback of wresting any athletic honours. Whether
+women were in politics or the wash-house was a sociological abstrusity
+beyond his line of thought, and not though it cost him all his fortune
+to refuse could he have decently addressed any association even on
+beloved sporting matters. Hence his consternation when Miss Grosvenor
+approached him. At first he was nonplussed, and next thing, taking it
+as a joke on my part, was highly amused. Miss Grosvenor, on her side,
+thought he was joking, with the result that there was the liveliest
+and most laughable conversation between them.
+
+Dawn did not know the reason of it. She could only see that Ernest and
+Miss Grosvenor were engrossed, and at first curious, a little later
+she was annoyed with the former.
+
+"I think," she whispered to me, "it's Mr Ernest you'll have to see
+doesn't flirt with every girl he comes across."
+
+"Perhaps he isn't flirting," I coolly replied.
+
+"Not _now_, perhaps," she said pointedly; "perhaps he's in earnest
+with one and practises with others."
+
+Arrived at the hall, we found the women swarming around Walker like
+bees.
+
+"Good Lord! Look what Les. has let himself in for," laughed Ernest; "I
+wouldn't stand in his shoes for a tenner."
+
+"Go on! Surely you too are partial to ladies?"
+
+"Yes; but--"
+
+"But there must be reason in everythink," I quoted. He laughed.
+
+"Yes; and reason in this sort of thing to suit my taste would be a
+small medium. But what a fine old sport the old dame Clay would have
+made--no danger of her not standing up to a mauling or baulking at any
+of her fences, eh?"
+
+Dawn would not look at Ernest after the meeting and deputation came to
+an end, but walked home with "Dora" Eweword, laughing and talking in
+ostentatious enjoyment; while Ernest and the Grosvenor girl were none
+the less entertained.
+
+"'Pon my soul, I couldn't make a speech to save my life," he
+reiterated. "My friend only laid you on for a lark, did you not?" he
+said, turning to me, whom he gallantly insisted upon supporting on his
+arm--that splendid arm in which the muscles could expand till they
+were like iron bands.
+
+"Don't you believe him, Miss Grosvenor," I replied; "he's a born
+orator, but is unaccountably lazy and vain, and only wants to be
+pressed; insist upon his speaking, he's longing to do so." And then
+his merry protesting laugh, and the girl's equally happy, rang out on
+the crisp starlight air, as they went over and over the same ground.
+
+As we neared Clay's I suggested that he should see Miss Grosvenor
+home, while I attached myself to Dawn and "Dora"; and I invited him to
+come and sing some songs with us afterwards, for the night was yet
+young.
+
+To this he agreed, and supposed to be with the other young couple, I
+slipped behind, and could hear their conversation as they progressed.
+
+"You're not struck on that red-headed mug, are you?" said Eweword, for
+general though political talk had become, there was still another
+branch of politics more vitally interesting to some of the electors.
+
+"I'm not the style to be struck on a fellow that doesn't care for me."
+
+"But he does!"
+
+"Looks like it, doesn't it?" she said sarcastically.
+
+"Yes, it does, or what would he be hanging around here so long for?"
+
+"Perhaps to see Ada Grosvenor; I suppose she'd have him, red hair and
+all."
+
+"Pooh! he never goes there; but he comes to your place though, too
+deuced often for my pleasure."
+
+"He comes to see the boarder--he's a great friend of hers."
+
+"Humph! that's all in my eye. He'd be a long time coming to see her
+if you weren't there, if she was twice as great a friend. What sort of
+an old party is she? Must have some means."
+
+"Oh, lovely!"
+
+"I suppose the red-headed mug thinks so too, as she is touting for
+him."
+
+"For him and Ada Grosvenor."
+
+"Have it that way if you like it, but you know what I mean all right."
+
+"I don't."
+
+"Oh, don't you! I say, Dawn, just stop out here a moment will you? I
+want to tell you something else, I mean."
+
+"Oh, tell it to me some other time," said she, "it's too beastly cold
+to stay out another minute. Come and tell it to me while we are having
+supper round the fire."
+
+"I'd have a pretty show of telling it there. I don't want it put in
+the 'Noonoon Advertiser,' but that's what I'll have to do if you won't
+give me a chance. If you keep pretending you don't get my letters,
+I'll write all that I put in them to your grandma, and tell her to
+tell you," he said jokingly; but the girl took him up shortly.
+
+"If you dare do that," said she, aroused from her indifference, "I'd
+never speak to you again the longest day I live, so you needn't think
+you'll get over me that way. You'd better tell Uncle Jake and Andrew
+too while you're about it, and Dora Cowper might be vexed if you don't
+tell her."
+
+"Well, I bet you'd listen to what the red-headed mug said quick
+enough," replied "Dora" Eweword in an injured tone.
+
+"The red-headed mug, as you call him--and his hair isn't much redder
+than yours, and is twice as nice," she retaliated, "he would be a
+gentleman anyhow, and not a bear with a scalded head."
+
+By this time they had reached the gate, and Dawn was carelessly
+inviting him to enter, but he declined in rather a crestfallen tone.
+
+"Better invite red-head, not me, if you won't listen to what I say,
+and pretend you never received my letters."
+
+"Thank you for the good advice. I hope he'll accept my invitation,
+because he is always pleasant and agreeable," she retorted.
+
+
+
+
+NINETEEN.
+
+AN OPPORTUNELY INOPPORTUNE DOUCHE.
+
+
+It was just as well that "Dora" Eweword had been too chopfallen to
+come in, for we found the place in what grandma termed "a uproar."
+
+As we had gone out Mrs Bray had arrived to relate her speculations in
+regard to Mrs Rooney-Molyneux. Mrs Bray did not live a great distance
+from the latter's cottage, and as she had not seen her about during
+the day, wondered had she come to her travail.
+
+Andrew decided the matter when he came home by relating what he had
+heard when passing the cottage; and he supplemented the statement by
+the deplorable information that "the old bloke is up at Jimmeny's
+tryin' if he can get a free drink."
+
+"I must go to her," said grandma, rising in haste.
+
+"I wouldn't if I was you," said Mrs Bray. "You don't never get no
+thanks for nothing like that, and might get yourself into a mess; I
+believe in leaving people to manage their own affairs."
+
+Carry sniffed in the background.
+
+"I'll risk all that," said grandma. "For shame's sake an' the sake of
+me daughters, an' every other woman, I couldn't leave one of me sex in
+that predicament."
+
+"Oh, well, some people is wonderful strong in the nerve that way,"
+said Mrs Bray, and Carry interjected in an aside--
+
+"And others are mighty strong in the nerve of selfishness."
+
+"Of course nothing would give me greater pleasure than to go,"
+continued Mrs Bray, "but I would be of no use. I'm so pitiful,
+sensitive, and nervous that way."
+
+"It's a grand thing, then, that some are hard and not so sensitive, or
+people could die and no one would help 'em," said Carry, no longer
+able to contain her measure of Mrs Bray.
+
+Uncle Jake had the sulky in readiness, and grandma with a collection
+of requisites appeared with a great old shawl about her, Irish
+fashion.
+
+"Come you, Dawn, I might want your help, I'm not as strong as I was
+once; and Andrew, you come too, you'll do to send for the doctor; an'
+who'll take care of the pony?"
+
+I volunteered, and though a rotten stick to depend on, was accepted,
+and we three women rode in the sulky while Andrew ran behind. Having
+arrived at the little cottage half-way between Clay's and town, we
+found it was too sadly true that the poor little woman was alone in
+her trouble, and worse, she had not had the means to prepare for it,
+while most ghastly of all, there was no trace of her having had any
+nourishment that day.
+
+These are the sad cases of poverty, when the helpless victim is not of
+the calibre which can beg, and suffers an empty larder in silence and
+behind an appearance of respectability.
+
+The capable old grandmother had prepared herself for this possibility,
+and from under her capacious shawl produced a bottle of broth which
+she set about warming. She may not have been at first-hand acquainted
+with the few silk-wrapped lives run according to the methods scheduled
+in first-class etiquette books, but she had a very resourceful and
+far-seeing grip of that style of existence into which, regardless of
+inclination or capability, the great majority are forced by
+domineering circumstance; and being competent to grapple with its
+emergencies, she took hold of this case without humbug and with the
+fortitude and skill of a Japanese general.
+
+As though the main trouble were not enough, the poor little wife was
+further smitten with the two-edged mental anguish which is the
+experience of sensitive women whose husbands neglect them at this
+crisis of the maternal gethsemane. Doctor Smalley, who soon appeared
+after receiving Andrew's message, was not sufficiently finely strung
+to fully estimate the evil effect of Rooney-Molyneux's behaviour at
+this juncture; but not so the fine old woman of the ranks, with her
+quick perceptions and high and sensitive sentiment regarding the
+bed-rock relations of life. Calling the doctor out during an interval
+she discussed the matter within my hearing.
+
+"Poor little thing, she's just heart-broke with the way her husband's
+carryin' on. I wish I could deliver him up to Mrs Bray to scald; he's
+one of 'em deserves it, pure an' simple! If Jim Clay had forsook me
+an' demeaned me like this I would have died, but he was always
+tenderer than a mother. Somethink will have to be done. I'll send
+Andrew to Jimmeny's with the sulky to get him; he can get Danby to
+help him if he can't manage him hisself, and take the old varmint down
+to my place and keep him there secure. Tell Jake there it's got to be
+done, an' I'll make up a yarn to pacify the poor thing;" and
+returning to her patient, to the old dame's credit, truthful though
+she was, I heard her say--
+
+"Your husband's been fidgeting me, an' I never can stand any one but
+the doctor about at these times, so I bundled him off down to stay
+with Jake, and gave him strict instructions not to poke his nose back
+here till he's sent for."
+
+What diplomat could have made it more kindly tactful than that?
+
+"Quite right too," said the doctor, upholding her. "When I see it's
+going to be a good case like this, I always banish the man too."
+
+"But I could have seen him, and the poor fellow I'm sure is
+overwhelmed with anxiety," said the hapless little martyr in the brave
+make-believe that is a compulsory science with most women.
+
+"Well, _we_ ain't so anxious about him as we are about you," said the
+valiant old woman. "You're the chief person now. He ain't no
+consideration at all, an' can go an' bag his head for all we care,
+while we get you out of this fix."
+
+I sat upon the verandah until Andrew passed, taking home with him the
+noble Rooney-Molyneux, lordly scion of an ancient and doubtless effete
+house, and then the doctor banished Dawn from the house, giving her
+into my charge, with instructions to take her home and calm her down.
+
+Had she been the heroine of a romance she would have been a born
+nurse. Without any training or experience she could have surpassed
+Florence Nightingale, but, alas! she was merely an everyday girl in
+real life, and this being her first actual experience of the tragedy
+of birth, and the terror of it being intensified and aggravated by the
+pitiable surrounding circumstances, she was beside herself. She clung
+to me, choked with a flood of tears, and palpitating in an unbearable
+tumult of emotion.
+
+This case, so pathetically ordinary that most of us are debased by
+acquaintance with similar, to this girl was fresh, and striking her in
+all its inexcusable barbarity without any extenuating gloze, made her
+furious with pained and righteous indignation.
+
+I led her about by devious ways that her heart might cool ere we
+reached Clay's.
+
+The cloudless, breezeless night, though not yet severely cold, was
+crisp with the purity of frost and sweet with the exquisite scent of
+flowering loquats. The only sounds breaking its stillness were the
+trains passing across the long viaduct approaching the bridge, and the
+rumble of the vehicles as they ground their homeward way along the
+stony road, their lights flashing as they passed, and snatches of the
+occupants' conversation reaching us where we walked on a path beside
+the main thoroughfare. The heavens were a spangled glory, and the dark
+sleeping lands gave forth a fresh, pleasant odour. Man provided the
+only discordant note; but for the jarring of his misdoings there would
+have been perfect peace.
+
+Oh, the hot young heart that raged by my side! I too had forded the
+cruel torrent of facts that was torturing her mind; I knew; I
+understood. By-and-by she would arrive at my phase and have somewhat
+of my calmness, but to tell her so would merely have been the
+preaching so deservedly and naturally abhorred by the young, and
+except for holding her hand in a tight clasp, I was apparently
+unresponsive.
+
+As she grew quieter I steered for home, and eventually we arrived at
+the door of the kitchen and found there Jake, Andrew, and the
+Rooney-Molyneux--a small man with a large beard and the type of
+aristocratic face furnished with a long protruding nose and a narrow
+retreating forehead. Carry, up aloft like the angels, could be heard
+practising on my piano, and the soiled utensils scattered on the table
+illustrated that the gentlemen had had refreshments.
+
+It being Dawn's week in the kitchen, she set about collecting the cups
+in the wash-up dish, and presently some maudlin expression of
+sentiment on the part of the Rooney-Molyneux reopened the vials of her
+indignation.
+
+"I'm naturally anxious that it may be a son," he drivelled, "as there
+are so few male representatives of the old name now."
+
+"And the sooner there's none the better. There is no excuse for the
+likes of you being alive. I'd like to assist in the extermination of
+your family by putting you in the boiling copper on washing day. That
+would give you a taste of your deserts," raged the girl.
+
+She was speaking without restraint in the light of the high demands of
+crude, impetuous, merciless youth. I had once felt as she did, but now
+I could see the cruel train of conditions behind certain characters
+forcing them into different positions, and in place of Dawn's
+wholesome, justifiable, hot-headed rage against the likes of
+Rooney-hyphen, I felt for him a contempt so immeasurable that it
+almost toppled over and became pity.
+
+Seeing the little sense of responsibility that is inculcated regarding
+the laws of being, instead of being shocked at the familiarity of the
+Rooney-Molyneux type of husband and father, I gave myself up to
+agreeable surprise owing to the large number of noble and worthy
+parents I had discovered.
+
+    "The world does soil our minds and we soil it--
+    Time brings the tolerance that hides the truth,"
+
+but Dawn had not yet sunk to the apathy engendered by experience and
+familiarity. She adjudged the case on its merits, as it would be
+handled by an administrator of the law--the common law we all must
+keep. She did not imagine a network of exculpatory conditions or go
+squinting round corners to draw it into line as an act for which
+circumstances rather than the culprit were responsible; she gazed
+straight and honestly and saw a crime.
+
+"Dawn, you shameless hussy, you ought to be ashamed of yourself," said
+her uncle.
+
+"Oh yes, I'm well aware that any girl who says the straight truth
+about the things that concern them most in life, _ought_ to be ashamed
+of herself. They should hold their tongues except to flatter the men
+who trample them in the dust,--that's the proper and _womanly_
+attitude for a girl, I know," she said desperately.
+
+"I'm sure this is uncalled for," simpered the hero of the act, rising
+and showing signs of looking for his hat.
+
+"You'd better run and tell your wife you've been insulted, poor little
+dear!" said Dawn.
+
+"Look!" said Andrew to me uneasily, "tell Dawn to dry up, will you;
+she'll take no notice of me, an' if that feller goes home actin' the
+goat I'll get the blame, an' he ain't drunk enough to be shut up. Blow
+him, I say!"
+
+"I'm sure," said Mr Rooney-Molyneux, who apparently had various things
+mixed with politics, "that some men, though the women have taken the
+votes and their manhood, still have some rights; bless me, it _must_
+be acknowledged they have some rights in creation!"
+
+Here he made an ineffectual grab for his hat and a sprawling plunge
+in the direction of the door, saying, "I've never been so insulted!"
+
+"Blow you! Sit down, Mr Mooney-Rollyno, or whatever you are," said
+Andrew, "you've got to stay here; and Dawn, hold your mag! You'd give
+any one the pip with your infernal gab."
+
+"I'm sure it must be conceded that men have some rights?" Mr
+Rooney-Molyneux appealed to me. I was the most responsible person
+present, Uncle Jake did not count, the other three were children, and
+so it behoved me to take a grip of the situation.
+
+"Rights in creation! I should rather think so! In creation men have
+the rights, or perhaps duties, of gods--to protect, to nurture, to
+guard and to love, and when as a majority men rise to them we shall be
+a great people, but for the present the only rights many of them wrest
+and assert by mere superior brute force are those of bullies and
+selfish cowards. Sit down immediately!"
+
+He sat without delay.
+
+"All that Dawn says of you is deserved. The least you can do now to
+repair matters is to swallow your pill noiselessly and give no further
+trouble until you are called upon to obstruct the way again in
+semblance of discharging responsibilities of which a cat would be
+twice as capable."
+
+"Yes," said Dawn, "if you dare to talk of going home to worry your
+wife I'll throw this dish of water right on you, and when I come to
+think of things, I feel like throwing a hot one on every man."
+
+As she said this she swirled her dishcloth to clean the bowl, and
+turning to toss the water into the drain outside the door, confronted
+Ernest Breslaw.
+
+Quite two hours had elapsed since he had parted from us to conduct
+Miss Grosvenor to her home, where he had been long delayed in argument
+concerning whether he could or could not address a public meeting. I
+discovered later that an opportunity to gracefully take his leave from
+Grosvenor's had not occurred earlier, and that he had quite
+relinquished hope of calling at Clay's that night, but to his
+surprise, seeing the place lighted as he was passing, he came towards
+the kitchen door.
+
+Dawn was doubtless piqued that he should have spent so much time with
+Miss Grosvenor, which, considering his previous attentions to her, and
+the rules of the game as observed in this stratum of society, gave him
+the semblance of flirting--perfidious action, worthy of the miscreant
+man in the beginning of a career which at a maturer stage should cover
+cruelty and cowardice equalling that of Rooney-Molyneux! Dawn lacked
+restraint in her emotional outbursts; the poor girl's state of
+nervousness bordered on hysteria; the water was nearly out of her hand
+in any case, and with a smack of that irritated divergence from lawful
+and decorous conduct of which the sanest of us are at times the
+victim, she pitched the dish of greasy, warm water fairly on the
+immaculate young athlete, accompanying the action with the
+ejaculation--
+
+"That's what you deserve, too!"
+
+"I demand--" he exclaimed, but further utterance was drowned by a
+hearty guffaw from Andrew which fully confirmed the outrageous insult.
+
+"Just what I should expect of you," sneered Uncle Jake, while Mr
+Rooney-Molyneux, his attention thus diverted from his own affairs,
+gazed in watery-eyed surprise at a second victim of the retributive
+Dawn.
+
+"Well, that's about what you'd expect from a _thing earning her
+living_, but never of a young lady in a _good_ home of her own and
+living with _the mother of a family_," said Carry, appearing in time
+to witness the accident.
+
+I said nothing to the white-faced girl, for there was more urgent work
+to be done in repairing the damage. Hurrying through the house, and
+reefing my skirts on the naked rose-bushes under Miss Flipp's window,
+where the dead girl's skirts had caught as she went out to die, I
+gained a point intercepting Ernest as he strode along the path leading
+to the bridge.
+
+"Ernest!"
+
+"You must excuse me to-night," he said, showing that my intervention
+was most unwelcome.
+
+"Ernest, if you have any friendship for me, stop. I must speak to you,
+and I'm not feeling able for much more to-night."
+
+Thus did I make a lever of my invalidism, and in the gentleness of his
+strength he submitted to be detained.
+
+Some men would have covered their annoyance with humorous satire, but
+Ernest was not furnished with this weapon. He only had physical
+strength, and that could not avail him in such an instance. I placed
+my hand on his arm, ostensibly for support, but in reality to be sure
+of his detention, and found that he was saturated. Not a pleasant
+experience on a frosty night, but there was no danger of it proving
+deleterious to one in his present state of excitement. Being one of
+those natures whose emotions, though not subtle, make up for this
+deficiency in wholesome thoroughness, he was furious with the rage of
+heated youth not given to spending itself on every adventitious excuse
+for annoyance, and debarred by conditions from any sort of
+retaliation. In addition to being bitterly wounded, his sporting
+instinct was bruised, and he chafed under the unfairness of the blow.
+
+The beauty of the cloudless, breezeless night had been supplemented by
+a lop-sided moon, risen sufficiently to show the exquisite mists
+hanging like great swathes of white gossamer in the hollows, and to
+cast the shadows of the buildings and trees in the silent river, at
+this time of the year looking so cold and treacherous in its
+rippleless flow. The wet grass was stiffening with frost, and the only
+sounds disturbing the chillier purity of advancing night were the
+erratic bell at the bridge and the far-off rumble of a train on the
+mountain-side. Man still afforded the discordant note, and the only
+heat in the surroundings was that in the burning young heart that
+raged by my side.
+
+Oh, youth! youth! You must each look back and see for yourselves, in
+the aft-light cast by later experience, the mountains and fiery
+ordeals you made for yourselves out of mole-hills in the matter of
+heart-break. We, whose hair is white, cannot help you, though we have
+gone before and know so well the cruel stretches on the road you
+travel.
+
+Ernest waited for me to take the initiative, and as everything that
+rose to my lips seemed banal, we stood awkwardly silent till he was
+forced into saying--
+
+"I'm afraid you are overdoing yourself. Can I not help you to your
+room? You will be ill."
+
+"The only thing that would overdo me is that you should be upset about
+this. It must not make any difference."
+
+"Difference between you and me?--nothing short of an earthquake could
+do that," he replied.
+
+"I mean with Dawn. It must not make any difference with her. It was
+only a freak."
+
+"Certainly; I would be a long time retaliating upon a _lady_, no
+matter what she did to me; but when--when--" (he could not bring
+himself to name it, it struck him as so disgraceful)--"she intimates
+to me, as plainly as was done to-night, that she disapproves of my
+presence in her house, well, a fellow would want pole-axing if he
+hadn't pride to take a hint like that."
+
+"She did not mean anything. She will be more hurt than you are."
+
+"Mean anything! Had it been a joke I could have managed to endure it,
+or an accident about which she would have worried, I would have been
+amused, but it was deliberate; and if it had been _clean_ water--but
+ugh! it was greasy slop-water, to make it as bad as it could be; and
+if a man had done it--"
+
+The muscles of his arm expanded under my interested touch as he made a
+fist of the strong brown hand.
+
+"But being a girl I can only put up with it," he said with the
+helplessness of the athlete in dealing with such a delinquent.
+
+"Did you hear what she said too? Great Scott! it is not as though I
+had done her any harm! I merely came here to see a friend, and made
+myself agreeable because you said she was good to you; and, dear me!"
+His voice broke with the fervour of his perturbation. He had been
+wounded to the core of his manly _amour propre_; and to state that he
+was not more than twenty-five, gives a better idea of his state of
+mind than could any amount of laborious diagnosis.
+
+"What can I have done?" he further ejaculated. "Can some one have told
+her falsely that I'm a cad in any way? She might have waited until
+she proved it. _I_ would not have believed bad any one spoken badly of
+_her_." (Here an inadvertent confession of the growing affection he
+felt for her.) "Even if I were deserving of such ignominy, it was none
+of her business. I only came to see you,--she had nothing to do with
+me."
+
+Then I took hold of this splendidly muscular young creature wounded to
+the quick. I determinedly usurped a mother's privilege in regard to
+the situation, and glancing back over my barren life I would that I
+had been mother of just such a son. What a kingdom 'twould have been;
+and, in the order of things, being forced to surrender him to
+another's keeping, I could not have chosen a better or more suitable
+than Dawn. Entering his principality to reign as queen, while his
+manhood was yet an unsacked stronghold, she was of the character and
+determination to steer him in the way of uprightness to the end.
+
+Wistfulness upsprung as I reviewed my empty life, but rude reality
+suddenly uprose and obliterated ideality. It put on the scroll a
+picture of motherhood, and mother-love wantonly squandered, trodden in
+the mire, and, instead of being recognised as a kingdom, treated only
+as a weakness, and traded upon to enslave women. I turned with a sigh,
+and we walked round a corner of the garden where, in one recent
+instance, appallingly common, a poor frail woman had crept out in the
+dead of night to pay alone the penalty of a crime incurred by two--one
+foolish and weak, the other murderously selfishly a coward.
+
+I addressed Ernest Breslaw regarding the painful effect this tragedy
+had produced on the mind of Dawn, and how it had been further
+overstrung by the later one, and concluded--
+
+"Had I expressed my inward feelings in outward actions at Dawn's age,
+and being armed with a dish of water, to have thrown it on the nearest
+individual would have been a very mild ebullition; but I set my teeth
+against outward expression and let it fester in my heart, while the
+beauty of Dawn's disposition is that her feelings all come out. She
+has disgraced herself by making outward demonstration of what many
+inwardly feel; but understanding what I have put before you, you must
+not hold the girl responsible for her action."
+
+With masculine simplicity he was unable to comprehend the complexity
+of feminine emotions engendered by the exigencies of the more
+artificial and suppressed conditions of life as forced upon women.
+
+"I understand about old Rooney; I feel as disgusted with him as any
+one does, but _I_ am not going to emulate him. I'd jolly well cut my
+throat first; and if I could lay my hand on the snake at the root of
+the drowning case, I'd make one to roast him alive! What made Miss
+Dawn confound me with that sort?"
+
+"She doesn't for an instant do so. On the contrary, she would be the
+first to repudiate such a suggestion."
+
+"Good Lord! then why did she throw that stuff on me? It was only fit
+for a criminal."
+
+"Can you not grasp that she was irritated beyond endurance with the
+unwholesomeness of the whole system of life in relation to women, and
+that for the moment you appeared as one of the army of oppressors?"
+
+"But that isn't fair! _I_ know enough of women--some women--to make
+one shudder with repulsion; but there would be no sense or justice in
+venting my disgust on you or the other good ones," he contended.
+
+"Quite so; but our moral laws are such that some issues are more
+repulsive to a woman than a man, and you must admit there are heavy
+arguments could be brought in extenuation of Dawn's attitude of mind
+when the water slipped out of her hand."
+
+"There's no doubt women do have to swallow a lot," he said.
+
+"You don't feel so angry on account of the impetuous Dawn's act now,
+do you?"
+
+"It doesn't look so bad in the teeth of your argument, and if she
+would only say something to explain, I won't mind; but otherwise I'll
+have sense to make myself scarce in this neighbourhood."
+
+"I'm afraid her vanity will be too wounded for her to give in."
+
+"I'll make it as easy for her as I can; but, good Lord! I can't go to
+her and apologise because she threw dirty water on me."
+
+"Well, I'll bid you good-night. I must run in to Dawn. I expect she is
+sobbing her heart out by this, and biting her pretty curled lips to
+relieve her feelings,--her lips that were meant for kisses, not cruel
+usage."
+
+"Good heavens! Do you really think she'll feel like that?" he asked in
+astonishment.
+
+"I'm certain."
+
+"But I can't see why--she might have had reason had I been the
+aggressor."
+
+"If you had hurt her she would not feel half so bad. You would be a
+hopeless booby if you could not understand that."
+
+"Really, now, if I thought she would take it that way, it would make
+all the difference in the world. But had she desired to despatch me,
+half that energy of insult would do," he said, drawing up, while
+hardness crept into his voice, but it softened again as he concluded--
+
+"I wouldn't like her to be upset about it, though, if she didn't quite
+mean it."
+
+"Well, you can be sure that in regard to you she was very far from
+meaning it, and that she will be dreadfully upset about it; so think
+of what I've said, and come and see me in the morning."
+
+Now that he had grown calm, he was shivering with the cold, so I bade
+him run home.
+
+On returning to the house I found Andrew the solitary watcher of his
+charge, who, covered by an old cloak, was snoring on the kitchen sofa.
+
+"Dear me, where are they all?"
+
+"In bed; and look at his nibbs there. I reckon I took a wrinkle from
+Dawn as how to manage him. Soon as every one's back was turned he
+began actin' the goat again an' makin' for home, an' I thought here
+goes, I don't care a hang if all the others roused on me like blazes,
+so long as grandma don't,--she's the only one makes me sit up,--so I
+flung water on him, not warm water but real cold. It took seven years'
+growth out of him, an' then I gave him a drink of hot coffee, an'
+undressed him, an' he was jolly glad to lay down there."
+
+"Why, you'll give the man a cold!"
+
+"No jolly fear. I took his clothes off. I've got 'em dryin' here. I
+couldn't find any of my gear, an' wasn't game to ask Uncle Jake, so I
+clapped him into a night-dress of grandma's. Look! he's got his hand
+out. I reckon the frill looks all so gay, don't you? I bet grandma
+will rouse, but I'll have a little peace with him now an' chance the
+ducks," said the resourceful warder, whose charge really looked so
+absurd that I was provoked to laughter.
+
+"How did you manage him? Was he tractable?"
+
+"He soon dropped that there was no good in bein' nothing else. He
+spluttered something about me disgracin' him, because something on his
+crest said he was brave or something; but I told him I didn't care a
+hang if he had a crest the size of a cockatoo or was as bald as Uncle
+Jake, that I was full of him actin' the goat, an' that finished him."
+
+"Enough too," I laughed, as I bade the Australian lad, with the very
+Australian estimate of the unimportance of some things sacred to
+English minds, the Australian parting salute--
+
+"So long!"
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY.
+
+"ALAS! HOW EASILY THINGS GO WRONG!"
+
+
+On ascending to my room I did not, as expected, find Dawn sobbing, but
+she had her face so determinedly turned away that I refrained from
+remark. I was none the worse for the diverting incidents of the
+evening, because the excitement of them had come from without instead
+of within. The rush of the trains soon became a far-away sound, and
+the light that flashed from their engine-doors as they climbed the
+first zig of the mountain, and which could be seen from my bed, had
+been shut from my sight by the fogs of approaching sleep, when I was
+aroused by heart-broken sobbing from the bed by the opposite wall.
+
+After a while I got out of bed, bent on an attempt to comfort.
+
+"Dawn, what is it?"
+
+"I'm sorry I waked you, I thought you were sound asleep," she said,
+pulling in with a violent effort but speedily breaking into renewed
+sobs.
+
+"I was thinking of poor little Mrs Rooney-Molyneux, and how my mother
+died," said the girl, rolling over and burying her lovely head in her
+tear-drenched pillow. "I can't help thinking about the sadness and
+cruelty of life to women."
+
+I felt certain that a matter less deep and lying farther from the core
+of being was perturbing her more, but as she chose to ignore it, I did
+likewise.
+
+"Well, we must not dwell too sadly on that for which we are not
+responsible, and women are privileged in being able to repay the cost
+of their being."
+
+"Yes, I always remember that, and often shudder to think I might have
+been a man, with their greater possibilities of cowardliness and
+selfish cruelty, as illustrated by old Rooney and Miss Flipp's
+destroyer."
+
+Not a word concerning her action to Ernest. Thought of it stung too
+much for mention, so there was nothing to do but comfort her till she
+fell asleep and await from Ernest the next turn of events bearing on
+the situation.
+
+The next turn of events in the Clay household bore down upon us next
+morning after breakfast when grandma came home, having left the
+first-born of Rooney-Molyneux comfortably asleep in the swaddling
+clothes which had contained Dawn at the date when she had been "a
+little winjin' thing," with whom everything had disagreed, and which
+garments were lent to the new-born babe until grandma could provide
+him with others. The hale old dame was not too fatigued to be in a
+state of lively ire, and opened fire upon her circle with--
+
+"I met old Hollis on the way home, an' do you believe, he says to me,
+'Well, Mrs Clay, so I believe you've took to rabbit ketchin' in your
+old days.' It was like his cheek, the same as w'en he said the monkeys
+would be havin' a vote next. _Rabbit ketchin'_ indeed! No wonder women
+has got sense at last to make the birth-rate decline, when you see
+cases like that, and even the people that go to help them out of the
+fix--an' that out of kindness, not for no reward nor pleasure--is
+demeaned to their face an' called _rabbit ketchers_, if you please! I
+reckon all women ought to be compelled to be _rabbit ketchers_ for a
+time, an' it would be such a eye-opener to them that if there wasn't
+some alterations made in the tone of the whole business they would all
+strike so there'd be no need of _rabbit ketchin'_, as some call it, to
+make things more disagreeabler; and that's what has been goin' on
+lately in a underhand way, but _some people_," concluded the
+intelligent old lady with her customary choler, coming to a full stop
+ere recapitulating the misdoings of these unmentionable members of
+society.
+
+"Rabbit ketching," as midwifery is contemptuously termed in the
+vernacular, does require a status, and those who have need of it merit
+some consideration. Civilisation, stretching up to recognise that
+every child is a portion of State wealth, may presently make some
+movement to recognise maternity as a business or office needing time
+and strength, not as a mere passing detail thrown in among mountains
+of other slavery.
+
+During the whole forenoon I busied myself with the construction of
+garments for the new arrival in this vale of woe, and at the same time
+was on the alert for the commanded appearance of Ernest Breslaw.
+Instead of himself he sent as messenger a well-spoken lad, who
+presented Mr Ernest's compliments, and hoped that I was not feeling
+any ill effects from my unusual exertion during the previous evening.
+
+I sent a request, per return, that he should call upon me during the
+afternoon, but he did not regard it. The next being Dawn's day for
+Sydney, I waited for this event to hatch some progress in the case,
+but upon her return she had no favours to share with me or merry tale
+to tell of being taken to afternoon tea by Ernest.
+
+Eweword figured in this account, and so prominently as to suggest that
+her talk of the fun she had had with him was a little forced, so on
+the following morning I took it upon myself to call upon the backward
+knight in his own castle. Unmooring one of the boats, I rowed with
+great caution obliquely across the stream till, reaching the desired
+pier, I tethered my craft and ascended among an orange-grove laden
+with its golden fruit, and between the rattling canes of the vineyard
+dismantled by winter, till I reached the house where at present my
+young friend sojourned, and I was thankful that bleached as well as
+unfaded locks having their own peculiar privileges, I was able to make
+this call with propriety.
+
+The young gentleman was in, and without delay appeared to the
+beautiful lady's self-directed and appointed ambassadress.
+
+"I suppose I may pay you a visit," I said with a smile as he seated me
+in the drawing-room which we had to ourselves. "As you didn't seem to
+care whether I were dead or alive I have come over to practically
+illustrate that I'm still above ground. Why did you not come to see
+me?"
+
+Ernest reddened and fidgeted, and said haltingly--
+
+"You know if you had been ill I would have been the first to go to
+you, but I knew you were quite well, and I've been so busy," he
+finished lamely.
+
+"Now, you know that I know that you have been idle--quite unendurably
+idle," I retorted, a remark he received in embarrassed silence, which
+endured till I broke it with--
+
+"Well, I suppose you are waiting for me to divulge the real object of
+my pilgrimage, and that is to know why you haven't kept your agreement
+about making that little mistake as easy as you could for Miss Dawn.
+She's fretting herself pale about it."
+
+Ernest stood up, his colour flaming into his tanned cheeks till they
+were as bright as his locks, while he made as though to speak once or
+twice, but hesitated, and at length exclaimed--
+
+"This is not fair--you must, you have no reason to bother--you," and
+there he foundered. Ernest could neither lie, snub, nor evade. He was
+totally devoid of all the attributes of a smart politician.
+
+"Have you not sufficient faith in my regard for you to trust my motive
+in thus apparently seeking to pry into your private life?" I asked.
+
+"You know I think more of you than any one, and I'll tell you the
+whole thing," he replied, taking a seat beside me.
+
+"You have made a mistake in assuming that Miss Clay, or whatever her
+real name might be (his indifference was well assumed), did not fully
+mean her action, and I was a fool to believe you when I had more than
+sufficient proof to the contrary. Yesterday morning I happened to go
+to Sydney in the same train as she did, and as I happened--entirely by
+chance and quite unexpectedly--to meet her on the platform, I lifted
+my hat as usual to make it easy for her, and a nice fool I made of
+myself. She didn't merely pretend not to see me, but hurried by me in
+contempt and came back with that Eweword, who glared at me as though I
+were a tramp who had attempted to molest her. I am sure you could not
+expect me to go any farther than that, and I only did that because you
+call her a friend of yours. Perhaps Eweword doesn't do things that
+necessitate the throwing of dirty water on him. It was rather an
+uncalled-for thing to do to any one. Perhaps the old dame doesn't
+allow her boarders to have visitors, and that is the polite way they
+have of informing one to the contrary."
+
+The sky looked rather murky. I said nothing, having nothing ready to
+say.
+
+"Oh, by the way, I'm leaving here to-morrow for Adelaide, where I am
+to play in some inter-colonial football matches against the New
+Zealanders. Is there anything I could do for you over there?" he said,
+as though having dismissed the other unworthy trifle from his mind.
+
+"Going to run away because a girl, half accidentally and half out of
+nervous irritation, threw a little water on you!"
+
+There I had said what I really thought, and half expected the snub
+which, according to the rules of tact, I deserved for my divergence
+therefrom, but it did not come; he was a man of the field, and in this
+type of encounter had not a chance against one of my perceptions.
+
+He laughed forcedly. "That would be something to turn tail for,
+wouldn't it?"
+
+"But are you not doing so? If a beautiful girl did such a thing to me
+it would only make me the more set to woo her to graciousness," I
+said.
+
+"Perhaps so, if she were some girl you specially considered, but in
+the case of a passing stranger that I may never meet again, it would
+not be worth wasting time, especially as her action was so uncalled
+for and unwomanly."
+
+"But you are sure to meet her again if you continue our friendship, as
+I hope to have her with me, and that is why I'm taking the trouble to
+thus interfere in what does not apparently concern either you or me
+very much. _I_ don't consider Dawn as a passing stranger. I think her
+especially honest and especially beautiful, and it worries me to think
+she has thus erred. Her action was _unwomanly_, if you like, but
+peculiarly feminine, with the unavoidable hysterical femininity
+engendered in women by their subjected environment. Are you quite sure
+you consider Dawn merely a passing stranger not worth consideration?"
+I asked, looking him fair in the eyes; and the quick lowering of them
+and the tightening of his mouth satisfied me that he could not
+truthfully answer in the affirmative.
+
+"It is a matter of what she considers me," he said.
+
+"Oh, well," I said indifferently, now that I had gained my point, "it
+doesn't matter to me, but I'll be sorry to lose your company, and I
+thought you were taking an interest in Leslie's candidature, and we
+could have enjoyed it together."
+
+"So I do."
+
+"Well, come back as soon as you get these matches played, and we'll
+have some good times together again, and I'll keep the reprehensible
+Dawn out of the way; and anyhow, remember she didn't throw _cold_
+water on you, and that's something."
+
+"Very well, I'll be back in about three weeks' time to see how Les.
+gets on. Polling-day hasn't been fixed yet. I'd like to see it through
+now I've started."
+
+"Of course," said I, considering it a good move that he should
+disappear for a short time, and after this he rowed me on the Noonoon
+till Clay's dinner-bell sounded and I went up to eat.
+
+That evening "Dora" Eweword came in to tea and remained afterwards.
+He informed us that the red-headed chap who had been loafing around
+Kelman's had gone to Europe.
+
+"Has he? Did he tell you?" interestedly inquired Andrew.
+
+"He mentioned that he would leave for South Australia by the express
+this evening," I replied, but did not add that his going to Europe was
+a little stretched.
+
+Dawn was quiet. Her merry impudence did not enliven the company that
+night, and after tea, when Eweword caught her alone for a few moments
+as I was leaving the room, he said--
+
+"So you cleared the red-headed mug out after all. Andrew says it was
+alright. You won't listen to me, but you haven't chucked the wash-up
+water on me yet, that's one thing." His complacence was very
+pronounced. To his surprise Dawn made no reply, but biting her lip to
+keep back her tears, walked out of the room, and in the dark of the
+passage smote her dimpled palms together, exclaiming--
+
+"Would to heaven I had thrown the water over this galoot instead of
+_him_," and the thermometer of "Dora's" self-satisfaction fell
+considerably when she did not appear again that evening.
+
+That night, when the waning moon got far enough on her westward way to
+surmount the old house on the knoll beside the Noonoon and cast its
+shadow in the deep clear water, the silver beams strayed through a
+little window facing the great ranges, and found the features of a
+beautiful sleeper disfigured by weeping; but youth's rest was sound
+despite the tear-stains, and the old moon smiled at such ephemeral
+sorrow. The night wind coming down the gorges with the river sighed
+along the valley as the moon remembered all the faces which, though
+tearless under her nocturnal inspection, yet were pale from the inward
+sobs, only giving outward evidence in bleaching locks and shadowy
+eyes. Even within sound of the engines roaring down the spur, many of
+the little night-wrapped houses, hard set upon the plain, had inmates
+kept from sleep by deeper sorrows than Dawn had ever known.
+
+The first fortnight of Ernest's absence, believed by his doubting
+young lady to be final, was a stirring time in Noonoon, and
+particularly full at Clay's. Jam-making was the star item on the
+latter's domestic bill. Baskets and baskets of golden oranges and
+paler lemons and shaddocks were converted into jam and marmalade, and
+ranged on the shelves of the already replete storehouse, in readiness
+to tempt the summer palate of the week-end boarders which should
+appear when the days stretched out again. We were occupied in this
+business to such an extent that the sight of oranges became a
+weariness, and Andrew averred that the very name of marmalade gave him
+the pip.
+
+At night we enjoyed the diversion of the meetings, and talk and gossip
+of them made conversation for the days. The previously mentioned
+political addresses were but mild fanfares by comparison with the
+flamboyance of the gasconading now in progress, and in its reports of
+these bursts of oratory the 'Noonoon Advertiser' gave further evidence
+of its broad-minded liberality.
+
+"Mrs Gas Ranter," it reported, "addressed a packed meeting in the
+Citizens' Hall last night, and proved herself the best public speaker
+who has been heard in Noonoon during the present campaign," &c. It
+recognised worth, and gamely gave the palm to the deserving,
+irrespective of party or sex,--did not so much as insert the narrow
+quibble that she was the best for a woman.
+
+Among other incidents, the lady canvassers called at Clay's and
+received a piece of grandma's mind.
+
+"Thanks; I don't want no one to tell me how to vote. I've rared two or
+three families and gave a hand with more, and have intelligence the
+same as others, and at my time of my life don't want no one to tell me
+my business. I reckon I could tell a good many others how to vote."
+
+The pity of it was that it was immaterial how any electors cast their
+vote. Neither party had a sensible grip of affairs, and besides, love
+of country in a patriotic way is not a trait engendered in
+Australians. In politics, as in private life, all is selfishness. The
+city people thought only of building a greater Sydney, the residents
+of Noonoon and other little towns had mind for nothing but their own
+small centre,--all seeing no farther than their noses, or that what
+directly benefited their little want might not be good for the country
+at large, and that legislature must, to be successful, better the
+living conditions of the masses, not merely of one class or section.
+Then city men, unacquainted with the practical working of the land,
+could not possibly handle the land question effectively, and,
+moreover, a man might understand how to manage the coastal district
+and remain at sea regarding the great areas west of the watershed.
+
+Another big mistake lay in over representation of the city and the
+under representation of the man on the land. The producer should be
+the first care, and while he is woefully disregarded and
+ill-considered a country cannot thrive. The reason of this state of
+affairs was the division of electorates on a population basis. This
+meant that a city electorate covered a very small area, and that
+practically all its wants were attended by the municipality, so that
+the city member had leisure to ply the trade of merchant, doctor, or
+barrister within a few minutes of the house of parliament; whereas the
+country member, to become acquainted with the vast area he represented
+and the requirements of its inhabitants and attend parliamentary
+sittings, had no time left to be anything but a member of parliament,
+precariously depending upon re-election for a livelihood.
+
+Dawn threw herself into the contest with great enthusiasm, and also
+industriously pursued her vocal studies, but for her was exceptionally
+subdued and inclined to be cross on the smallest provocation. She had
+become so engrossed in political meetings that "Dora" Eweword, who was
+continually at Clay's since the retreat of Ernest, one day
+remonstrated with her. She had made a political meeting the excuse for
+declining to go rowing with him, whereupon he remarked--
+
+"Oh, leave 'em to the old maids, Dawn. You'll grow into a scarecrow
+that would frighten any man away if you hang on to politics much
+more."
+
+"Well, if it would frighten _some_ men away, I'd go in for them twice
+as much," snapped the girl. "I suppose you admire the style of girls
+who are going around now saying, after some straightforward women have
+said what we all feel and got the vote, 'Oh, I don't care for the
+vote. Let men rule; they are the stronger vessel. Politics don't
+belong to women,' and so on. You'd think me a sweet little womanly
+dear if I croaked like that; but you keep your brightest eye on that
+sort of a squarker, and for all her noise about being content with her
+rights, you'll see that she takes more than her share of the good of
+the reforms that other women have worked for."
+
+"Oh Lord!" good-temperedly giggled "Dora," for home truths that would
+be considered sheer spleen from a plain girl are taken as fine fun
+when uttered by a girl as physically attractive as Dawn.
+
+During the second week of the footballer's absence, who should appear
+to lend a hand on the side of Leslie Walker but Mr Pornsch, _uncle_ of
+the late Miss Flipp. He arrived with the callousness worthy of a
+certain department of man's character, and addressed a meeting with as
+much pomp and self-confidence and talk of bettering the morals of the
+people, as though he had been an Ellice Hopkins. He had the further
+effrontery to visit Clay's and feign crocodile grief for the
+deplorable fate of his niece. He protested his shame and horror,
+together with a desire for revenge, so loudly that I resolved that he
+should not be disappointed, that the dead girl should be in a slight
+measure avenged, and he should not only know but feel it.
+
+"I ain't got me voting paper. Me an' Carry will go up for 'em
+to-morrer," said grandma one evening from her arm-chair near the
+fireplace.
+
+There had been the usual meeting, and Ada Grosvenor and others had
+called in to discuss it.
+
+"Why, didn't the police deliver yours?" inquired Miss Grosvenor.
+
+"No, we was missed somehow."
+
+"Easy to see Danby wasn't on the racket of deliverin' electors'
+rights, or you would have had two or three apiece," Andrew chipped in.
+
+"I'm going for Walker straight," announced grandma. "He's temperance
+at all events, and that is somethink w'en there ain't any
+common-sense in any of them."
+
+"If I had twenty votes I wouldn't give one to that Walker," said
+Andrew. "All the women are after him because they think he's
+good-lookin', an' he's got bandy legs. They clap him like fury, and
+look round like as they'd eat any one that goes to ask him a question.
+They seem to reckon he's an angel that oughtn't to be asked nothink he
+can't answer. I believe they'd all kiss him an' marry him if they
+could. I hate him. Vote for Henderson, he wouldn't give the women a
+vote, and only men are workin' on his committee."
+
+"Oh my, what's this!" exclaimed Dawn.
+
+"Well, you know, the women _are_ making fools of themselves about this
+Walker," said Ada Grosvenor, with her intelligently humorous laugh. "I
+don't think much of him myself. In spite of his choice phrasing of the
+usual hustings' bellowing, if women had not already the franchise he
+would be slow to admit them on a footing of equality with men as
+regards being. There are two extremes of men, you know. One thinks
+that woman's position in life is to act squaw to her lord and master.
+The other regards her as a toy--an article to be handed in and out of
+carriages like choice china--a drawing-room ornament, to be decked in
+wonderful gowns, and whose whole philosophy of existence should be to
+add to the material delight of men. Walker is a representative of the
+latter type, and old Hollis, who thinks that monkeys have as good a
+right to vote as women, belongs to the other. At a surface glance
+their views regarding women seem to be diametrically opposed, but to
+me it has always appeared that they equally serve the purpose of
+degrading the position of women. You should have seen how cruel
+Walker looked to-night when an old man asked if he approved of women
+entering the senate. He said _no_ like a clap of thunder."
+
+It was probably this perspicacity on the part of Ada Grosvenor,
+coupled with a sense of humour, that earned for her the reputation of
+"trying to ape the swells."
+
+"Well, good-night everybody, and, Mrs Clay, don't forget to apply for
+your right in time, or you won't be able to vote," she said in
+parting.
+
+"No fear," responded grandma. "I've not been counted among mad people
+an' criminals, an' done out of me simple rights till this time of life
+without appreciatin' 'em w'en I've got 'em at last."
+
+Next day, true to intention, the old dame and Carry went up town for
+their "voting papers," and to repeat the former's words, "was
+downright insulted, so to speak."
+
+The civil servant whose duty it was to give rights to those electors
+who were not already in possession of such, was carrying affairs with
+a high hand, and had the brazen effrontery to tell Grandma Clay that
+it was a disgrace to see a woman of her years "running after a vote,"
+as he elegantly expressed it; and he also suggested to Carry that it
+would suit her better to be at home doing her housework, and to put
+the cap on his gross misconduct, he persuaded them that they had left
+it too late to obtain the coveted document, the first outward and
+visible proof that men considered their women complete rational
+beings.
+
+Carry had retorted that it would suit him better to do the work he was
+paid for than to exhibit his ignorance in meddling with the private
+affairs of others, and that if he could discharge his duties as well
+as she did her housework, he wouldn't make an ass of himself by
+showing his fangs about women having the vote in the way he did.
+
+The two electresses thus bluffed came down the street and told their
+grievance to Mr Oscar Lawyer, for the nonce head of the Opposition
+League, and at ordinary seasons a father of his people, to whom all
+the town made in times of necessity,--whether it was an old beldame
+requiring assistance from the Benevolent Society or a lad seeking a
+situation and requiring a testimonial of character.
+
+With Mr Oscar Lawyer they also ran upon Mr Pornsch; and it was
+discovered that the churlish clerk's statement was utterly false, and
+made because he was on the side of Henderson and these two women were
+not. There was more talk than there is space for here, but the upshot
+of it was the clerk was routed, and grandma and Carry came home
+triumphantly, each in possession of one of the magic sheets of blue
+paper, which they spread out on the table for us all to see.
+
+"Well, well!" said grandma, "I seen the convicts flogged in days w'en
+this was nothink but a colony to ship them to, and I drove coaches
+w'en the line was only as far out of Sydney as here; and to think I
+should have lived to see the last of the convicts gone, coaches nearly
+become a novelty of the past, us callin' ourselves a nation, an' here
+a paper in me hand to show I can vote a man into this parliament and
+the other that the king's son hisself come out to open. I'm glad to
+see us lived that we can have our say in the laws now same as the men,
+and not have to swaller anythink they liked to put upon us to soot
+theirselves," and the old dame, with a splendid light in her eye,
+rubbed the creases out of the paper and spread it out again.
+
+"Pooh, it's the same as we've had all along. You didn't think a
+elector's right was anythink to be grinnin' at w'en the men had it. I
+never seen you gapin' at mine; you'd think it was somethink wonderful
+now when you've got one of your own," said Uncle Jake, coming in.
+
+"Well, I never! Jake Sorrel! Of course we don't think much of other
+people's things! What is the good of another woman's baby or husband
+or _frying-pan_, that is, if it was equally a thing you couldn't
+borrer? And if you was blind, what pleasure would you get out of some
+one else seein' the blue sky, or warnin' that there was a snake there
+to be trod on, an' that's what it's been like with the elector's
+rights."
+
+"Well, but what difference does that bit of paper make to you now? You
+won't live no longer nor find your appetite no better, an' it won't
+pay the taxes for you," contended uncle.
+
+"Then if it is of so little account, why does it gruel you so much to
+see me with it? An' little as it is, there ain't that paper's reason
+why we shouldn't have always voted; and little though it is, that's
+all the difference has stood all these years between men voting and
+women not; and little as you think it is for a woman to have done
+without, it's what men would shed their blood for if _they_ was done
+out of it. It ain't what things actually are, it's all they stand
+for," and grandma gathered up her _right_ and went to take off her
+bonnet and change the bristling black dress which she donned for
+public appearance.
+
+I sat musing while she was away. "It ain't what things actually are,
+it's all they stand for," as the old dame had said; and her delight in
+being a freed citizen, no longer ranked with criminals and lunatics,
+had touched my higher self more profoundly than anything had had
+power to do for years.
+
+Though taking a vivid interest in the electioneering, owing to the
+large distillation of the essence of human nature it afforded, as
+neither of the candidates had a practical grip of public business, I
+cared not which should poll highest; but now I resolved to procure my
+right and go to the ballot, and, if nothing more, make an informal
+vote _for the sake of all that it stood for_.
+
+At back of the simple paper were arrayed the spirits of countless
+noble and fearless men and women who had so loved justice and their
+fellows that they had spent their lives in working for this betterment
+of the conditions of living, and the little paper further stood for an
+improvement in the position of women, and consequently of all
+humanity, inconceivable to cursory observation.
+
+As for a woman going to the poll and voting for Jones or Smith, that
+was harmless in either case, and would not help her live or die or pay
+her debts, as Uncle Jake expressed it; but excepting the female vote
+for the House of Keys in the Isle of Man, the enfranchisement of
+women, spreading from one to the other of the Australian States,
+represented the first time that woman, even in our vauntedly great and
+highly civilised British Empire, was constitutionally, statutably
+recognised as a human being,--equal with her brothers. That women
+shall compete equally with men in the utilitarian industrialism of
+every walk of life is not the ultimate ideal of universal adult
+franchise. Such emancipation is sought as the most condensed and
+direct method of abolishing the female sex disability which in time
+shall bring the human intelligence, regardless of sex, to an
+understanding of the superiority of the mother sex as it concerns the
+race--as it is the race, the whole race, and consequently worthy of a
+status in life where it shall neither have to battle at the polls for
+its rights nor be sold in the market-place for bread.
+
+The empty-headed cannot be expected to perceive the magnitude of this
+upward step in the evolution of man, and its machinery may not run
+smoothly for a span; we nor our children's children may not know much
+benefit from what it symbolises, but shall we who are comfortable in
+rights wrested from ignorance and prejudice but never enjoyed by past
+generations, be too selfish and small to rejoice in the possibility of
+bettered conditions those ahead may live under as the fruits of the
+self-sacrificing labour of those now fighting for their ideals?
+
+NO!
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-ONE.
+
+THINGS GO MORE WRONG.
+
+
+Grandma could think of nothing but the clerk's insult when she had
+gone for her electoral right.
+
+"Him! that thing! What's he employed for but to do this work, and if
+he ain't prepared to do it decent, why don't he give up an' let a
+better man in his place? They're easy to be got. 'Runnin' after a
+vote,' indeed! But that's where I made me big mistake. I should have
+stayed at home and writ to him, an' he'd have been compelled to send
+the police with it. That's what I ought to have done, an' let me
+servants that I'm taxed to keep do the work they're dying for want of,
+instead of doin' it meself; but at any rate I got me right safe an'
+sure," she said with satisfaction. "A long time we'd be getting them
+if all men was like him, which, thank God, they ain't. But that's the
+way with all these fellers in a Government job; they think they're
+Lord Muck, and too good to speak to the folk that's keeping them
+there, and only for which they wouldn't be there at all. Only for
+Oscar Lawyer and Mr Pornsch--and Dawn, where are you? Mr Pornsch was
+very nice to me, an' I asked him to tea, an' to come down for some of
+them little things belongin' to his niece. He's very cut up about
+her."
+
+"Yes, about as cut up about her as Uncle Jake would be over me."
+
+"Now, Dawn, how do you know?" severely inquired the old dame.
+
+"I know very well that old men with his delightful slenderness of
+figure, and men who have drunk all the champagne and other poison it
+must have taken to colour his nose that way, haven't got much true
+feeling left, except for a bottle of wine, and a feed of something
+high and well seasoned."
+
+However, Mr Pornsch presently arrived, and illustrated by his
+smickering at Dawn that notwithstanding his grief for a dead girl he
+yet retained an eye for the charms of a living one. It also transpired
+that he would not have waited for an invitation to call upon us.
+
+This sweet bachelor champion of Women's Protection Bills, who had so
+long deprived some woman of the felicity of being his wife, had
+apparently determined to hastily repair the omission, and it soon
+became evident that he meant to honour no less a person than Dawn in
+this connection--Dawn! a princess in her own right, by reason of her
+health, her beauty, her youth, and her honest maidenhood!
+
+He took Ernest's place in going to Sydney with her, thrust costly
+trifles upon her; he was fifty-five if he were a day, and a repulsive
+debauchee at that. Dawn, so healthy and wholesome, loathed him. She
+sat on her bed at night with her dainty toes on the floor, and raved
+while she combed her fine-spun brown hair. I let her rave, believing
+this a good antidote for the worry of that dish of water that was
+rarely out of her thoughts. I knew that she never omitted to scan the
+football news in hopes of seeing the doings of a certain red-headed
+player recorded there, and I also knew that she was doomed to
+disappointment, unless she could connect R. E. Breslaw with R. Ernest
+of the wash-up water incident.
+
+A man of Pornsch's calibre is hard to abash, or Dawn would have
+abashed him, but failing to do so, at last she came to me requesting
+that I should assist her to get rid of him.
+
+"I don't want to complain to grandma," said she. "It might get abroad
+if she took it in hand, so I'd like to choke him off myself if I
+could. I have enough to suffer already;" and I knew she was again
+thinking of that fatal dish of water, and how "Dora" Eweword twitted
+her concerning it.
+
+Then I took Dawn on my knee as it were, and told her a story. It was
+such a painful story that I first extracted from her a solemn promise
+that she would not make a fuss of any sort, for this young woman
+lacked restraint--that command over her emotions which, if carefully
+adjusted and gauged, will make the work of a talented artist pass for
+genius, and that of a genius pass for the work of a god.
+
+When his connection with the ill-fated young girl, who had slipped out
+in the dead of night to throw herself in the gently gliding Noonoon,
+became known to Dawn, I was afraid her horror would so betray her that
+any subsequent plans for the punishment of the miscreant might fall
+through.
+
+"I'll knock him down with the poker next time he comes. I'll throw a
+kettle of boiling water on him as sure as eggs are eggs. Fancy the
+reptile leering around me: I felt nearly poisoned as it was, but I
+didn't know he was a murderer as well! Oh, the hide of him to come
+here! I really will throw boiling water on him!"
+
+Dawn continued in this strain for some time, but as she quieted down
+became possessed of a notion to tar and feather him in the manner
+mentioned by her grandmother in one of her anecdotes. Carry and I were
+to be called upon to assist in this ceremony, which was to take place
+upon the return of Mr Pornsch. For the present he had disappeared to
+attend to some business.
+
+In the interim, the meetings continued without a break, and Dawn
+unremittingly looked for the football news, now with the war crowded
+into a far corner, by the special complexion that each daily chose to
+put on political affairs.
+
+"Just look up the football news," I said one day, "and see how my
+friend Ernest is doing."
+
+"He made a lot of goals as 'forward' in the last match. See!" she
+coolly replied, putting her tapering forefinger on the name of R. E.
+Breslaw, as she handed me the paper.
+
+"Did he tell you he wanted to disguise his identity while here?"
+
+"Yes; he told me all about it one day when we went to Sydney," she
+replied, leaving me wondering what else they might have confided
+during these jaunts.
+
+Now that we required his presence Mr Pornsch was not in evidence, and
+neither was anything to be heard of the red-headed footballer's
+reappearance, though he had been absent four weeks, and this brought
+us towards the end of June. At this date there appeared a paragraph
+stating that Breslaw and several other amateur sportsmen were
+contemplating a tour of America, to include the St Louis Exposition.
+
+That night some one besides myself heard the roar of the passing
+locomotives, but she did not confess the cause of her sleeplessness.
+It was one of those irritations one cannot tell, so she let off her
+irritation in other channels.
+
+Matters did not brighten as the days went on. Two nights after
+Ernest's reported departure for the States, "Dora" Eweword brought
+Dawn home from Walker's committee meeting, and remained talking to her
+in the otherwise deserted dining-room till a late hour. As soon as he
+left Dawn came upstairs, and throwing herself face downwards on her
+bed burst into violent weeping.
+
+"What has come to you lately, Dawn?" I inquired. "Tell me what sort of
+a twist you have put in your affairs so that I may be able to help
+you."
+
+"No one can help me," she crossly replied.
+
+"Don't you think that I was once young, and have suffered all these
+worries too? It is not so long since I was your age that I have
+forgotten what may torment a girl's heart."
+
+Thus abjured she presently made me her father-confessor.
+
+Eweword it appeared had grown very pressing, and her grandma had urged
+her to accept him as the best of her admirers. The old dame had not
+observed the trend of matters with Ernest. In a house where week-end
+boarders came and went, and the landlady had a pretty granddaughter,
+there were strings of ardent admirers who came and went like the
+weeks, and in all probability transferred their week-end affections as
+frequently and with as great pleasure as they did their person, and
+the old lady was too sensible to place any reliance in their
+earnestness, while Dawn too was very level-headed in the matter. Thus
+Ernest, if considered anything more than my friend, would have merely
+been placed in the week-end category. The old lady, not feeling so
+vigorous as usual, was anxious to have Dawn settled, and had tried to
+put a spoke in "Dora" Eweword's wheel by threatening Dawn with
+deprivation of her coveted singing lessons did she not receive him
+favourably. Dawn in a fit of the blues, probably brought on by seeing
+the announcement of Ernest's departure, had accepted Eweword
+conditionally. The conditions were that he should wait two years and
+keep the engagement entirely secret, and she had promised her grandma
+that she would think of marriage with him at the end of that time,
+provided her vocal studies should be continued till then.
+
+"That's the way I'll keep grandma agreeable to pay for the lessons,
+and in that time, do you think, I'll be able to go on the stage and do
+what I like and be somebody?" asked the girl from out the depths of
+her inexperience.
+
+"And what of '_Dora_'?"
+
+"He can go back to Dora Cowper then. I'll tell him I was only 'pulling
+his leg,' like he said about her. It will do him good."
+
+"You might break his heart," I said with mock compassion.
+
+"Break his heart! _His_ heart! He's got the sort of heart to be
+compensated by a good plate of roast-beef and plum-pudding--like a
+good many more!"
+
+"Will he consent to this?"
+
+"He'll have to or do the other thing; he can please himself which. I
+don't care a hang. He said that if I would marry him soon he would let
+me continue the singing lessons and get me a lovely piano,--all the
+soft-soap men always give a girl beforehand. I wonder did he think me
+one of the folks who would swallow it? Couldn't I see as soon as I was
+married all the privileges I would get would be to settle down and
+drudge all the time till I was broken down and telling the same
+hair-lifting tales against marriage as aired by every other married
+woman one meets;" and Dawn, her cheeks flushed and her white teeth
+gleaming between her pretty lips, looked the personification of
+furious irritation.
+
+"All I care for now is to get the singing lessons, as long as I don't
+have to do anything too bad to get them."
+
+I suddenly turned on her and asked--
+
+"Honestly, why did you throw that dish of water on Ernest Breslaw?"
+Thus unexpectedly attacked, her answer slipped out before she had time
+to prevaricate.
+
+"Because I was a mad-headed silly fool--the biggest idiot that ever
+walked. That's why I did it!"
+
+"Do you know that it hurt him very, very keenly?"
+
+No answer.
+
+"Do you know that he cared more for you than he understood himself?"
+
+No answer.
+
+"Dawn, do _you_ care?"
+
+"Not in that way; but oh, I care terribly that I made such a fool of
+myself. Had it been any one else it wouldn't have mattered, but he
+will think I did it because I was an ignorant commoner who knew no
+better. That's what stings; but I'm not going to think any more of it.
+I'm going to give my life up to singing, and it doesn't matter. I
+suppose I'll never see him again, and he'll never know but that I did
+it out of ignorance."
+
+I smiled at the despondence in her tone as I extinguished the kerosene
+lamp-light.
+
+There is a stage in the course of most love affairs when the knight is
+despised and rejected by the lady, when the sun and the salt of life
+depart, and he finds no more pleasure in it; when he is seized with an
+irresistible desire to go forth in the world and by his prowess dazzle
+all mankind for the purpose of attracting one pair of eyes. The same
+occurs to the lady, and she determines to make all men fall at her
+feet by way of illustrating to one adamantine heart that he was a
+dullard to have passed over her charms. And this young lady of the
+rose and lily complexion, and knight of the bright-hued locks and
+herculean muscles, being young--sufficiently young to be downcast by
+imaginary stumbling-blocks--had reached it. Goosey-gander knight!
+Gander-goosey lady!
+
+I smiled again, for in my pocket was a letter that morning received
+from the former himself, stating that he had been booked for a trip to
+the St Louis Exposition, but had flung it up at the last moment in
+favour of seeing how Les. got on at the election, and that he would be
+back in Noonoon before polling-day. Considering he could have seen how
+the election progressed equally as well in Sydney as Noonoon, and that
+to see how his step-brother polled, when he took little interest in
+politics, had grown preferable to a trip to America, quite contented
+me regarding the probable termination of affairs.
+
+However, I did not show this letter, as in matchmaking, like in good
+cooking, things have to be done to the turn, and this was not the
+opportune turn.
+
+"Oh, well," I said, "so long as you don't let your little arrangement
+get abroad, I don't expect it will harm Eweword."
+
+"No fear of it getting abroad. I've threatened him if it does that a
+contradiction that will be true will also get abroad by being put in
+the 'Noonoon Advertiser.'"
+
+Next night, however, I found Dawn stamping on something glittering
+that spread about the floor, and by inquiry elicited--
+
+"That infernal 'Dora' Eweword has had the cheek to give me a ring, and
+that's what I've done with it, and that's all the hope he has of ever
+marrying me," she exclaimed, bringing the heel of her high-arched foot
+another thump on the fragments.
+
+"He's a bit too quick with his signs and badges of slavery. He's so
+complacent with himself, and thinks he's ousted the 'red-headed mug'
+as he calls him, that I hate him."
+
+"He has a right to be complacent. You have given him reason to be. He
+has won you, so you have told him, and he believes you."
+
+"Yes, I know, and it makes me all the madder to think of it."
+
+I suppressed a chuckle; even before attaining my teens I had never
+been so splendidly, autocratically _young_ as this beautiful
+high-spirited creature!
+
+"Let things settle awhile, and then we'll pour them off the dregs," I
+advised.
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-TWO.
+
+    "O Spirit, and the Nine Angels who watch us,
+    And Thy Son, and Mary Virgin,
+    Heal us of the wrong of man."
+
+
+Outside politics the next item of interest on the Clay programme was
+the reappearance of Mr Pornsch, who came for afternoon tea, during
+which he invited himself to evening tea later on, and before it took
+Dawn's time in the drawing-room trying some late songs. Dawn averred
+that it was with difficulty she had restrained from setting fire to
+him or attacking him with the piano-stool.
+
+He got so far with his "love-making" on this occasion that he had
+asked Dawn to take a little walk with him, which she had readily
+consented to do, as it would enable her to entrap him for the
+tarring-and-feathering upon which she had determined.
+
+"He is going to meet me over among the grapes in the shade of the
+osage breakwind. Do you think we will be able to manage him? Let us be
+sure to have everything well arranged," whispered Dawn to me as we
+came to evening tea.
+
+Near the appointed time of tryst, when the first division of the
+Western mail was roaring by--the warm red lights from its windows
+shedding a glow by the viaduct--she and I betook ourselves to the far
+end of Grandma Clay's vineyard, where we were securely screened by the
+osage orange hedge on one side and the grape-canes and their stakes on
+the other. Dawn carried a two-pound treacle-tin filled with tar, and
+which had been sitting on the end of the stove during the afternoon to
+melt into working order. Carry, who had entered into the affair with
+vim, had her share of the arrangements in readiness, and was secreted
+nearer the house to act as sentinel, and to run to our assistance if
+summoned by a prearranged whistle.
+
+Dawn placed me and the superannuated hair broom, with which she had
+armed me, behind a grape-vine, and herself took up a position before
+it and beside a hole about eighteen inches deep and two feet square
+which she had excavated.
+
+Mr Pornsch was soon to be heard tripping and blundering along, while
+the starlight, to which our eyes had grown accustomed, showed the
+river where the dead girl whom we were there to avenge had ended her
+miserable existence.
+
+"Dawn, my pet, where are you? Curse the grape-vines," he gasped.
+
+"I'm here, _uncle darling_," she responded, the two last words under
+her breath.
+
+Directed by her voice, he neared till we could discern his bulk.
+
+"My little queen," he exclaimed, the tone of his voice betraying that
+which defiled the crisp glory of the night for as far as it carried.
+
+"Just wait a minute till I see where we are," said Dawn, "or we will
+be getting all tangled up in these canes."
+
+With this she started back, causing him to do likewise, and drawing a
+swab on a stick from the pot in her hand, she brought a consignment of
+the black sticky tar a resounding smack on his face, and following it
+with others thick and fast, exclaimed--
+
+"There! There! That's all for you!"
+
+Mr Pornsch naturally stepped backwards into the excavation, as
+designed, and sat down as completely and largely helplessly as one of
+his figure could be counted upon to do, and coming to Dawn's
+assistance I planted the broom on his chest, and bore with my feeble
+strength upon him. It was quite sufficient to detain him, seeing he
+was now stretched on the broad of his back with his amidship
+departments foundered in two feet of indentation.
+
+Dawn thoroughly plastered his face and head, and in spitting to keep
+his mouth clear he lost his false teeth. He attempted to bellow, but
+jabbing his mouth full Dawn soon cowed him into quietude.
+
+"Shut up, you old fool; if you make a noise we have six more girls
+waiting in a boat to fling you in the river and drag you up and down
+for a while tied on to a rope like a porpoise. Do you think you'll
+float?"
+
+This had the desired effect, though he spluttered a little.
+
+"What is the meaning of this? Have you all gone mad? I met you here at
+your own request to speak about helping you with your singing, and
+you've evidently put a wicked construction on my action. I demand a
+full explanation and an abject apology."
+
+"Well," said Dawn, punctuating her remarks with little dabs of the
+tar, "the explanation is that we're doing this to show what we think
+of a murderer. Even if Miss Flipp had not drowned herself, but had
+lived to be an outcast, you would be still a murderer of her soul."
+
+"What's this?" he blustered.
+
+"We have several witnesses ready to give evidence regarding all that
+passed between you and the unfortunate girl supposed to be your niece
+during your midnight calls upon her," I interposed, speaking for the
+first time, "so bluff or pretence of any kind on your part is
+unavailing. Remain silent and hear what we intend to say."
+
+"We're dealing with this case privately," continued Dawn, "because the
+laws are not fixed up yet to deal with it publicly. Old
+alligators--one couldn't call you men, and it's enough to make decent
+men squirm that you should be at large and be called by the same
+name--can act like you and yet be considered respectable, but this is
+to show you what _decent_ women think of your likes, and their spirits
+are with us in armies to-night in what we are doing. They'd all like
+to be giving your sort a wipe from the tar-pot, and then if you were
+set alight it would not be half sufficient punishment for your crimes.
+We haven't a law to squash you yet, but soon as we can we'll make one
+that the likes of you shall be publicly tarred and feathered by those
+made outcasts by the system of morality you patronise," vehemently
+said this ardent and practical young social reformer, who was more
+rabid than a veteran temperance advocate in fighting for her ideal of
+social purity.
+
+There was silence a moment while we listened to ascertain was there
+any likelihood of our being disturbed, but the only man-made sounds
+breaking the noisy crickets' chorus were the rumble of vehicles along
+the highroad and the shunting of the engines at the station, so I
+chimed in with promised support.
+
+"Yes, good women have to continually suffer the degradation of your
+type in all life's most sacred relations. They have to endure you at
+their board and in their homes, and leering at their sweet young
+daughters; and, alack! many in shame and humiliation own your stamp as
+their father or the father of their sons and daughters. They have had
+to endure it with a smile and hear it bolstered up as right, but those
+whose moral illumination has taken place would be with us in armies
+to-night if they could."
+
+"I'm dying to give him a piece of my mind," said Carry, coming up.
+
+"How do you like our little illustration of what we think of you?
+We've done it out of a long smouldering resentment against your reign,
+and this is a species of jubilation to find that the majority of
+Australian men are with us, because in the vote they have furnished us
+with a means of redress," and Carry finished her previously prepared
+speech by throwing a clod of dirt on him.
+
+"My grey hairs should have protected me," he muttered.
+
+"You mean they should have protected Miss Flipp," said Dawn, "and when
+a man with grey hairs carries on like this the crime is twice as
+deadly. There was nothing about grey hairs when you used a lead comb
+and got yourself up to kill. I thought you didn't want to make an
+especial feature of them, and that's why I'm dyeing them this
+beautiful treacley black. They'll look bosker when I'm done."
+
+"Get up out of that, lest I'm tempted to do you a permanent injury," I
+said, taking the broom off him.
+
+"You can go to the stable," said Dawn, "and I hope you won't
+contaminate it. Carry has a lantern and some grease and hot water, so
+you can clean yourself there and put on your overcoat. Never let us
+hear of you on a platform spouting about moral bills again unless you
+say it is on account of the practical experience you've had of the
+need of them to save weak and foolish young women from the clutches of
+such as you."
+
+Mr Pornsch arose with difficulty while Dawn struck matches to see what
+he was like, and a more deplorably ludicrous spectacle never could be
+seen in a pantomime. The only pity of it was that it was not a
+punishment more frequently meted out to the sinners of his degree. He
+raved and stuttered how he would move in the matter, but Dawn, who had
+a commendable fearlessness in carrying out her undertakings, only
+laughed merry little peals, and told him the best way for him to move
+in the tar was towards the stable, and the best way to move out of it
+was by the aid of grease, soap, hot water, and soda. The expression of
+his eyes rolling and glaring amid the black was quite eerie, but
+eventually we reached the stable, where Carry instructed him how to
+clean himself, while Dawn jeered at him during the operation.
+
+Having cleaned his face somewhat, he hid his neck and clothes in his
+overcoat which Carry handed, put on his hat, muffled his face in his
+handkerchief, and went away, Dawn administering a parting shot.
+
+"Now, Uncle Pornsch, dear, next time you go ogling and leering round a
+_decent_ girl, remember, though she may be so situated that she has to
+endure you, yet she feels just as we do, that is, if she is a decent
+girl, whose eyes have been opened to the facts of life."
+
+"I feel better than I have done for a long time," she concluded, as
+bearing the implements used in the adventure we three, who had agreed
+upon secrecy, made towards the house.
+
+"So do I," said Carry. "If we could only do it to all who deserve the
+like, it would be grand!"
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-THREE.
+
+UNIVERSAL ADULT SUFFRAGE.
+
+
+I.
+
+Electioneering matters ripened, and so did Carry's love affair with
+Larry Witcom. In fact it got so far that she gave grandma notice, and
+announced her intention of going to a married sister's home for that
+process known as "getting her things ready," while Larry, in keeping
+up his end of the stick, bought a neat cottage and began furnishing it
+in the style approved by his circle, with bright linoleum on the
+floors, plush chairs in the "parler," and china ornaments on the
+overmantels.
+
+Mrs Bray, one of those very everyday folk whose god was mammon, and
+who naturally hung on every word issuing from a person of means while
+she would ignore the most inimitable witticism from an impecunious
+individual, began to regard the lady-help from a new point of view.
+
+"She mightn't have done so bad for herself after all. Some of these
+girls knockin' about the world not havin' nothink to their name, don't
+baulk at things the same as you an' me would who's been used to plenty
+and like to pick our goods, so to speak. The way things is, Larry is
+as likely as most to be in a good position yet," was a sample of the
+modified sentiments falling from her full red lips.
+
+Carry was to remain at Clay's until after the election day, so that
+she could cast her vote for Leslie Walker.
+
+The political candidate thus favoured scarcely allowed three days to
+pass without personally or by proxy stumping the Noonoon end of the
+electorate. His last meeting in the Citizens' Hall was jam-pack an
+hour before the advertised time of speaking.
+
+The candidate on this occasion made no fresh utterances to entertain,
+he merely repeated the catch cries of his party; but the air was
+heavily charged with human electricity, and the questions and
+"barracking" of the crowd were supremely diverting.
+
+"Are you in favour of the Chows going to South Africa?" bawled one
+elector.
+
+"My dear fellow, we are going to govern New South Wales--not South
+Africa."
+
+"Yes; but when we sent contingents out to fight for the Empire in the
+Transvaal, do you think it fair that white men should be passed over
+in favour of Chows in the South African labour market?"
+
+This question being ignored another was interjected.
+
+"Are you in favour of the newspapers running New South Wales?"
+
+"Certainly not!"
+
+This being a satisfactory answer, the old favourite question, "Are you
+in favour of black gins wearing white stockings?" was put; and the
+candidate having assured us that, provided they could manage the
+laundry bill, he certainly was in favour of these ladies wearing any
+hosiery they preferred; and the loud guffaw which greeted this
+information having subsided, he continued--
+
+"Now, don't vote for _me_ or for _Henderson_,--vote for the best
+measures for the country. (Henderson was driving the personal ticket
+of having lived among them,--hence this warning.) I think it an
+unparalleled impertinence for a man to ask an intelligent body of
+electors to vote for _him_--"
+
+"When there's a swell bloke like you in the field."
+
+"Pip! pip! Hooray! Cock-a-doodle-do!" came the chorus. The "Pip! pip!"
+was a new sound to them, having been introduced to represent the noise
+made by the propulsion of a motor-car, in which set the candidate
+shone.
+
+"Are you in favour of gas and water running up the one pipe?" inquired
+another, when the din had once more fallen to comparative silence.
+
+"Don't you think that ladies ought to wear big boots now that they've
+got the vote?"
+
+All such important questions having been put, the chairman called for
+three cheers for Mr Walker.
+
+"Three cheers for Henderson," yelled the rabble at the back, which
+were given deafeningly, and the candidate, with the lively tact which
+bade fair to develop into his most prominent characteristic, joined in
+the cheers for his opponent, till some one had the grace to call
+"Three cheers for Mr Walker now"; and in the most delightfully
+uproarious, holiday-spirited clamour thus ended the last meeting but
+one before the election.
+
+This was fixed for the 6th of August, and, notwithstanding there being
+several other towns in the electorate equally as important as Noonoon,
+on polling eve both candidates were to make their final speech there
+at the same hour.
+
+During the week intervening, Leslie Walker's "Ladies' Committee" were
+very busy in the construction of dainty rosettes of pink and blue
+ribbon to be worn by his followers; and not to be outdone, Henderson's
+committee of "mere men" armed themselves with little squares of
+hatband ribbon of red, white, and blue--the Ministerial colours.
+
+These were not such dainty badges as the rosettes, but they served the
+purpose equally well; and the sterner sex, in our present stage of
+evolution ever to be trusted to make up in downright usefulness what
+they lack in mere prettiness, had attached a safety-pin to each piece
+of ribbon for its masculinely substantial affixing.
+
+
+II.
+
+Polling eve arrived, and the Ministerialists having secured the hall,
+the Oppositionists had perforce to hold an open-air meeting. We
+attended the hall first, intending to move on to the street
+entertainment later, and Dawn was attacked by an old dame in the
+opposing camp because she was displaying Walker's colours.
+
+"If I liked him I'd go an' stand in the street an' listen to him, not
+take up the room of them as has a hall hired for 'em by the _best_
+man, who has lived among us, and not some city lah-de-dah married to a
+hussy off the stage, an' who had women who might be any character
+goin' round speakin' for him," she tiraded, and turning to me
+aggressively demanded--
+
+"Where are _your_ colours?"
+
+"Could you supply me with some?" I replied; and only too pleased, she
+squalled to an urchin who was distributing the squares plus a
+safety-pin. I was such a well-poised "rail-sitter" that I was entitled
+to wear both colours; and as this one was being ostentatiously
+fastened to the lapel of my over-jacket, I remembered the injunction
+to live at peace with all.
+
+A brass band played the people in, and a trio of youngsters unfurled
+red, white, and blue parachutes,--alias gamps, alias ginghams, alias
+umberellers,--which were a popular feature of the "turn."
+
+The committee appeared on the platform one by one, each received with
+noisy approval, and one facetiously wearing a rosette the size of a
+large cabbage was tendered a particularly deafening ovation.
+
+After these crept Henderson, who, though not a particularly inspiring
+individual, was wildly and vociferously cheered for everything and
+nothing, and after listening awhile to his catch cries,--which
+differed from those of Walker only in the irritatingly halting and
+unimpressive way they were delivered,--we rose and scrambled our way
+out, jeered by the old dame as we went, and our departure was further
+commented upon from the platform by the speaker himself, in the
+words--
+
+"Getting too hot for some of the ladies," which, if correct, could not
+by any means have been attributed to the winter air or the dull and
+weakly maudlin speech he was trying to deliver.
+
+Walker spoke from a balcony crowded by devotees--mostly women--to an
+audience in the street, which was further enlivened by the fighting of
+the numerous dogs I have previously mentioned as addicted to holding
+municipal meetings. Their loud differences of opinion occasionally
+drowned the speakers, and the main street being also the public
+thoroughfare,--in fact, no less a place than the great Western
+Road,--there was no by-law or political etiquette to prevent the
+Ministerial band from strolling that way at intervals; so, much to the
+delight of all who were out for fun and the annoyance of those who
+were sensibly interested in the practical welfare of their country,
+and who imagined that the policy of this party would materially better
+matters, the cut-and-dried denouncement of the Ministry was at times
+drowned by the strains of "Molly Riley," "He's a Jolly Good Fellow,"
+and "See the Conquering Hero Comes!"
+
+The followers of Walker contended that Henderson was the worst of
+scorpions to thus come to Noonoon on the last night; but considering
+that he had only addressed Noonoon once to Walker's thrice, as an
+impartial wiggle-waggle I could not help seeing that the
+Ministerialists had most cause for complaint.
+
+Dawn pinned the badge I had acquired to the coat-tail of a local bank
+manager who, though on her side, had lately distinguished himself by a
+public denouncement of "Women's Rights," so savagely virulent and
+idiotically tyrannous in principle as to suggest that his household
+contained representatives of the "shrieking sisterhood," who had been
+one too many for him. The boys who saw the joke enjoyed it very much
+indeed, as he strolled along with the self-importance befitting so
+prominent a citizen.
+
+The beautiful voice of the candidate rose and fell, occasionally
+halting till the usual cheers or guffaws died away, and the meeting
+ended in the customary way. What good to the country was likely to
+accrue from it? On the other hand--what harm?
+
+To be abroad in the open air with comfort at that time of the year,
+and at that hour of the night, illustrated the beautiful climate of
+that latitude if nothing more, and every one was harmlessly
+entertained, for good-humour characterised the whole affair.
+
+Tea, coffee, and cheese abounded for all comers at the committee rooms of
+Leslie Walker--the candidate supported by the temperance societies; and on
+behalf of Olliver Henderson there was an "open night" at Jimmeny's "pub.,"
+with the result--as published by the Oppositionists--that boys of fourteen
+and sixteen were lying drunk in the gutters.
+
+The next day, however, was the culmination of the whole thing.
+
+Dawn almost wept that she was not of age to vote, and as I was so
+comfortably indifferent as to which man won, I offered to cast my vote
+for the one she favoured, but she declined.
+
+"That would only be the same as men having the vote and thinking they
+know how to represent us," she said.
+
+But though she couldn't vote she worked hard for her side, and with a
+big rosette of pink and blue decorating her dimpling bosom, and
+streamers of the same flying from her whip and her pony's headstall,
+she was out all day driving voters to the booth, where for the first
+time in that town women produced an electoral right. The Federal
+election had been conducted without them.
+
+In the forenoon Larry Witcom drove Carry to vote in state--otherwise a
+brand-new sulky he had recently purchased; and such is human nature
+that we were all sufficiently malicious to be secretly pleased that
+poor old Uncle Jake could not vote at all, because he had only an
+obsolete red elector's right, and he should have procured an
+up-to-date blue one.
+
+It was a genial sunshiny day, and the lucerne and rape fields and the
+Chinese gardens on either hand were beautifully green, as grandma
+noticed when during the afternoon she and I drove in the old sulky to
+cast our vote.
+
+"Poor Jake! I'm sorry he can't vote, though he ain't goin' for my
+man," she remarked. "But don't it seem like a judgment on him for
+bein' so narked about the women bein' set free? That's always the way
+in life. If you are spiteful about anythink it always comes back on
+yourself."
+
+The street opposite the court-house--for the time converted into a
+polling-booth--was thronged like a show-day with an orderly crowd of
+citizens of both sexes. The voting had become so congested that
+vehicle loads of voters were being conveyed over to Kangaroo, and each
+contingent set out amid the cheers of small boys, who were most ardent
+politicians.
+
+Laughing and banter were exchanged between people of all ages and
+classes, one as important as the other for the time being.
+
+As we crowded round the door, a jovial-looking man with a twinkle in
+his eyes, as he was unceremoniously shoved against a pillar, announced
+that women should not have been allowed the vote, for its disastrous
+results were already evident in this crush; while the equally
+pleasant-faced policeman, who, as soon as intimation came from within
+that there was a vacancy, wheeled us in like so many bales of wool,
+replied--
+
+"Women jolly well have as much right to vote as men, and more, because
+they can do it without getting drunk or breaking their heads."
+
+Many displayed colours and some did not. There was the truculent woman
+who voted as she thought fit, and who loudly advertised this fact; the
+man who voted for Henderson because he lived in the district; and the
+woman who supported Leslie Walker because he was rich and would be
+able to subscribe liberally to all local institutions. A shallow-pated
+Miss favoured Walker because his colours were the prettier; and an
+addle-pated old man balanced this by voting for Henderson because he
+"shouted,"[1] and Walker was temperance. There was a silly little
+flaxen-haired woman who also supported the Opposition to spite her
+husband,--a Henderson man, and the prototype of Mr Pornsch,--because,
+being over-grogful, he had made tracks for the polling-booth alone,
+leaving his wife to go as best she could. Alas! there was a poor
+little woman at home who could not vote at all because she had
+succumbed to the gentlemanliness of Leslie Walker, and her husband
+being against him had tyrannously taken her right from her; and there
+was also the woman who _would_ not vote at all, because she considered
+men were superior to women, and boisterously proclaimed this to all
+who would listen, in hopes of currying favour with the men; but
+fortunately this, in the case of the best men, is becoming an obsolete
+bid for popularity. There was the woman who voted for the man her
+father named, and those electors of each sex who voted to the best of
+their discernment great or small. Quite a crop of Uncle Jakes were
+disfranchised through their rights being back numbers, and the
+nobodies who imagined themselves something altogether too lofty to
+consider anything so mundane as law-making at all, were also rather
+numerous. Ada Grosvenor's bright happy face shone like a star amid her
+companions, and she discharged this duty honestly and thoughtfully as
+she did all others, recognising it as the practical way of working for
+the brave, bright ideals guiding her life.
+
+[Footnote 1: To treat to free drinks.]
+
+Among the electresses were all the same types of vote as cast by men,
+except that those sold for a glass of beer were not so frequent; and
+as civilisation climbs higher, universal suffrage, and the better
+methods of administration to which it will give birth, will be
+exercised for the adjustment of the great human question now so
+trivially divided into squabbles of sex and class.
+
+The bright Australian sun shone with genial approval on all, and in
+the air was a hint of the scent of the jonquils and violets, so early
+in that temperate region. Grandma Clay must not be forgotten, for in
+her immaculate silk-cloth dress and cape, her bonnet of the best
+material, and her "lastings," with her spectacles in one hand and her
+properly-prized electoral right in the other, and her irreproachable
+respectability oozing from her every action, she could not be
+overlooked. As she neared the door the gentlemen and younger ladies
+crowding there politely stood back and cancelled their turn in her
+favour; and Mrs Martha Clay, a flush on her cheeks, a flash in her
+eyes, and with her splendidly active, upright figure carried
+valiantly, at the age of seventy-five, disappeared within the
+polling-booth to cast her first vote for the State Parliament.
+
+What a girl she must have been in those far-off teens when she had
+handled a team of five in Cobb & Co.'s lumbering coaches, when her
+curls, blowing in the rain and wind, had been bronze, when with a
+feather-weight bound she could spring from the high box-seat to the
+ground! Lucky Jim Clay, to have held such vigorous love and splendid
+personality all his own. All his own to this late day, for the old
+dame returning said to me, "This is a great day to me, and I only wish
+that Jim Clay had lived to see me vote;" and there was a pathetic
+quiver in the old voice inexpressibly sweet to the ear of one
+believing in true love.
+
+After Grandma Clay there was myself--a widely different type of voter.
+In one way it did not matter whether I voted or not. Neither candidate
+had a clear-cut policy to rescue public affairs from their chaotic
+state. The electors themselves had no definite idea what they
+required, but this was in no way alarming--all the materials for
+national prosperity were at hand, presently matters would evolve, and
+the demand for able statesmen would be filled when the demand grew
+clearly defined.
+
+Which man would do most for women and children was also immaterial;
+the mere fact of women no longer being redressless creatures, but
+invested with rights of full citizenship, was even at that early stage
+having its effect. Politicians were trimming their sails to catch the
+great female vote by announcing their readiness to make issues of
+questions relative to the peculiar welfare of the big bulk of the
+human race represented by women and children. Inspired by women's
+newly-granted power of electing a real representative of their
+demands, would-be M.P.'s were hastening in one session to insert in
+their platform planks which much-vaunted "womanly influence" had been
+unable to get there during generations of masculine chivalry and
+feminine disenfranchisement.
+
+Let the women vote!
+
+As Grandma Clay expressed it, "It ain't what things actually are, it's
+all they stand for." For this reason I meant to exercise my right.
+
+A sovereign in itself may not be much, but to a starving man within
+reach of shops see what it means in twenty shillings' worth of food.
+Similarly the right to vote in a self-governed country meant many a
+mile in the upward evolution of mankind.
+
+Countless brave women and good men had sacrificed all that for which
+the human heart hankers, that women should be raised to this estate,
+and what a coward and insolent ignoramus would I be to lightly
+consider what had been so dearly bought and hard fought! And so
+thinking I presented my right, received my ballot-paper, and though
+not bothering to meddle with either candidate's name, I folded it
+correctly, and for the sake of all that stood behind and ahead of the
+right to perform this simple action, dropped it in the ballot-box.
+
+It closed at six o'clock, and then came a lull till the first returns
+should have time to come in. The candidates were not in Noonoon but
+Townend, where the head polling-booth was situated, though nothing
+could have exceeded the excitement in Noonoon.
+
+Grandma said she would wait quietly at home till next day to hear the
+result, but at nine o'clock the strains of a band, the glow of the
+town-lights like a red jewel through the night, and the sound of
+distant cheering proved too enticing to us two left alone in the
+house, so we locked it up, put the pony in the sulky, and sallied
+forth into the winter night, which in this genial climate was pleasant
+in an over-jacket added to one's ordinary indoor attire.
+
+We had the road to ourselves, for the strings of vehicles from which
+it was seldom free were all ahead of us.
+
+The candidates had tiny globes of electric light representing their
+colours hung across the street from their respective committee rooms,
+and the proprietor of 'The Noonoon Advertiser' had a splendid placard
+erected on his office balcony and well lighted by electricity, on
+which the names of members were pasted as they were elected, and in
+view of this had gathered one of the most good-humoured crowds
+imaginable. Irrespective of party, the hoisting of each name was
+wildly cheered by the embryo electors who, being at that time of life
+when to yell is a joy, took the opportunity of doing so in full.
+
+Leaving grandma in charge of the vehicle I got out to reconnoitre, and
+slipped in among the crowd desiring to be unobserved, but that was
+impossible; a good-tempered man invariably discovered me behind him,
+and insisted upon putting me forward where there was a better view of
+the numbers and names.
+
+"Let the women have a show. This is their first election and it ought
+to be their night," and similarly good-natured remarks in conjunction
+with a little "chyacking" from either party as the numbers fluctuated,
+were to be heard on all sides.
+
+Where were all the insults and ignominy that opponents of women
+franchise had been fearfully anticipating for women if they should
+consent to lower themselves by going to the polling-booth? If one
+excepted the discomfort that non-smokers have to suffer in any crowd
+owing to the indulgence of this selfish, disgusting, and absolutely
+idiotic vice, it was one of the best-mannered crowds I have been
+among.
+
+I espied Larry and Carry carefully among the shades of the trees on
+the outskirts of the gathering, and even in the teeth of a political
+crisis not so thoroughly "up-to-date" that they could forego a
+revival of the old, old story that will outlive voting and many other
+customs of many other times.
+
+Among the crowd of mercurial and lustily cheering boys was my friend
+Andrew, and a little farther on, lo! the knight himself. A motor cap
+was jammed on his warm curls, and a football guernsey displayed the
+proportions of his broad chest as his Chesterfield fell open, while
+with a gaiety and freedom he lacked when addressing girls he exchanged
+comments with some other young fellows, evidently fellow-motorists.
+
+My feeble pulse quickened out of sympathy with Dawn as I caught sight
+of him. It was easy to understand the hastened throb of her heart upon
+first becoming aware of his presence. Who has not known what it is to
+unexpectedly recognise the turn of a certain profile or the
+characteristic carriage of a pair of shoulders, meaning more to the
+inner heart than had a meteor flashed across the sky? Most of us have
+known some one whose smile could make heaven or whose indifference
+could spell hell to us, and those who by some fortuitous circumstances
+have spent their life without encountering either one or both these
+experiences, are still sufficiently human to regret having missed
+them, and to understand how much it could have meant.
+
+Had Dawn's blue eyes yet discovered the goodly sight?
+
+When I presently found her the light in them betrayed that they had.
+
+Her face shone with the inward gladness of a princess when she has
+come into view of a desired kingdom--whether it shall endure or be
+destroyed and replaced by the greyness of disappointment, depends upon
+the prince reciprocating and making her queen of his heart.
+
+"Dora" Eweword was in attendance, so I despatched him to ascertain if
+grandma were all right, and took advantage of his absence to say--
+
+"I see Ernest has returned to see the result of Leslie Walker's
+candidature."
+
+"Then it's a wonder he didn't stay in Townend. They'll know the
+results there sooner," she replied with studied indifference.
+
+Our pony fell sound asleep where she stood and in spite of the
+cheering, as though she were well acquainted with women taking a live
+interest in an election. We let her sleep till twelve, when to
+grandma's disappointment Leslie Walker was more than a hundred votes
+behind. There were yet other returns to come in, but these were not
+large enough to alter present results.
+
+When we left the street was still crowded and the cheering unabatedly
+vigorous.
+
+On our way home grandma remarked with satisfaction that Dawn seemed to
+be regarding Eweword sensibly at last, and I seized the opening to
+inquire if she were really anxious that the girl should marry him.
+
+"I am if she couldn't get no one better," replied the old lady, and I
+considered that this condition saved the situation.
+
+
+III.
+
+The poll had been taken on a Saturday, and on Monday both the elected
+and defeated candidates appeared in Noonoon to return thanks.
+
+The former came into town at the head of a long cortége of vehicles,
+and with the red, white, and blue parasols very prominently in
+evidence. The streets were hung with bunting, and at night the newly
+elected M.P. was lifted into a buggy in which he was drawn through the
+streets by youths, at the head of a glorified procession led by a
+brass band; and there were not only little boys covered with
+electioneering tickets from top to toe and yelling as they marched and
+waved flags, but also little girls, now equally with their brothers,
+electors to be. More power to them and their emancipation!
+
+It came on to rain, so black umbrellas, big and business-like, went up
+by dozens around the three special ones, and became an amusing feature
+of the train of miscellaneous people who came to a halt within earshot
+of a balcony in the main street. Henderson was carried upstairs on
+some enthusiasts' shoulders, and when landed there followed the usual
+"gassating" and flattery--the re-elected member being presented with a
+gorgeous bouquet of red, white, and blue flowers.
+
+A little farther up the street the Walkerites also held a
+"corroboree," where graceful thanks were returned by the Opposition
+candidate, who was overloaded with offerings of blue and white violets
+and narcissi, and amid great enthusiasm dragged in a buggy to the
+railway station.
+
+As they came down the street, though they had the intention of giving
+three cheers for the victors as they passed, the rabble could not be
+expected to anticipate such nicety of feeling, and some young
+irresponsibles attempted to form a barricade across the route.
+
+"Charge!" was then called out by some braw young Walkerites in the
+lead, and mild confusion followed.
+
+I was knocked on to the wheel of Leslie Walker's buggy, from whence I
+was rescued by an old gentleman, himself minus his pipe and cap, but
+good-humouredly laughing--
+
+"My word! aren't the other side dying hard?"
+
+"Take care you and I do not also die hard," I replied, stepping out of
+the way of an idiot lad, who, dressed as a jester in Walker's colours,
+was sitting on a horse whose progress was blocked by the crowd, which
+began jibing at the rider.
+
+Dawn, indignant at this, dashed forward like a beauteous and
+infuriated Queen Boadicea, her cheeks red from excitement and the
+winter air, and with her grandmother's flash in her eyes, exclaimed as
+she took the bridle rein--
+
+"Cowards, to torment a poor fellow!"
+
+She attempted to lead the animal through, but the torches of the band
+were put before it and the indispensable red, white, and blue parasols
+swirled in its face, till it reared and plunged frantically, catching
+the excited girl a blow on the shoulder with its chest. She must
+inevitably have been knocked down in the street and been trampled upon
+but for the intervention of a hand so timely that it seemed it must
+have been on guard.
+
+Noonoon was by no means an architectural town, and the ugliness of its
+always dirty, uneven streets was now accentuated by the mud and rain,
+but the picture under the dripping flags shown up by the torches of
+the band was very pretty.
+
+The sturdy young athlete thus triumphantly in the right place at a
+necessitous moment, held his precious burden with ease and delight,
+and though she was not in any way hurt she did not seem in a hurry to
+relinquish the arm so willingly and proudly protecting her. The
+expression on the young man's face as he bent over the beautiful girl
+was a revelation to some interested observers but not to me.
+
+Oh, lucky young lady! to be thus opportunely and romantically saved
+from a painful and humiliating if not serious accident!
+
+Oh, happy knight! to be thus at hand at the psychologic moment!
+
+And where was "Dora" Eweword then?
+
+And where was _my_ rescuer? Apparently he had forgotten that he had
+rescued me, or that to have done so was of moment.
+
+Ah, neither of us were in the heyday of youth, and 'tis only during
+that roseate period that we extract the full enchantment of being
+alive, and only by looking back from paler days that we understand how
+intense were the joys gone by.
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-FOUR.
+
+LITTLE ODDS AND ENDS OF LIFE.
+
+
+The electioneering over, the town fell to a dulness inconceivable, and
+from which it seemed nothing short of an earthquake could resuscitate
+it. So great was the lack of entertainment that the doings of the
+famous Mrs Dr Tinker regained prominence, and the old complaints
+against the inability of the council to better the roads awoke and
+cried again.
+
+Two days following Dawn's rescue from the accident, Ernest called upon
+me, and occupying one of the stiff chairs before the fireplace under
+the Gorgonean representations of Jim Clay, looked hopelessly
+self-conscious and inclined to blush like a schoolboy every time the
+door opened, but Dawn did not make her appearance. I knew he had come
+hoping that in averting the accident he had been able to illustrate
+his friendliness towards her, and that she would now meet him as of
+old, so that the little incident of the wash-up water could be
+explained and buried. At last, taking pity on the very natural young
+hope that was being deferred, I excused myself and went in quest of
+Dawn, and found her in her room sewing with ostentatious industry.
+
+"Dawn, won't you come down and speak to Ernest, he has called to see
+how you are after your adventure," I said with perfect truth, though
+as a matter of fact he had studiously refrained from mentioning her.
+
+"Oh, please don't ask me to go down," she implored excitedly; "you
+seem to have forgotten!"
+
+"Forgotten what?"
+
+"That dish of water," she faltered with changing colour, "and then he
+saved me so cleverly from being trampled on! If he had ridden over me
+I wouldn't have cared, as it would have made things square; but as it
+is, can't you understand that I'd rather _die_ than see him?" said she
+in the exaggerated language of the day, and burying her face in her
+hands.
+
+"I can better understand that you are _dying_ to see him," I returned,
+pulling her head on to my shoulder; "but never mind, you'll see him
+some other day, and it will all come straight in time."
+
+I forbore to press her farther, but that Ernest might not be too
+discouraged I gave him some splendid oranges Andrew had picked for me,
+and said--
+
+"Miss Dawn kept these for you, but as she is not visible this
+afternoon I am going to make the presentation."
+
+His face perceptibly brightened, and also noticeable was the brisk way
+he terminated his call upon learning that there was no prospect of
+seeing Dawn that day. I watched him bounding along the path to the
+bridge carrying the oranges in his handkerchief, and watched also by
+another pair of eyes from an upstairs window.
+
+Carry left us during that week, and as she had now fixed her
+wedding-day the tax of wedding presents had to be met. Grandma, in
+bidding her good-bye, presented her with a generous cheque, and paid
+her a fine compliment.
+
+"I wish you well wherever you go, for I never saw another young
+woman--unless it was meself when I was young--who could lick you at
+anythink."
+
+Carry's departure put the cap on our quietude at Clay's, but soon a
+movement transpired to stir the stagnation.
+
+The out-voted electors of Noonoon were so galled by their defeat that
+they ignored the British law under which it was their boast to live,
+and refused to acknowledge that the man who had been voted in by the
+majority was constitutionally their representative in parliament. They
+also failed to see that he would serve the purpose quite as well as
+the other man, and to publish their sentiments more fully, determined
+to tender Leslie Walker a complimentary entertainment of some kind,
+and present him with a piece of plate, not as the other side had it,
+in token of his defeat, but owing to the fact that he was actually the
+representative of Noonoon town, having in that place polled higher
+than his opponent. The presentation took the shape of a silver
+epergne. This to a man who probably did not know what to do with those
+he already possessed, a wealthy stranger who had contested the
+electorate for his own glory! Had he been a struggling townsman, who,
+at a loss to his business, had put up in hopes of benefiting his
+country, to have paid his expenses might have shown a commendable
+spirit, but this was such a pure and simple example of greasing the
+fatted sow, that even those who had supported him openly rebelled,
+Grandma Clay among them.
+
+"Well, that's the way women crawl to a man because he's got a smooth
+tongue and a little polish," sneered Uncle Jake.
+
+"And some of the men hadn't gumption to get the proper right to vote
+for their man who flew the publican's flag and truckled to the
+tag-rag," chuckled grandma, who was delighted to prove that this
+illustration of crawl had originated with the men.
+
+Nevertheless it was decided to present the epergne at a select concert
+or musical evening, with Mr and Mrs Leslie Walker sitting on the
+platform, where the audience could gloat upon them. Dawn was asked to
+contribute to the programme, and relieved her feelings to me
+forthwith.
+
+"The silly, crawling, ignorant fools!" she exclaimed. "The first item
+on the programme is a solo by Miss Clay!!!" says the chairman, "and
+I'll come forward and squark. 'Next item, a recitation by Mrs
+Thing-amebob.' Can't you just imagine it?" she said in inimitable and
+exasperated caricature from the folds of her silk kimono. "Good
+heavens! to give a man like that an amateur concert like ours! Do you
+know, they say he is the best amateur tenor in Australia, and his wife
+was a comic opera singer before she married--so a girl was telling me
+where I get my singing lessons. You'd think even the galoots of
+Noonoon wouldn't be so leather-headed but they'd know their length
+well enough not to make fools of themselves in this way! _I_ know; why
+can't they know too? They like these things themselves, and think
+others ought to like them too. What do they want to be licking
+Walker's boots at all for? We all voted and worked for him; that was
+enough! It will just show you the way people will crawl to a bit of
+money! Oh dear, how Walker must be grinning in his sleeve! I _won't_
+sing for them!"
+
+But she was not to escape so easily. A member of the committee asked
+grandma "Would she allow her granddaughter to contribute a solo?"
+
+"Of course!" said the old lady. "Ain't I getting her singing lessons
+to that end?" and down went the girl's name on the programme, and
+there was war in the Clay household on that account.
+
+"I can't sing yet," protested Dawn. "I can't sing in the old style,
+and can't manage the new style yet."
+
+"Rubbish!" said grandma, who could not be got to grasp the intricacies
+of voice production. "What am I payin' good money away for? It's near
+three months now, and nothing to show for it yet. If you can't sing
+now, you ought to give it best at once; and if you can't sing a song
+for Mr Walker, and show him you've got a better voice than some, I
+think it common-sense to stop your lessons at the end of the quarter."
+
+"My teacher wouldn't let me sing."
+
+"And who's the most to do with you, your teacher or me, pray? Who's
+_he_ to say when you shan't sing or the other thing?" and thus she
+decided the point; but Dawn each night dwelt upon the trouble, while I
+sought to comfort her.
+
+"It is best to sing to the people who know all about singing. They
+will see you have a good voice and appreciate it far more than could
+the ignorant."
+
+A fortnight had to elapse before the date of the concert, and during
+that time Carry's successor arrived in the form of a stout "general,"
+as Dawn averred she had sufficient companion in me, and that a kitchen
+woman was preferable to a lady help.
+
+The pruning of a portion of the vineyard, which had been delayed by
+electioneering matters till now, also took place during this time, and
+Andrew and Uncle Jake, when working in the far corner, made the
+extraordinary discovery of an odontologic gold plate of the best
+quality and in perfect order. The find created quite a sensation.
+
+As grandma said, it bore evidence that some one had been stealing
+grapes during the season, for any person legitimately in the vineyard
+would have instituted a search for such a valuable piece of property,
+and for a person who could afford such a first-class gold plate to
+steal grapes, showed what _some people_ were. It did indeed, for this
+person had been wont to clandestinely enter her premises to perpetrate
+a far lower grade of crime than pilfering her grapes or destroying her
+vineyard. The incident trickled into the columns of 'The Noonoon
+Advertiser,' in conjunction with the facetious remark that the invader
+would have had to take a lot of grapes to compensate him for what he
+had lost; and it was further stated that the article being useless
+except to him--its size bespoke it a man's--for whom it had been
+modelled, he could have it upon giving satisfactory proof that he was
+the owner.
+
+Needless to say, Mr Pornsch did not claim his property, and this
+souvenir was the last we heard of him. Andrew took it to Mr S. Messre,
+dentist, the man who had seemed to consider it unprofessional that to
+fill my teeth should take time, and with him the lad bargained that in
+return for the plate he was to tinker up those teeth whose aching I
+had allayed with the carbolic acid prescribed for me by the other
+dentist.
+
+Dawn and I chuckled in secret, sent a copy of 'The Noonoon Advertiser'
+to Carry, and remarked that it was an ill wind that blew no one any
+good.
+
+During the fortnight preceding the concert, Ernest Breslaw called at
+Clay's several times to see me, and saw me unattended by any extras in
+the form of a beautiful young girl, for Dawn blushingly avoided him.
+He had to fall back on such outside skirmishing as rowing me on the
+river, and though there was no longer an impending election to furnish
+him with excuse for loitering in Noonoon, he did not speak of
+deserting it in a hurry. He had reached that degree of amorous
+collapse when he could manage to shadow the haunts of his desired
+young lady regardless of circumstances, and grandma began to suspect
+that his attentions had a little more staying power than those of the
+week-end admirer.
+
+Seeing that the "red-headed mug" had reappeared, in the hope of
+permanently extirpating him "Dora" Eweword was anxious to announce his
+engagement, but with threats of immediate extermination if he should
+so much as give a hint of it, Dawn kept him in abeyance, and
+altogether behaved so erratically that Andrew candidly published his
+belief that she had gone "ratty."
+
+Ernest proffered himself as our escort to the Walker presentation, but
+Eweword having previously secured Dawn, Breslaw had to be satisfied
+with my company. I had already presented Andrew with a ticket, and as
+I could not now discard him, I resolved to ignore the injunctions to
+be found in etiquette books, and accept attentions from two gentlemen
+at once. Thus it happened that I, at the despised grey-haired stage,
+sat in state with a most attentive cavalier on either hand, while
+handsome young ladies sat all alone.
+
+We had entered September, and the early flowers had lifted their heads
+on every hand in this valley, where they grew in profusion, and that
+evening were in evidence at women's throats, in men's coats, and in
+young girls' hair. The stage was a bower of heavenly scented bloom,
+and many among the audience held bouquets the size of a broccoli in
+readiness for presentation to the guests of the evening.
+
+Ernest was holding the pony, which was restive, while Andrew buckled
+her to the sulky, when Dawn came upon the scene after the concert and
+presented me with a huge bunch of flowers, and Eweword also got his
+nag ready for home-going. Dawn had not met Ernest since the night in
+the street, and even now affected not to notice him, so thinking it
+time to take the situation by the horns, I said--
+
+"Here is Mr Ernest; you didn't see him because he was standing in the
+shade."
+
+Thus encouraged, he came forward and sturdily put out his hand, and
+Dawn could not very well fail to observe that, as it was of
+substantial build and held where the light shone full on it, so she
+was constrained to meet it with her own, and received, as she
+afterwards confessed, a lingering and affectionate pressure.
+
+It was not of Ernest, however, but of Mrs Walker that she talked that
+night as we prepared for rest, with our washhand basins full of
+violets that had been crowded out of the quantity given to the
+defeated candidate's wife.
+
+"Fancy being lovely like she is! After looking at her I've given up
+all hope. I suppose all I'm fit for is Mrs Eweword--Mrs 'Dora'
+Eweword; do my housework in the morning and take one of these sulkies
+full of youngsters for a drive in the afternoon like all the other
+humdrum, tame-hen, _respectable_ married women! It's a sweet prospect,
+isn't it?" she said vexedly, throwing herself on the bed.
+
+"Don't be absolutely absurd! Look in the glass and you will see a far
+more beautiful face, and one possessed of other qualities that make
+for success."
+
+"Oh, nonsense, you only say that to put me in a good humour. But how
+do women find such good matches as Leslie Walker?--that's what I want
+to know," she continued.
+
+"Either by being beautiful or using strategic ability in the great
+lottery. Mrs Walker probably used both these accomplishments. You can
+achieve similar results by means of the first without the necessity of
+developing the second. Silly girl, marry Leslie Walker's step-brother,
+Ernest Breslaw, and if you do not live happily ever after it will not
+be because you have not been furnished with a better opportunity than
+most people."
+
+She did not remark the relationship I thus divulged, showing that
+Ernest's confidences must have included it.
+
+"A girl can't _make_ a man marry her," was all she said. "I don't know
+how to use strategy, and wouldn't crawl to do such a thing if I
+could."
+
+"Neither would I, but if I loved a man and saw that he loved me, I'd
+secretly hoist a little flag of encouragement in some place where he
+could see it," I made reply.
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-FIVE.
+
+"LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM."
+
+
+Next morning was gloriously spring-like; the violets raised their
+heads in thick mats of blue and white in every available cranny of the
+garden and other enclosures where they were allowed to assert
+themselves, while other plants were opening their garlands to replace
+them, and the air breathed such a note of balminess that Ernest came
+to invite me to a boat-ride.
+
+To the practised eye there were certain indications that he hoped for
+Dawn's company too, but this was out of the question, as under
+ordinary circumstances it is rarely that girls in Dawn's walk of life
+can go pleasuring in the forenoon without previous warning, or what
+would become of the half-cooked midday dinner? So we set out by
+ourselves, and as the boat shot out to the middle of the stream
+between the peach orchards, just giving a hint of their coming glory,
+and past the erstwhile naked grape-canes, not cut away and replaced by
+a vivid green, the rower made a studiedly casual remark, "Your friend
+Miss Dawn spoke to me again at last. I wonder why on earth she threw
+that dish of water on me; did she ever say that she had anything
+against me?"
+
+"No. If you could be a girl for half an hour you'd know that the man
+to whom she shows most favour is frequently the one she most despises,
+while he whom she ignores or ill-treats is the one she most warmly
+regards."
+
+"How on earth is that?"
+
+"Oh, a species of shyness like your own, which makes you talk freely
+of Dawn and Ada Grosvenor, because you have no particular interest in
+them, whereas there is some name you guard jealously from me," I
+cunningly replied.
+
+"Is it true that Miss Dawn is engaged to Eweword? If she is let me
+know in time to send her a wedding present. I'd like to, because she's
+your friend," he said with such elaborate unconcern that I had
+difficulty in suppressing a smile. His step-brother, the dilettante,
+would never have been so clumsily transparent in a similar case.
+
+"Nonsense; she's as much engaged to you as to him," I said
+reassuringly, and that was all that passed between us on that subject.
+He energetically confined our conversation to the lovely odour from
+the lucerne fields we were passing on the river-bank, but I was not
+surprised that the afternoon's post brought Dawn a letter that
+smothered her in blushes, and plunged her in a gay abstraction too
+complete for either Uncle Jake or Andrew to penetrate.
+
+When we were once more in our big room, commanding a view of the
+Western mail with its cosy lights twinkling across the valley, she
+extended me the privilege of perusing one of the simplest and most
+straightforward avowals of love from a young man to a maiden it has
+been my delight to encounter.
+
+     "DEAR MISS DAWN,--You will be very surprised at receiving
+     such a letter from me, but I hope you will not be offended.
+     I have loved you since the first day I saw you, but have
+     kept it so well to myself that no one has suspected it,
+     perhaps not even yourself. Will you be my wife? I love you
+     better than life, and am willing to wait any number of years
+     up to ten, if you can only give me hope of eventually
+     winning you. I do not expect you to care for me at once, but
+     if you can give me hope that you do not dislike me I shall
+     be content to wait. You are so beautiful and good, I am
+     afraid to ask you to marry me, but I would try hard to make
+     you happy, and being in a position to live comfortably, you
+     could continue any studies you like." Here followed a most
+     business-like and lucid statement of his affairs, and the
+     ending--"Please do not keep me waiting long for a reply, and
+     let me know if I am to interview your grandmother. I am sure
+     I can satisfy her in regard to my position and
+     antecedents.--Yours devotedly,
+
+     "R. ERNEST BRESLAW."
+
+He was honest. Not fearing that his income might tempt a girl of
+Dawn's or indeed any other's station, he had in no way attempted to
+test her affection ere mentioning it. After the manner of his
+type--one of the best--he would place complete reliance where he
+loved, and feel sure of the same in return.
+
+"Good heavens! has he really all that money?" she exclaimed.
+
+"So I believe."
+
+"I'd be able to live the life I want, then. Learn to sing, have lovely
+dresses, and travel about. I'm not thinking only of his money, but
+don't you think people who marry on nothing are fools and selfish? A
+woman who marries a man who is only able to keep her and her children
+in starvation is a fool, and a man who wants a woman to suffer what
+wives have to, and drudge in poverty, is a selfish brute--that's what
+I've always thought. As for gassing about love when there's no comfort
+to keep it alive, that's about as foundationless as we, always being
+supposed to think men our superiors, even the ones a blind idiot could
+see are inferior."
+
+"Are you going to marry him?"
+
+"I want to, but what on earth am I to do with 'Dora' Eweword?"
+
+"Break his heart to keep Ernest's together?"
+
+"Break _his_ heart! It's the style to break, isn't it? He can have
+Dora Cowper or Ada Grosvenor, they both want him. If grandma got wind
+of the situation though, she'd put my pot on properly. She'd carry on
+like fury, and let me have neither of them--that would be the end of
+it. I can't make out why I fooled with that 'Dora' at all. I'll write
+and ask Ernest to give me a week;" and with her characteristic
+promptitude she sat down, and favoured a style as unadorned as that of
+the knight himself.
+
+     "DEAR MR ERNEST,--Your letter received. I care for you, but
+     cannot give you a definite answer at once. There may be
+     obstacles in the way of accepting your kind offer; if you
+     will give me a week to consider matters, I will answer you
+     definitely then.--Yours with love,
+
+     DAWN."
+
+As she got into bed she said with a happy giggle, "He says he loved
+me from the first day he saw me, and you thought he only came to see
+you!"
+
+"Well, my dear, you can't expect people whose hearts are broken from
+over-work, and whose hair is grey from want of love, to be as quick as
+beautiful young ladies whose affairs have come to a happy head with a
+splendid young knight;" and what I inwardly thought was, that at all
+events I had discovered the knight's symptoms long before he had done
+so.
+
+"Would you like Mr Ernest and me to marry?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, I don't object," I laconically replied.
+
+"Well, I'll marry him as soon as ever he likes if I can get rid of
+'Dora.' I'll see 'Dora' and see if I can do it without a rumpus first,
+but if he hasn't got sense to be quiet, well, I won't give in without
+a fight. Ernest mightn't like it if he knew, but I bet he will have to
+keep dark about worse things on his part if I only knew,--he's
+different to ninety-nine per cent of men if he hasn't," she said as
+she opened the French lights wider to the crisp breath of scented
+night and blew out the lamp.
+
+"You don't mind his hair being red now, do you?" I maliciously
+inquired in the darkness, and though she feigned sleep I knew that
+owing to a delightful wakefulness another beside myself heard the
+splendid music of the trains that night. The style of her breathing
+told that she was still awake some hours later when the old moon
+climbed high and came shining, shining down the valley, divided in two
+by its noble river, and laid out in orchard and agricultural squares.
+The great silver light outlined the glorious hills that walled the
+west away from the little towns and villages, and here and there a
+gleaming white cluster of tombstones bespoke the graveyards where
+slept the early pioneers and the folk who had followed them, and which
+one by one, as opening buds or withered stalks, were settling their
+last earthly score. The little homesteads lay royally, peacefully free
+from danger of molestation amid their wealth of trees and vines.
+Cottages raised on piles, and vain in the distinction of small
+protruding gables, pretentiously called bay windows, and with keys
+rusting for want of use in the cheap patent door-locks, were quickly
+superseding the earlier dwellings. These squat old cots generally had
+thresholds higher than the floors; their home-made slab doors knew no
+fastening but a latch with a string unfailingly on the outside day and
+night, and with their beetling verandahs and tiny box skillions, were
+crouchingly hard set upon the genial plain.
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-SIX.
+
+"OFF WITH THE OLD."
+
+
+Dawn was not a procrastinator, so she lost no time in sending Eweword
+a message to meet her next night at eight at the corner of the
+Gulagong Road for the purpose of a private talk.
+
+She was going to take something to Mrs Rooney-Molyneux and the baby as
+an excuse to be abroad at that hour of the night, and requested me to
+accompany her, so that she would not be saddled with Andrew as
+protector. We set out immediately after tea, and had time for a chat
+with Mrs Rooney-Molyneux about her son. Both were enjoying good
+health, thanks to the opportune arrival of a well-to-do sister, and
+the fact that, in honour of an heir to his name, the father had lately
+abstained from alcoholic drinks, and made an occasional pound by
+writing letters for people.
+
+We had some trouble to dissuade him from escorting us home, but
+emerged at last without him, and within a few minutes of eight
+o'clock.
+
+The cloudless, breezeless night, though a little chilly, was heavy
+with the odours of spring and free from the asperity of frost. The
+only sounds breaking its stillness were the trains passing across the
+long viaduct approaching the bridge. The vehicles which met from the
+two roads--the Great Western, leading in from Kangaroo, and the
+Gulagong, coming from the thickly-populated valley down the
+river-banks--had gone into town earlier for the Saturday night
+promenade, and we practically had to ourselves the broad highway,
+showing white in the soft starlight.
+
+I walked behind Dawn, and she, having found Eweword, who had been
+first at the tryst, they came back towards the river a few hundred
+yards and stopped behind some shrubbery, while I took up a place on
+the other side of it, as directed beforehand by this very
+business-like young person, to act as witness in case of future
+trouble.
+
+"Well, Dawn, what has turned up?" said the young man after a pause.
+
+"There's something that might explain the situation better than a lot
+of talk."
+
+Claude, alias "Dora" Eweword, struck a match, and upon discovering the
+fragments of his engagement-ring in the piece of paper she had handed
+him, was silent for a minute or two, and then said--
+
+"Dawn, so you want it to be all off. I knew that this long while, and
+have been mustering pluck to say so, but it seems you have got in
+before me."
+
+"Perhaps you were going to say you were pulling my leg like you did
+with Dora Cowper?"
+
+"No, I was not," and his tone was exceedingly manly. "I was going to
+say that, much as I care, I'd rather let you go free than hold you to
+your agreement when I saw you didn't care for me."
+
+"You were mighty smart!"
+
+"No, I'm only a dunce, but even a dunce can liven up sufficiently when
+he's in love to see whether his sweetheart cares for him or not, and
+you didn't take much pains to hide the state of affairs," he said with
+a rueful laugh. "I know enough about girls to know when they really
+care."
+
+"Practice, like," said Dawn.
+
+"You can say that if you like," he gravely replied.
+
+"Well, things were rather mixed, but now I know what I want."
+
+"And that you don't want me?" he interposed.
+
+"Well, you can marry Ada Grosvenor or Dora Cowper."
+
+"We can leave that to the future; it doesn't enter into this question
+at all," he said with a dignity that made the girl ashamed of herself.
+"There will be no difficulty about my marrying, the main thing is
+whether you are all right. It's easier for a man than a girl if he
+does make a hash of it."
+
+"Oh, Claude, don't be so good and generous, or you'll make me mad
+because I'm not going to have you after all."
+
+"Good and generous! Nonsense! I'm only doing what any decent fellow
+would do; you'd do as much and more for me if things were reversed,"
+he said, taking her hand. "Great Scott, what sort of a crawler did you
+take me for? Did you think I'd cut up nasty about it? Surely you knew
+I'd wish you well even if you were not for me; but won't you tell me
+who it is that has put my light out?"
+
+"Can't you guess?"
+
+"Well, I suppose it's--"
+
+"The red-headed mug," put in Dawn.
+
+"Yes, I saw it all along, but that night in the street finished
+matters. I knew my chances were as dead as a door-nail after that. You
+only took me because something went out of gear between you, and
+that's why you made me keep it dark."
+
+"Oh, I don't want to say that, Claude."
+
+"No, but I'm saying it; and now, is there anything else I can do for
+you except wish you luck?"
+
+"Only promise not to let grandma or any one know."
+
+"Did you think it necessary to tell me that. I'd not be likely to howl
+about my set-back. You needn't fear. I'll act with common-sense, and
+pull through. I won't drown myself and haunt you, or any of that sort
+of business," he said cheerfully.
+
+"Oh, thank you more than I can say," she exclaimed enthusiastically;
+"I hope you'll soon find some one better than I--some one as good as
+yourself. Good-bye!"
+
+"Well, Dawn, I wish you joy anyhow, and good luck to the fellow who
+has got the best of me. He seems an alright sort from what I can make
+out, and will be able to give you everything you want. Good-bye!" He
+drew her to him, and as she did not resist, kissed her warmly on the
+cheek, and let her go. He wanted to see her to her gate, but she
+dismissed him, and he walked away through the spring night whistling a
+cheery air. When he was safely gone I came out from hiding, and taking
+Dawn's arm moved homewards.
+
+The girl was weeping, but so softly that I was not aware of it till
+her warm tears fell on my hand.
+
+Oh, the never-ending fret and fume of being! When it is not discarded
+love or jealousy that is agitating the human bosom, it is unsatisfied
+ambition, the worry of parental responsibility, or loneliness and
+regret that one has never tasted them. The past--what has it been? The
+future--what will it be? The present--what does it matter? but a
+thousand curses on its pin-pricks, wounding like sword-thrusts, and
+which all must endure!
+
+"Oh dear, I wish he hadn't been so nice," sobbed the girl. "He has
+made me feel so ashamed that I don't think I'm fit to marry Ernest! I
+wish he had been nasty to me, and then I wouldn't have cared. But you
+don't think he cares, do you? Listen to him whistling so merrily!"
+
+"It is not those who whine loudest who feel most."
+
+"But men don't really have any feelings in this sort of thing, do
+they?"
+
+"Feeling is not peculiar to any section or sex of the community, but
+to a percentage of all humanity. This is my belief, but I cannot
+attempt to judge which feel and which do not."
+
+"Who would have dreamt of him being so sweet-natured about it?"
+
+"Nobility of character and unselfishness are also traits we cannot
+find in any set place."
+
+"I wish I hadn't been such a cat. I can't forgive myself."
+
+I smiled happily as Eweword's action bespoke a character more in
+keeping with his imposing physique than that betrayed when he had
+vulgarly spoken of pulling a girl's leg. That had been like seeing a
+beautiful house occupied by nothing but poachers, and I loved
+humanity, so that it always hurt to see even the meanest individual do
+less than their best.
+
+"Well, cheer up," I said. "Take care not to similarly transgress
+again. We all are constantly committing regrettable actions, but so
+long as we are careful not to repeat them we may hope to make some
+headway."
+
+So the knight received a favourable reply, and the man supplanted by
+him went another way.
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-SEVEN.
+
+     "One might think better of marriage if one's married friends
+     would not confide in one so much."--_Reflections of a
+     Bachelor Girl._
+
+
+Mrs Martha Clay proved a little obstreperous in regard to Ernest
+Breslaw filling the position of grandson-in-law.
+
+"You always get what you don't want," said she; "an' that's why one of
+the same class as treated me daughter so shocking is now to be
+pesterin' me for me grandchild in the same way. A girl of the decent
+class wants to look a long time before she leaps with one of them
+swells. They just take to a girl out of their own click out of the
+contrariness of human nature, and then by-and-by give 'em a dog's
+life. I know there's bad in all classes, but them upstarts have so
+much more licence to be up to bad capers,--that's where it comes in.
+And anyhow I ain't breakin' me neck to have Dawn married. None of my
+people ever had any trouble to get married, an' she can wait a bit an'
+look round an' see if this feller can stand the test of waitin',"
+concluded the old dame, with the light of conflict in her steel-blue
+eye.
+
+Fortunately I was able to bring forward a seductive statement of the
+case. Walker--the man who had made the money for Breslaw and his
+step-brother--had been a grand level-headed old labourer, and though
+his sons had been educated in the great English schools, they were
+not far removed from honest utilitarian folk, and owing to this, and
+in conjunction with Dawn, when her real name was divulged,--being a
+daughter of one of the "old families," to wit, the Mudeheepes of
+Menangle, the old dame consented to be reconciled.
+
+Now that the oppression of Carry had been removed, Mrs Bray came over
+and beamed upon us in her usual inspiriting way.
+
+The electioneering gossip having died out, she reopened the old budget
+concerning the misdoings of the Noonoon aristocracy, and once more the
+name of Mrs Tinker figured so largely on the bill that I deeply
+regretted my inability to encounter this much-discussed individual.
+
+However, when Dawn flung into the quiet pool the bomb of her
+approaching wedding with one of the best "catches" of New South Wales,
+all other topics faded into insignificance, and every woman who had
+the slightest acquaintance with the bride-elect called on her to warn
+her against the horrors to be discovered after she had irrevocably
+taken the contemplated step in the dark.
+
+As Dawn was going to take it speedily, they were very enthusiastic and
+unanimous in their evidence against the married state under present
+conditions, and the thoughtful student of life on listening to the
+testimony of these women of the respectable useful class, supposed to
+be comfortably and happily married, will know that notwithstanding the
+great epoch of female enfranchisement the workers for the cause of
+women have yet no time for rest.
+
+Dawn was so visibly worried by the revelations made to her in the most
+natural way, that grandma grew concerned and published her mind on
+the subject.
+
+"Women ought to hold their tongues and let young girls come to things
+gradual. To have it thrust upon them sudden is too much of a
+eye-opener for them. The way women tell how their husbands treat them
+nowadays is surprisin'. We all know that with the best of men marriage
+ain't a path of roses, but in my day women kep' it to theirselves.
+They suffered it in silence and thought it was the right thing, but
+they're getting too much sense now; and perhaps all this cryin' out
+against it will be a means to an end, for a grievance can't be
+remedied till it's aired, that's for certain," said she.
+
+Mrs Bray was in great form during those days, and though her
+assertions frequently lacked logic, and betrayed in her the very
+shortcomings which she railed against in men, nevertheless I liked
+her, for she blurted out that with which the little quiet woman rules
+by keeping it in the background, well hidden under seeming humility.
+
+"Look here, Dawn," said she on one of these occasions, "when you get a
+home of your own, take my advice and don't never let no other woman in
+it. You can't, seein' what men are. There's no trustin' none of them,
+and if you think you can you'll find yourself sold. And try soon as
+ever you're married to get something into your own hands, as a married
+woman is helpless to earn her livin'; and once you have any children
+you're right at the mercy of a man, and if he ain't pleased with you
+in every way you're in a pretty fix, because the law upholds men in
+every way. If you don't feel inclined to be their abject slave they
+can even take your children from you, and what do you think of that?
+It shows we ain't got the vote none too soon, I reckon! I'm not sayin'
+that you'll get that kind of a crawler; some of them is good,--a jolly
+sight better than some of the women,--but the most, when you come to
+live with them, is as hard as nails. They don't know how to be nothing
+else. They never know what it is to be quite helpless and dependent,
+so what do they care. They just glory and triumph over women bein'
+under them, because they know there's nothing to bring them down, and
+you want to set your wits to get some hold on a man,--he has plenty on
+you by law and everything else,--get some property or something in
+your name so that he can't make a dishcloth of you altogether. Bein'
+rich you'll have a somewhat easier time, but it's when you've got
+mountains of work, when you ain't feelin' as strong as Sandow for it,
+an' have one child at your skirts an' another in your arms, an' your
+husband to think women ain't intended for nothink better,--that this
+is God's design for 'em, like most men do,--it's then that married
+life ain't the heaven some young girls think it's goin' to be. This
+ain't a description of no uncommon case but among them all around you,
+and supposed to be the fortunate ones. I think girls want warnin', so
+they ain't goin' into it with their eyes shut."
+
+The picture painted by this lady was duplicated by sadder pictures of
+the small worn type, and some weeks of this brought us to advanced
+spring and a bride-to-be so worried and unhappy that she had lost her
+appetite and the roses from her cheeks, and grew visibly thinner.
+
+Ernest, who managed to snatch a little time from worshipping his
+bride-elect wherein to superintend the furnishing of his house, was
+exceedingly sensitive that his affianced should look so perceptibly
+miserable.
+
+"Do you think she doesn't care for me, and would like to be released?
+I'd rather die than marry her if she doesn't want me," he would say,
+sometimes with haughtiness and more often with anger. "Good gracious!
+I don't know why she thinks I'm going to belong to the criminal class.
+Goodness knows, if I were to judge her the same way there are plenty
+wives would scare even a Hottentot from matrimony, and if I were to
+express to Dawn any fears of her being similar, I bet you'd hear of
+our engagement coming to a sudden death. You seem to understand her
+better than I do, so say a good word for me if you can."
+
+My opinion of him being so high, saying a word in his favour gave me
+delight, and I took the first opportunity of saying a good many. At
+the end of one day, after Dawn had been subjected to a particularly
+gruesome account of what she might expect, I found her face downwards
+on her bed, weeping bitterly, and elicited--
+
+"I'm going to tell Ernest to-morrow that I won't marry him. It's too
+terrible--they all tell you the same. I'd rather earn my living in
+some other way while I'm able. I'd rather throw up the thing now when
+most of my trousseau is ready than go on if one quarter of what they
+say is true. I'm not one of those fools who think life is going to
+turn out something special for me. Before these women were married I
+suppose they thought their husbands were going to be kings, but see
+how they have panned out, and why should I expect any better?"
+
+Time had arrived to take the subject in both hands, so I gripped it
+firmly.
+
+"You must be thankful to gain one point at a time," I said, beginning
+with the lightest end of my argument. "A little while since you feared
+you were fated for the life of those around--household drudgery, with
+an occasional sulky drive in the afternoon; now that you have escaped
+that prospect you are haunted by worse possibilities. No doubt you
+hear some saddening and deplorable stories, for some of the laws
+relating to marriage are degrading, and the lot of the married woman
+in the working class where she is wife, mother, cook, laundress,
+needlewoman, charwoman, and often many other things combined, is the
+most heartbreakingly cruel and tortured slavery; but you are escaping
+the probability of such a purgatorial existence. Take comfort in
+knowing that a great percentage of men are infinitely superior to the
+laws under which they live, because law is determined by public
+opinion, and though it restrains and modifies public behaviour it will
+not mould private character. Law is shaped for the masses, but there
+is a small percentage of individuals in either sex who are superior to
+any workable law, and I think Ernest Breslaw is one of these."
+
+"Do you?" she said, sitting up eagerly. "Would you marry him without
+any fear if you were me?"
+
+"I would--right at once. In spite of all its shortcomings I have a
+profound belief that not woman, as the poet has it, but all humanity--
+
+    'Holds something sacred, something undefiled,
+    Some quenchless gleam of the celestial light.'"
+
+The rain that was temporarily washing the perfume from the flowers
+pattered against the window-panes and accentuated the silence, till I
+added--
+
+"I will tell you my history some day, so that you may see that when I
+have belief in my fellows how little reason you have to fear. I have
+been an actress, you know."
+
+"Yes; Ernest told me."
+
+"Well, I'll tell you about it one day." I did not mention that I had
+expressly requested Ernest to keep my past a secret. However, I was
+not displeased that he had been unable to do so. If a man of his
+inexperience, and in the zenith of his first overwhelming passion, had
+been able to keep such a secret in the teeth of his love's wheedling,
+he would have proved himself of the stuff to make an ambassadorial
+diplomat, but not of the calibre to be the affectionate, domesticated
+husband, having no interests of which his wife might not be
+cognisant--the only character to whom I could without misgiving
+entrust the hot-headed Dawn.
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-EIGHT.
+
+LET THERE BE LOVE.
+
+
+I so nearly "pegged out" with an attack that fell to my lot a little
+time after the election, that Dr Smalley considered it advisable to
+summon Dr Tinker to a consultation, but sad to say I was too comatose
+to have become acquainted with the husband of the famous Mrs Tinker,
+whose individuality afforded considerable interest, because it was
+very conspicuous when surrounded by the neutrality of life in Noonoon.
+However, with the aid of some "powltices" constructed by Grandma Clay
+and energetically applied by Mrs Bray, and because my hour had not yet
+come, against the time when we slid into a splendid October I was
+tottering about once more.
+
+During my time of confinement the old valley had put on its finishing
+touches of spring glory. Only a few golden oranges now remained on the
+trees, and amid the bright green leaves were thick clusters of waxy
+bloom. The perfume from them was heavenly, and sometimes almost too
+powerful after the sun had toppled behind the great level-browed range
+which, viewed from the plain, guarded the west of the valley of
+Noonoon like a mighty wall. Some of the land had been cultivated for a
+century without attention to artificial renewal of its fertility, but
+still it gave forth a wondrous variety and wealth of vegetation. The
+widespreading cedars hung out their scented bloom like heliotrope
+flags amid surrounding greenery of pine, plane, poplar, and loquat,
+and the peach and apricot orchards contributed banks of their delicate
+flowers, which in the glory of their massed bloom could have
+out-Japanned Japan. Along the lanes, where their stones had been
+thrown, they sprang up and bloomed and bore liberally; roses of many
+kinds and colours clambered up verandah posts and peeped over fences;
+the garden plots were like compressed bouquets; the brilliant,
+graceful, and exquisitely perfumed pink oleanders grew wild in the
+fields; and altogether the vale of melons had graduated to a valley of
+flowers.
+
+The days had stretched out so that the mail from the far West trundled
+down the mountains in time to cross the queer old bridge across the
+Noonoon at daybreak, and the first beams of morning turned its windows
+to gold as the waking flowers were lifting their dew-drenched heads
+and the soft white mists were dispersing themselves betimes from the
+plains dotted with ramshackle little homes and cut into squares by
+barbed-wire fences. The weather had warmed, so that the fashionables'
+week-end exit to the cool Blue Mountains had begun; and the youngsters
+near the railway line sometimes left their play and stood agape in the
+soft twilight to watch the governor's car, painted in a strikingly
+different colour to all the others and emblazoned with the British
+coat of arms, go by.
+
+Uncle Jake, a hired man, and Andrew were very busy on the farm, and we
+none the less engaged in the house, where every article of furniture
+was made a receptacle for drapery and haberdashery, and where the
+wedding was the only subject. It so often gave Andrew the "pip" that
+his constitution must have been seriously impaired by such frequent
+attacks of this complaint.
+
+In those days Dawn was too engrossed to take me for drives, and Ernest
+too occupied to pull me on the historic stretch of water running like
+the moats of old beside his lady's castle, so that Ada Grosvenor, in
+her office of doing good to all with whom she came in contact, stepped
+into the breach, and sought to aid my recovery by taking me for gentle
+exercise.
+
+It was one day when we had driven east from Noonoon that she
+remarked--
+
+"It's a wonder that Mr Breslaw would care for Dawn's style when he
+moves in such a smart set. She is a handsome girl, which covers a
+multitude of sins in that respect, but still she is very downright,
+and--and, well, doesn't quite conform to the rules of refinement."
+
+I only smiled, and waited till the pony's head was turned for home,
+when I covered the necessity for reply by admiring the incomparable
+panorama before us. From the altitude we had reached on the Sydney
+road, we could see above the unbroken line of the horizon west from
+Noonoon town, and the Blue Australian Mountains stretched across the
+view in an endless succession of round-topped peaks painted in their
+matchless cerulean tints, which, near the end of day, were royal in
+their splendour. For a hundred miles they reigned supreme before the
+fringe of the endless plains was reached--peak after peak, gorge on
+gorge, tier upon tier of beetling walls of rock, disclosing dim
+shadowy gullies clothed with greenery and ferns where abounded
+cascades of water and dewy springs in romantic and unrivalled
+solitude. The sun, surrounded by a gorgeous pageant of flame and
+gold, rested his chin on one of the peaks as though well pleased with
+the glowing snowless scene that his offices had in part created, and
+lingered a moment ere giving it up to the eager night. She sent her
+forerunners,--twilight, which paled the wondrous blues, and dusk, that
+left the mountains shadowy and indistinct, when the lady of darkness
+herself rubbed them right out of the great canvas, and left it no
+coloured beauty but the gleam of the far stars overhead and the tiny
+man-made lights below, which, showing from the windows of the little
+homesteads creeping up the mountain-sides, twinkled like points
+between earth and sky.
+
+Miss Grosvenor made no further comment regarding Dawn's probable
+inability to rise to the demands of smart society. Only inexperience
+had caused her to make any. Ernest fluttered in the smart set; he and
+I were familiar with it; Miss Grosvenor was not, therefore we were
+disillusioned and she was not.
+
+We knew that the acme of refinement and culture might possibly be
+found in the smart set, but that it was a very small island,
+surrounded by a very large sea of other styles which spoke nothing so
+much as squandered opportunities. We knew girls too superior to dress
+themselves without a maid, yet who rolled tipsy to bed after every
+champagne orgy; supercilious and much-paragraphed misses educated in
+England, finished in Paris, and presented at Court, but who used more
+slang than grooms; while an expensive education did not raise their
+brothers above ribaldry and other vulgar excesses. Ernest and I knew a
+beautiful, honest, intelligent girl when we had the good fortune to
+meet her, and had no fears that she could not hold her own in good
+sets, let alone in the smarter ones of colonial or any other
+fashionable society, where the majority were animated by nothing
+higher than an insane and inane pursuit of something to kill time.
+
+Besides, it was wonderful how Dawn suddenly eschewed slang and
+conspicuous violation of syntax, as she could easily do, for she had
+been somewhat educated in a school patronised by the Australian _beau
+monde_. Had not her grandma told me of the magnitude of her education
+when I had first arrived? and did she not constantly repeat the story
+now? For having survived the fear of Ernest being too aristocratic,
+she took pride in his worldly possessions and position, and
+characterised him as "more likely than most, if he only turns out true
+to name, which in the case of husbands is as rare as bought seed
+potatoes turnin' out what they're supposed to be; but there ain't any
+good of meeting troubles half-way."
+
+As the wedding preparations made so much bother, grandma got in a
+woman to clean and another to sew, and determined to admit no summer
+boarders until after Christmas.
+
+"I can do without 'em, only I like to see money changin' hands quicker
+than happens with a farm," said she; while also, in consideration of
+the wedding, the doors, whose opening and shutting had been obstructed
+by the ravages of the white ants, were at last satisfactorily
+repaired.
+
+Dawn, after the manner of most youthful brides, was desirous of the
+full torture of "keeping up" her wedding, while Ernest, as usual with
+bridegrooms, so shrunk from display that he would have paid half a
+year's income to escape it; but it was only to me he made this
+confession, to Dawn he was manfully unselfish, allowing her full rein
+and agreeably falling in with her requirements.
+
+I did not think much of fussy weddings, but these were such a
+splendid pair of young things that I was pleased to endure the
+preparations with a smile instead of a sigh, and contribute some old
+silks and laces towards the trousseau; while a few dainty and
+expensive trifles, sent to me from a traveller over the sea, found a
+place in the furnishing of the bride's boudoir.
+
+Like all strictly reared girls, a certain prudishness at first caused
+Dawn to shrink from her love as something that should be resisted, but
+as her wedding-day drew near her heart grew more at peace regarding
+her contemplated change of life, and unfolded to the enchanting
+influence of youth's master passion. The roseate mists it weaves
+before the vision of its happy and willing victims, blunted even this
+girl's exceptional and matter-of-fact perspicacity, and with her ears
+grown suddenly deaf to those who had at first alarmed her by the
+recapitulation of their unfortunate practical and disillusioning
+experiences, looked out towards a future beautified with as many
+shades of blue as the mountain ramparts beyond the river flowing by
+her door. There was no hitch to speak of. Grandma, being one of a
+bygone brigade, enforced the almost obsolete rule of a chaperon, and
+the two evils in this case being represented by Andrew and me, Dawn
+considered me the lesser, and installed me in the office known by the
+irreverent as "gooseberrying."
+
+Mostly it is a thankless and objectionable undertaking, but in this
+instance it was delightful, and we three spent a kind of antenuptial
+honeymoon that was an experience to be appreciated with a warm glow by
+one whom the world has all gone by.
+
+I suddenly developed a latent artistic ambition, and no subject would
+do for my brush but the exquisite scenes far up the quiet river, where
+its deep clear pools lay like basins under the overhanging cliffs,
+and numerous species of beautiful flowering creepers clambered over
+the cool brown rocks shaded by the turpentine and gum-trees, ti-tree,
+wild cotton-bush, native hibiscus, and an endless variety of trees and
+shrubs getting a foothold in the crevices. These nooks, owing to the
+rugged and precipitous country, could only be reached by water, so
+Ernest rowed me up by boat and Dawn went with me for company, for thus
+do we live the best of our lives under pretence of trivial outside
+actions. The river was dotted with other boaters on these summer
+afternoons, and Grandma Clay's "Best Boats on the River" were seldom
+idle, while Uncle Jake was also occupied in collecting the tariff from
+those who hired them, and in seeing that the boats themselves were
+safely moored again after their jaunts.
+
+I fear that I may have been a better chaperon from Dawn's point of
+view than from grandma's, but even chaperons, however great their
+diplomacy, cannot well serve two mistresses. While I sketched, the
+young couple made horticultural expeditions up the river-banks where
+the cliffs were not too precipitous, and though they went beyond my
+sight and hearing, and after a couple of hours' absence returned with
+no better specimens of ferns and flowers than were to be plucked
+within a stone's-throw of the boat, I failed to remark it. They were
+equally lenient in the matter of my feeble sketches, which never
+progressed beyond a certain stage, and which could have been equally
+well perpetrated at home from memory, for all the justice they did the
+exquisite little gems of the picturesque river scenery. Grandma Clay,
+however, thought them fine, and as the demand for them was not likely
+to be greater than the supply, I generously presented her with one,
+unfinished and all though it was, and which she "hung on the line"
+with Jim Clay; and no doubt it was not so great a caricature of the
+beauty of the Noonoon as the "enlargements" were of the comeliness of
+their dead original in the days when he had told life's sweetest story
+to the dashing damsel who could handle her coaching team of five with
+as much complacence as her granddaughter drove her small fat pony in
+the little yellow sulky about the execrably rough but level roads of
+Noonoon municipality.
+
+This month of real orange blossoms was a time of moonlight, and
+regardless of the fact that the river scenes were at their best for
+reproduction on canvas, when the sun was high enough above the gorges
+to send great quivering shafts of sunlight between the tree-trunks
+deep into the heart of the pools, and to cast the shadow of the gum
+leaves in lace-like patterns on their surface, we sometimes delayed
+our setting out till close upon sundown, and took a billy[2] and
+provisions, intent upon having our tea on the rocks under the trees by
+Noonoon's banks.
+
+[Footnote 2: A tin pail.]
+
+Ah! glorious summer hours on the happy Noonoon, amid-stream, bright in
+the hot afternoon sun, cool by the edges where the lilies and reeds
+abounded, and the beetling cliffs and the limitless eucalypti flung
+their shade.
+
+There was a joy in going abroad when the sun was nearly on the blue
+wall of mountain, and its oblique beams poured a golden mist over the
+blossoming orangeries, the milk-white spiræa in Clay's drive, and
+intensified the gorgeous red of the regal pomegranate blooms showing
+against the heliotrope on the lower limbs of the umbrageous cedars.
+Coming down the little pathway gained by the creaking garden gate, we
+shot out from among the drooping willows, the steerswoman turning her
+face up-stream where, in a southerly direction, the ranges were cut in
+a great V-shaped rift that let the waters through. Anxious to escape
+from the company and critical observation of the garden species of the
+local boater, we went a long way up-stream. Seven or eight miles were
+but a bagatelle to the amateur sculling champion of the State that
+held the world's championship, and he pulled his freight past the
+evidence of husbandmen, past the straight historic stretch where the
+Canadian champion had lost his laurels to New South Wales; on, on the
+strong arms took the craft till a wall of mountain loomed straight
+across our way, and the river had every appearance of coming to a
+sudden end, but round a sudden surprising elbow we went till a similar
+prospect confronted the navigator, and the river came round another of
+its many angles. On, on we steered till the warm rich scent from the
+flowering vineyards was left behind and the sound of the trains could
+not be heard. Far up the ravines beyond the pasture lands and men's
+habitations, we found the desired privacy, and the solitude was broken
+only by the dip of the oars, the flash of an occasional water-fowl,
+the cry of some night-bird, or the "plopping" of the fishes that
+Andrew could never catch as they fell back after rising to snatch some
+unwary insect. The gentle breezes sighing down the gullies, dim and
+lone in the eerie moonlight, were laden with the scent of wattle and
+other native flowers, and otherwise fresh and sweet with the
+inexpressible purity of summer night on the great unbroken bush-land.
+In such dryad-like resorts we were tempted to dawdle so long that the
+big hours of the evening frequently found us still on the breast of
+the river. I was wont to recline on an impromptu couch of rugs in the
+bottom of the well-built craft identified with our excursions, where I
+could feign to be asleep. At first Dawn suspected me of only
+pretending, but I was so emphatic in declaring that the fresh air and
+motion of the boat induced the sleep I could not woo in bed, that they
+grew to believe me, and carefully covering me from mosquitoes, it
+became invariable that at a certain distance on our homeward way the
+rower relinquished rowing, the steerer stopped steering, and the boat
+drifted down-stream with the gentle flow, while two-thirds of its
+occupants tasted of the elixir--
+
+    "That burns beneath the beauty of the rose,
+    And in the hearts of youth and maiden glows,
+    And fills and thrills the world with life and light,
+    And is the soul of all that breathes and grows."
+
+And what did the old moon see in that peaceful valley ere she sank
+behind the great primeval gum-tree forests on the mountain crests,
+across which zigzagged the noisy trains? There were heavy crops above
+ground, vineyards abloom, orchards forming fruit, hundreds of
+comfortable homes, and no doubt many pairs of lovers abroad, for
+lovers love their friend the gentle moon; but none were more fitted
+for love's consummation than the two drifting on the old river whose
+limpid waters never again "shall blacken below, spear and the shadow
+of spear, bow and the shadow of bow," and which, after rushing a
+tortuous way between its wild gorges, steadies by the old settlement
+on the plain, and saunters smooth and straight and deep a space
+between fertile banks gardened with lucerne fields, orchards of peach
+and apricot, and delightful orange groves. The air was intoxicatingly
+heavy with the exquisite perfume of these bridal blooms, and the
+soft-scented breezes laughed as they too kissed the close-pressed lips
+of the fair young pair who--
+
+    "Gathered the blossom that rebloom'd, and drank
+    The magic cup that filled itself anew."
+
+Ah! Love's idyllic hours on the breast of a grandly gliding river,
+when the dews were on the flowers, and all was enchantingly sweet and
+fair under the sleep-time silver of a southern summer moon!
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-NINE.
+
+    "The savage sells or exchanges his daughter, but in
+     civilisation the man gives his away, and is thankful for the
+     opportunity."--_Reflections of a Bachelor Girl._
+
+
+Dawn took a great deal of her own way, Ernest and I were privileged to
+make suggestions so long as we were careful to remember our
+insignificance, and grandma saw to it that her lawful rights were not
+altogether usurped.
+
+Occasionally it fell to my lot to act in a slightly mediatorial
+capacity, owing to the divergence of the swell wishes of the
+bridegroom-elect, and the plebeian determination of his
+grandmother-in-law to be, regarding the wedding celebrations, but
+Ernest was exceptionally unselfish and therefore very long-suffering.
+
+Dawn being under age, her grandmother came forward with a project that
+her father should be apprised of what was transpiring, requested to
+give his daughter away, and to bring some of his side of the house to
+the wedding. Dawn raised vigorous opposition.
+
+"It would be like my father's presumption to interfere in any way,
+considering his career with my mother. I hate him for a mean coward.
+He's the very style of man I'd be ashamed to acknowledge as an
+acquaintance yet alone own as a _father_! I'd like to see him dare to
+give me away,--he'd have to own me first!"
+
+"Well, Jake, there, will have to give you away then," said grandma.
+
+"I'd give _him_ away with pleasure," replied Dawn. "If I _must_ be
+_given_ away like a slave or animal, you'll give me away grandma, or
+I'll stay where I am. 'Who giveth this woman to be married to this
+man?' the old parson will ask; why won't he also ask, 'Who giveth this
+man?' as if he too were only a chattel belonging to some one?"
+
+That she would be disposed of by no one but her grandmother rather
+pleased the old lady than otherwise; so she invested in yet another
+black silk gown, over which she was to wear a seldom seen cape of
+point lace worked by Dawn's mother; and she also purchased a wonderful
+bonnet, and armed herself with a new pair of "lastings." Thus Dawn was
+to have her way in this particular, but the old dame adhered to her
+original intention in the matter of the Mudeheepes.
+
+"I've kep' 'em at bay long enough now. I'll just acknowledge 'em this
+once, or it will seem as if you was a 'illegitimate,'" said she in the
+plenitude of her worldly wisdom, and thereupon "writ" a stiff though
+not discourteous letter to Dawn's father, inviting any number of the
+bride's relatives up to six, to come and spend a week before the
+wedding in her home, for the purpose of making Dawn's acquaintance.
+
+"There, I have done me duty, and they can suit theirselves whether
+they come or go to Halifax," she remarked as she despatched the
+communication.
+
+They came. Dawn's father, his second wife, and his youngest sister,
+Miss Mudeheepe, arrived three days before the wedding and remained to
+grace the ceremony.
+
+Dawn, being a mere girl, perhaps it was Ernest's wealth and position
+induced them to meet Mrs Martha Clay's overture, for they were
+thorough snobs, but if they had come prepared to patronise, their
+intention was killed ere it bore fruit.
+
+The hostess hired the town 'bus to convey them from the station, and
+despatched Andrew, with many injunctions to "conduct hisself with
+reason," to meet them there, while she and Dawn waited to receive them
+on one of the old porches. It was a bower of roses and pot-plants, and
+further shaded by a graceful pepper-tree, and made a beautiful frame
+for the grandmother and the maiden,--the old dame so straight and
+vigorous, the girl as roseate and fresh as her name, but each equally
+haughty and bent upon maintaining their iron independence of the
+people who had discarded the girl and her mother ere the former had
+been born.
+
+Personal appearance was much in their favour, and no practised belle
+of thirty could have held her own better than the inexperienced girl
+of nineteen, whose native wit and downright honesty of purpose were
+more than equal to all the diplomacy of thrust and parry to be gained
+by living in society. Her stepmother, who was apparently as
+good-natured as she seemed brainless, was prepared to be gushing, but
+that was nipped in the bud by the way Dawn extended her pretty, firm
+hand with the dimpling wrist and knuckles and exquisitely tapering
+fingers.
+
+Her father and aunt, who were tall and angular, with thin faces of
+dull expression, met a similar reception, and she presented them to me
+herself, explaining that I was a very dear friend with her for the
+wedding.
+
+I had long since risen from a boarder to be a guest and friend of the
+house, and it had devolved upon me to exhibit the presents and
+interview the endless callers at this time of nine days' wonder.
+
+It being hot, the ladies retired to doff their hats ere partaking of
+afternoon tea, and Dawn took her father's hat while he trumpeted in
+his handkerchief and attempted a few commonplace platitudes from the
+biggest and stiffest arm-chair in the "parler," into which he had
+subsided. I left the room, but could hear him from where I stood
+awaiting the ladies' reappearance, one from the room that had been
+Miss Flipp's and the other from the one I had at first occupied, and
+Mr George Mudeheepe was to occupy the third one of these apartments,
+which had been empty since the tragedy.
+
+"Dawn, my dear, you are your mother once again," he said with a sigh;
+"I have never seen you, and now you are sufficiently grown to be
+married."
+
+"Yes," said the girl.
+
+"Will you give me a kiss?"
+
+"I'd rather not. You see you are only a stranger to me. I have never
+heard of you only as the man who was a monster to my mother. I never
+saw her, but I remember to love her for what she did for me, whereas
+you, what did you do for her and me? I would like you to understand
+how I feel on this subject, so that there can be no mistake," said the
+girl honestly.
+
+"Oh, well, I didn't come here to be told that, but to give consent to
+your marriage."
+
+"Oh!" said the girl, rearing the pretty head with its wealth of bright
+hair, "as for that, I'm going to marry. If you like to exercise your
+authority I'll run away and you can't unmarry me. It is at grandma's
+wish you are here; she said to let old bitterness sleep for the time
+you are here, and so I will now that I have explained that I utterly
+refuse to recognise that a father is anything but a stranger unless he
+discharges the responsibilities of the office. For the sake of the
+race I maintain this ground," she concluded in words that had been put
+into her mouth by one of the speakers at Ada Grosvenor's election
+league, and the appearance of the ladies put an end to further
+contention.
+
+Dawn's judgments were remorseless, as becoming clean-souled, fearless
+youth as yet unacquainted with the great gulf 'twixt the ideal and
+real, and untainted by that charity and complaisance which, like
+senility, come with advancing years.
+
+The aunt was elderly and unprepossessing, and the stepmother of the
+type bespeaking champagne and too much eating for the exercise taken,
+for her head was partly sunk in a huge mass of adipose substance that
+had once been bosom, and the other proportions of her figure were in
+keeping.
+
+The cups were spread in the dining-room, so thither we repaired to eat
+and drink while representations of Jim Clay and Jake Sorrel, senior,
+who had wept for the sufferings of the convicts, glowered down upon
+the gathering of plebeians who were half swells and the swells who
+were wholly plebeian.
+
+Presently grandma and I excused ourselves and left Dawn with her
+relations.
+
+"What do you think of 'em? Are they any better than Dawn an' me?" said
+the old dame as we got out of hearing. "How do I compare with that old
+sack of charcoal?"
+
+Ay, how did she compare? As a slight, active, handsome woman, still
+vigorous at seventy-six, with one who, though thirty years her junior, was
+already almost helpless from obesity and natural clumsiness,--that's how
+she compared!
+
+"Them's some of the swells for you--one of the 'old families,' who
+think they're made of different stuff to you an' me. What do you think
+of Dawn, Jim Clay's granddaughter, who drove the coach, when placed
+beside her aunt, the granddaughter of an admiral in the army?"
+
+"She looks as though Jim Clay had been a general in the navy and she
+had done justice to her heredity," I gravely replied.
+
+"Andrew, come here an' tell me how you managed 'em, an' what you think
+of the great bugs now you've seen 'em," commanded the old lady of that
+individual, as he emerged from the kitchen with both hands full of
+cake.
+
+"Did you walk up to 'em an' say, 'Are you Mr and Mrs Mudeheepe, I'm
+Mrs Clay's grandson?' like I told you."
+
+"No; I seen it on their luggage without arskin' them, an' one look at
+'em was enough for me. I didn't bother tellin' 'em who I was. I didn't
+care if they had fell down an' broke their necks--the bloomin'
+long-nosed old goats! I just took hold of their things an' flung 'em
+in the 'bus, and the old fat one she says, 'Are you Mrs Clay's groom?'
+an' I says, 'Mrs Clay is my grandma,' an' she says, 'Oh'!"
+
+"Well, you might have introduced yourself a bit better to make things
+more agreeabler, but they really are the untakin'est people I've seen
+for a long time. Ain't I delighted that Dawn took after my side! An'
+now, though she's me own, do you think I'm over conceited to think her
+fit for the king's son?"
+
+"Certainly not," I replied; for it would have taken a very estimable
+son of a king to be meet for this Princess of the Break-of-Day,
+appropriately christened Dawn!
+
+
+
+
+THIRTY.
+
+FOR FURTHER PARTICULARS CONSULT 'THE NOONOON ADVERTISER' OF THAT DATE.
+
+
+That was a grand wedding celebrated in Noonoon ere the orange blossoms
+had turned into oranges, but for details it would be better to refer
+to that most reliable little journal, 'The Noonoon Advertiser.' Only a
+few particulars remain in my mind, but the paper published a full
+account, including a minute description of the bride's gown and a
+careful list of the presents. It was much to the horror of Ernest that
+the latter was inserted, but it would have been much more horrible to
+Grandma Clay had the mention of so much as a jam-spoon been omitted,
+so he consoled himself with the reflection that it was only in 'The
+Noonoon Advertiser,' and took care to keep the list out of the account
+which appeared in the Sydney dailies. The curious, by consulting a
+back number of the little country sheet, may learn that Mrs L. Witcom
+(_née_ Carry, the ex-lady help) gave the bride one of many pairs of
+shadow-work pillow shams, and that Miss Grosvenor contributed one of
+the equally numerous drawn-thread table centres. Mrs Bray presented a
+ribbon-work cushion; Dr Smalley, some of the jam-spoons; Andrew, a
+bread-fork; and Mr J. Sorrel, great-uncle of the bride, a silver
+cream-jug; while Mr Claude (alias "Dora") Eweword kept himself in mind
+by an afternoon tea-set. The complete list took a column, and included
+dozens of magnificent articles from sporting associations and chums of
+the bridegroom.
+
+The bride--a glorious vision in Duchesse satin and accessories in
+keeping, and with real orange blossoms in hair, corsage, and train;
+the proud shyness of the gentle and stalwart groom standing beside
+her, and the brave old grandmother drawn up a little in the rear,
+formed a picture I shall never forget. The old lady performed her
+office with flashing eyes, a steady voice, and an individuality which
+none could despise or overlook.
+
+Excepting her grandmother, Dawn was unattended, and as the young
+couple came down the aisle, by previous request of the bride, I had
+the honour of accompanying the old lady from the church, and she said,
+as we drove away over the scattered rose petals to be in readiness to
+receive the guests--
+
+"I've done it--give me little girl away, an' without misgivin's, for
+if she's as happy as I was she'll do. When the time was here there was
+some patches of me life wasn't too soft, but lookin' back, I would
+marry Jim Clay over again if I could."
+
+The caterpillars that had been eating the grape-vines and giving
+Andrew exercise as destroyer, had turned into millions of white
+butterflies that flecked the golden sunlight like a vast flotilla of
+miniature aerial yachts, and enhanced the splendour of that balmy
+wedding-day. It was the month of roses, and, intertwined with jasmine
+and mignonette, they formed the chief decorations in the roomy marquee
+erected for the breakfast under the big old cedars overlooking the
+river. All Noonoonites of any importance sat down to the repast, and
+their names, from that of Mrs Bray to Mrs Dr Tinker, are recorded in
+'The Noonoon Advertiser.' The last-mentioned lady did not exhibit any
+of her famous characteristics at the function further than to use a
+gorgeous fan she carried in rapping her husband over the knuckles
+every time his attention wandered from her remarks. The toasts were
+many and long, and it fell to "Dora" Eweword to respond to that of the
+"ladies." Since the announcement of Dawn's engagement to Ernest,
+"Dora" had been frequently seen out driving with Ada Grosvenor, and he
+paid her marked attention at the wedding; but this was private, not
+public, information.
+
+After I had helped Dawn into her travelling dress I had a few words
+apart with Ernest while Grandma Clay bade a private good-bye to his
+wife.
+
+"Well," he said, with self-contained and pardonable triumph, "I've won
+her in spite of that dish of water."
+
+"Yes, we three have accomplished our desire."
+
+"What three?"
+
+"Mr and Mrs R. E. Breslaw and myself!"
+
+"Oh, was it your desire too?" he said with a happy laugh.
+
+The bride now appeared, and wringing my hand as he said--
+
+"You'll come to us when we return," he stepped forward to place her in
+the carriage that took them to the railway.
+
+The paper had better be again consulted for accurate account of the
+confetti pelting and other customary happenings that took place at the
+station. These details, and the real greatness of Dawn's match, and
+her aristocratic relatives, who, as often suspected, had not proved to
+be only a myth, were the chief theme of conversation for many days.
+
+All the engines in the sheds at the time, and whose music had lulled
+me to sleep o' nights, blew the bride a royal fanfare as she entered
+her first, _engaged_, and further cock-a-doodled "good luck" as the
+train steamed out.
+
+Most keenly of all I remember that it was piteously lonely, and as
+dreary as though the sun had lost its power, when the panting engine
+had climbed the hill from the sleepy little town, and dropped out of
+hearing on the down grade from the old valley of ripening peach and
+apricot, bearing the girl for ever away from the slow, meandering
+grooves of life of which her vigorous young soul was weary.
+
+A meeting of the municipal council claimed Uncle Jake that night,
+Andrew went over to discuss the situation with Jack Bray, and the
+loneliness of the old dining-room was insupportable to grandma and me.
+Joy and beauty seemed to have fled from the scented nights beside the
+river,--even the whistle and rush of the trains breathed a forlorn
+note to my bereaved fancy, and there was a tear in grandma's eye as
+she said--
+
+"Well, she's really gone for altogether--she that I helped into the
+world and rared with my own hand, and named after the Dawn in which
+she came. That's the order of life. It's always the same--you can't
+keep any one for always. I couldn't abear it here now--it seems as if
+everything in life was done, and there's no need for me to stay if
+Ernest puts Andrew in the way of this electrical engineerin' he's so
+mad for. Jake can board somewhere. He don't care about things so much.
+I'll go to Dawn: thank God she wants me, an' I've got plenty to take
+me away if she gets tired of me, as young folks often do of the old,
+and which is only natural after all. I can let or sell the place, an'
+w'en I'm gone it will be enough for Dawn if ever she's threw on the
+world like I was. Everythink seems fair with her now, but this is a
+life of ups an' downs, and there's no tellin' what may happen."
+
+
+
+
+L'ENVOI.
+
+
+What interest can there be in the play after the knight has settled
+affairs with the lady, or in the story-book when the heroine and hero
+have gone on a honeymoon preparatory to living happily ever
+after?--and that is what befell my tale in Noonoon.
+
+I listen no more to the splendid music of the locomotives as they roar
+across the queer old bridge, nor watch the red light flashing from
+their coaling doors as they climb the Blue Mountain ascent and fire as
+they go. Their far-carrying rumble has been succeeded by the more
+thunderous voice of the sea on the rock-walled coast of my native
+land.
+
+Four months have elapsed since the wedding in Noonoon, yet Ernest is
+still content to let his athletic ambitions remain in abeyance while
+he squanders his time in the sweet dalliance of love. Squander, I say;
+but on reviewing the expired years, how sanely sweet the youthful
+hours we dallied shine from amid the years we toiled, fumed, cursed,
+sweated, and strove to step past our brother in the bootless race for
+pleasure, opulence, or popularity!
+
+Being able to indulge in the insignia of wealth, even without being
+the good fellow he is, Ernest finds it is of little significance that
+his hair is "what fond mothers term auburn," while Dawn's triumphs
+were assured from the outset. As mistress of a fine town mansion,
+with good looks, with smart ideas of dress, and smarter ability to
+verbally hold her own in any set, it goes without saying that her
+grandmother having "kep' a accommodation" is not remembered against
+her to any harmful extent in everyday life, where a large percentage
+of folks in all cliques have to survive the knowledge of their
+progenitors having been worse things than irreproachable proprietors
+and conductors of most exemplary accommodation houses for those who
+travel.
+
+As Ada Grosvenor is not a girl in a book but in everyday life, I
+cannot record that she has married a man worthy of her. Such an one
+would have to be a leader of men--a prime minister, reformer, or other
+prominent worker in the cause of humanity--and as these do not abound
+in the quiet whirlpools of existence, I can only hope that she does
+not drop in for a too impossible noodle, as is frequently the fate of
+noble women. "Dora" Eweword would have done very well to discharge the
+clodhopping work of her earthly journey--could have made her
+bread-and-butter and carried her parcels, but if I can depend on
+Andrew's letters, which breathe more heavily of generosity than of
+grammar and gracefulness, this eligible and strapping young member of
+Noonoon society has been rejected a second time, so that Mrs Bray's
+fears that he would be made over conceited by adulation from
+marriageable girls seems to have been unnecessary.
+
+Noonoon is enshrined in my heart as one of the pleasantest valleys on
+earth, so during enforcedly idle hours it has given me delight to
+paint its beauty, however feebly, and to put some of the doings of
+some of its folk in a story, that others might possibly enjoy them
+too. But I put the MSS. aside till, as the good country doctor so
+much esteemed in his circle expresses it, I shall have "pegged out,"
+and the heroine and hero of the plot shall then judge whether it is
+fit or not for publication. It has interested me to write, but
+
+    "My life has crept so long on a broken wing
+    . . . . . . . .
+    That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing,"
+
+and those whose lives are strong, fruitful, and successful may have no
+patience with the sentimental meanderings of an old woman who has
+outlived joy and usefulness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now, may the Lady of my tale, as her life progresses from dawn to
+noon, high noon to afternoon, dusk, evening, and night, have the
+Knight of her choice and peace always beside her, till new dawns break
+in other worlds beyond this place of fears and phantoms.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, by Miles Franklin
+
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+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, by Miles Franklin
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, by Miles Franklin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Some Everyday Folk and Dawn
+
+Author: Miles Franklin
+
+Release Date: June 1, 2007 [EBook #21659]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME EVERYDAY FOLK AND DAWN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<div class="tr"><p class="center">Transcriber's Note:</p>
+<p class="center">The Table of Contents is not part of the original book.</p>
+</div>
+
+<h1>Some<br />
+Everyday<br />
+Folk<br />
+and<br />
+Dawn</h1>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h2>MILES FRANKLIN</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3>First published in Great Britain by<br />
+William Blackwood &amp; Sons <br />
+1909
+</h3>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3><i>TO THE</i></h3>
+<h3><i>ENGLISH <span class="u">MEN</span> WHO BELIEVE IN VOTES FOR <span class="u">WOMEN</span></i></h3>
+
+<h3><i>THIS STORY IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED</i>,<br />
+<i>BECAUSE THE WOMEN HEREIN CHARACTERISED WERE</i><br />
+<i>NEVER FORCED TO BE</i></h3>
+
+<h2>"<i>SUFFRAGETTES</i>,"</h2>
+
+<h3><i>THEIR COUNTRYMEN</i><br />
+<i>HAVING GRANTED THEM THEIR RIGHTS AS</i></h3>
+
+<h2><i>SUFFRAGISTS</i></h2>
+
+<h3><i>IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1902.</i></h3>
+
+<p class="sig"><i>M. F.</i></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<table summary="Contents">
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="f1">CHAPTER</td><td class="tocpg f1">PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tocpg">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">ONE.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#ONE">CLAY'S.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">TWO.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#TWO">AT CLAY'S.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_9">9</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">THREE.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#THREE">BECOMING ACQUAINTED WITH GRANDMA CLAY.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_29">29</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">FOUR.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#FOUR">DAWN'S AMBITION.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_46">46</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">FIVE.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#FIVE">MISS FLIPP'S UNCLE.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_52">52</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">SIX.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#SIX">GRANDMA CLAY'S LOVE-STORY.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_58">58</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">SEVEN.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#SEVEN">THE LITTLE TOWN OF NOONOON.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_73">73</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">EIGHT.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#EIGHT">GRANDMA TURNS NURSE.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">NINE.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#NINE">THE KNIGHT HAS A STOLEN VIEW OF THE LADY.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_92">92</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">TEN.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#TEN">PROVINCIAL POLITICS AND SEMI-SUBURBAN DENTISTS.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_100">100</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">ELEVEN.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#ELEVEN">ANDREW DISGRACES HIS "RARIN'."</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_110">110</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">TWELVE.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#TWELVE">SOME SIDE-PLAY.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_117">117</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">THIRTEEN.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#THIRTEEN">VARIOUS EVENTS.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_131">131</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">FOURTEEN.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#FOURTEEN">THE PASSING OF THE TRAINS.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_152">152</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">FIFTEEN.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#FIFTEEN">ALAS! MISS FLIPP!</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_173">173</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">SIXTEEN.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#SIXTEEN">ADVANCE, AUSTRALIA!</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_179">179</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">SEVENTEEN.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#SEVENTEEN">MRS BRAY AND CARRY COME TO ISSUES.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_196">196</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">EIGHTEEN.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#EIGHTEEN">THE FOUNDATION OF THE POULTRY INDUSTRY.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_206">206</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">NINETEEN.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#NINETEEN">AN OPPORTUNELY INOPPORTUNE DOUCHE.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_226">226</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">TWENTY.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#TWENTY">"ALAS! HOW EASILY THINGS GO WRONG!"</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">TWENTY-ONE.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#TWENTY-ONE">THINGS GO MORE WRONG.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_261">261</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">TWENTY-TWO.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#TWENTY-TWO">"O SPIRIT, AND THE NINE ANGELS WHO WATCH US ..."</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_270">270</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">TWENTY-THREE.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#TWENTY-THREE">UNIVERSAL ADULT SUFFRAGE.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_277">277</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">TWENTY-FOUR.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#TWENTY-FOUR">LITTLE ODDS AND ENDS OF LIFE.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_295">295</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">TWENTY-FIVE.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#TWENTY-FIVE">"LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM."</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_304">304</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">TWENTY-SIX.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#TWENTY-SIX">"OFF WITH THE OLD."</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_310">310</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">TWENTY-SEVEN.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#TWENTY-SEVEN">"ONE MIGHT THINK BETTER OF MARRIAGE IF ONE'S MARRIED FRIENDS ..."</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_315">315</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">TWENTY-EIGHT.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#TWENTY-EIGHT">LET THERE BE LOVE.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_322">322</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">TWENTY-NINE.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#TWENTY-NINE">"THE SAVAGE SELLS OR EXCHANGES HIS DAUGHTER, BUT IN ..."</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_333">333</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">THIRTY.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#THIRTY">FOR FURTHER PARTICULARS CONSULT 'THE NOONOON ADVERTISER' OF THAT DATE.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_340">340</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch"></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#LENVOI">L'ENVOI.</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_345">345</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>GLOSSARY OF COLLOQUIALISMS AND <br />
+SLANG TERMS.</h2>
+
+
+
+<table summary="Glossary of Colloquialisms">
+<tr><td>AUSTRALIAN.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>AMERICAN EQUIVALENTS.</td><td>ENGLISH INTERPRETATION.</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>Billy</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>A tin pail</td><td>A camp-kettle.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Blokes</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>Guys</td><td>Chaps&mdash;fellows.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Bosker</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>Dandy or "dandy fine"</td><td>Something meeting with unqualified approval.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Galoot</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>A rube</td><td>A yokel&mdash;a heavy country fellow.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Larrikin</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>A hoodlum.</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Moke</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>A common knockabout horse.</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Narked</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>Sore</td><td>Vexed&mdash;to have lost the temper.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Gin</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>Squaw</td><td>An aboriginal woman.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Quod</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>Jail.</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sollicker</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>Somewhat equivalent to "corker"</td><td>Something excessive.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Toff</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>A "sport" or "swell guy"</td><td>A well-dressed individual&mdash;sometimes of the upper ten.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Two "bob"</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>Fifty cents</td><td>Two shillings.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>To graft</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>To "dig in"</td><td>To work hard and steadily.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>To scoot</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>To vamoose or skidoo</td><td>To leave hastily and unceremoniously.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>To smoodge</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>To be a "sucker"</td><td>To curry favour at the expense of independence.</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>"Gives me the pip"</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>"Makes me tired"</td><td>Bores.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>"On a string"</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>}</td><td>Trifling with him.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>"Pulling his leg"</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>}</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Kookaburra</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>A giant kingfisher with grey plumage and a
+merry, mocking, inconceivably human laugh&mdash;a
+killer of snakes, and a great favourite with
+Australians.</td><td></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>Some Everyday Folk <br />
+and Dawn.</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="ONE" id="ONE"></a>ONE.</h2>
+
+<h3>CLAY'S.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The summer sun streamed meltingly down on the asphalted siding of the
+country railway station and occasioned the usual grumbling from the
+passengers alighting from the afternoon express.</p>
+
+<p>There were only three who effect this narrative&mdash;a huge, red-faced,
+barrel-like figure that might have served to erect as a monument to
+the over-feeding in vogue in this era; a tall, spare, old fellow with
+a grizzled beard, who looked as though he had never known a succession
+of square feeds; and myself, whose physique does not concern this
+narrative.</p>
+
+<p>Having surrendered our tickets and come through a down-hill passage to
+the dusty, dirty, stony, open space where vehicles awaited travellers,
+the usual corner "pub."&mdash;in this instance a particularly dilapidated
+one&mdash;and three tin kangaroos fixed as weather-cocks on a dwelling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span>
+over the way, and turning hither and thither in the hot gusts of wind,
+were the first objects to arrest my attention in the town of Noonoon,
+near the river Noonoon, whereaway it does not particularly matter. The
+next were the men competing for our favour in the matter of vehicular
+conveyance.</p>
+
+<p>The big man, by reason of his high complexion, abnormal waist
+measurement, expensive clothes, and domineering manner, which
+proclaimed him really a lord of creation, naturally commanded the
+first and most obsequious attention, and giving his address as
+"Clay's," engaged the nearest man, who then turned to me.</p>
+
+<p>"Where might you be going?"</p>
+
+<p>"To Jimmeny's Hotel."</p>
+
+<p>"Right O! I can just drop you on the way to Clay's," said he; and the
+big swell grunted up to a box seat, while I took a position in the
+body of the vehicle commanding a clear view of the grossness of the
+highly coloured neck rolling over his collar.</p>
+
+<p>The journey through the town unearthed the fact that it resembled many
+of its compeers. The oven-hot iron roofs were coated with red dust; a
+few lackadaisical larrikins upheld occasional corner posts; dogs
+conducted municipal meetings here and there; the ugliness of the
+horses tied to the street posts, where they baked in the sun while
+their riders guzzled in the prolific "pubs.," bespoke a farming rather
+than a grazing district; and the streets had the distinction of being
+the most deplorably dirty and untended I have seen.</p>
+
+<p>The same could be said of a cook, or some such individual of whom I
+caught a glimpse when landed at a corner hotel, where I sat inside the
+door of a parlour awaiting the appearance of the landlady or the
+publican,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span> while for diversion I watched the third arrival wending his
+way from the station on foot and shouting something concerning melons
+to a man in a dray in the middle of the roadway.</p>
+
+<p>Evidently it was the land of melons and other fruits and vegetables.</p>
+
+<p>Over at the railway, loaded waggons, drays, and carts were backed
+against a line of trucks drawn up to convey such produce to the city
+and other parts of the country, while strings of vehicles similarly
+burdened were thundering up the street. Some carts were piled with
+cases of peaches, grapes, tomatoes, and rock-melons&mdash;the rich aromatic
+scent of the last mentioned strongly asserting their presence as they
+passed. On some waggons the water-melons were packed in straw and had
+the grower's initials chipped in the rind, others were not so
+distinguished, and at intervals the roughness of the thoroughfare
+bumped one off. If the fall did not break it quite in two, a stray
+loafer pulled it so and tore out a little of the sweet and luscious
+heart, leaving the remainder to the ants and fowls. The latter were
+running about on friendly terms with the dogs, which they equalled in
+variety and number. Droves of small boys haunted the railway premises
+at that time of the year and eagerly assisted the farmers to truck
+their melons in return for one, and came away with their spoils under
+their arms. Never before had I seen so many melons or so large. Some
+weighed sixty and eighty pounds or more, while those from sixteen to
+twenty-five pounds, in all varieties,&mdash;Cuban Queens, Dixies, Halbert's
+Honey, and Cannon Balls,&mdash;were procurable at one shilling the dozen,
+and nearly as much produce as sent away wasted in the fields for want
+of a market.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>An hour after arrival, having refused the offer of refreshments, which
+in such places are not always refreshing, I betook myself to a
+comparatively cool back verandah to further investigate my temporary
+surroundings.</p>
+
+<p>A yellow-haired girl with rings on her fingers sprawled in a hammock
+reading a much-thumbed circulating-library novel and eating peaches.
+This was the landlord's daughter, and a very superior young lady
+indeed from her own point of view.</p>
+
+<p>I learnt that at present there would only be one other boarder besides
+myself. He came up for the week-end, and had just gone down to Clay's
+to see some one there. If he could get a berth at Clay's he would not
+come back; but the only hope of being taken in there during the summer
+weather was to bespeak room a long way ahead, as there was a great run
+on the place. It was built right beside the river, and they kept boats
+for hire, which attracted a number of desirable young men from the
+city to engage in week-end fishing, picnicing, swimming, &amp;c.; and the
+young gentlemen attracted young ladies, who found it difficult to be
+taken in at all, because old Mrs Clay allowed her granddaughter, Dawn,
+to boss the place, and <i>she</i> favoured men-boarders.</p>
+
+<p>The tone of Yellow-hair suggested that perhaps the men-boarders
+favoured Dawn; at all events, it was an attractive name and aroused
+interested inquiry from me.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, some thought her a beauty! There were great arguments as to
+whether she or Dora Cowper&mdash;another great big fat thing in a hay and
+corn store over the way&mdash;was the belle of Noonoon;" but for her part,
+Yellow-hair thought her too coarse and vulgar and high-coloured (Miss
+Jimmeny was sallow and thin), and she was always<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span> making herself seen
+and known everywhere. One would think she owned Noonoon!</p>
+
+<p>"There she is now," exclaimed the girl, pointing out another who was
+driving a fat pony in a yellow sulky. "Talk of the devil."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps it is an angel in this case," I responded, for though she was
+thickly veiled she suggested youth and a style that pleased the eye.</p>
+
+<p>Whether she and the boats were sufficient to make Clay's an attractive
+place of residence I did not know, but already was painfully aware of
+conditions that would make Jimmeny's Hotel an uncomfortable location.
+I retired to my room to escape some of them&mdash;the foul language of the
+tipplers under the front verandah, and the winds from two streets that
+also met there in a whirlwind of dust and refuse.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing for me to do but kill time, and no way of killing it
+but by simple endurance. I had been ordered to some country resort for
+the good of my health. But do not fear, reader; this is not to be a
+compilation of ills and pulses, for no one more than the unfortunate
+victim of such is so painfully aware of their lack of interest to the
+community at large. There are, I admit, some invalids who find a
+certain amount of entertainment in inflicting a list of their aches
+upon people, blissfully unconscious of how wearisome they can be, but
+my temperament is of the sensitive order, knowing its length too well
+to similarly transgress.</p>
+
+<p>How I had struck upon Noonoon I don't know or care, except that it was
+within easy access of the metropolis, and I have no predilection for
+being isolated from the crowded haunts of my fellows. I had descended
+upon Jimmeny's Hotel because in an advertisement sheet it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span> was put
+down as the leading house of accommodation in Noonoon. Now I had come
+to hear of Clay's and Dawn, and determined to shift myself there as
+soon as possible. This did not seem imminent, for presently the
+"bloated aristocrat" came back to Jimmeny's pub. for the evening meal,
+as he had been unable to get so much as a shake-down at Clay's. This
+so aroused my desire to be a boarder at Clay's that I straightway
+wrote a letter to its ch&acirc;telaine inquiring what style of accommodation
+she provided, and could she accommodate me; and strolling up the
+broken street, while a few larrikins at corners, by way of
+entertaining themselves and me, made remarks upon my appearance, I
+dropped it in the post-office, but had to endure a week's inattention
+at Jimmeny's, and no end of yarns from outside folk I encountered as
+to how Mrs Jimmeny robbed the "swipes" who took their poison at her
+bar, before I was honoured by a reply from Mrs Clay.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The accommodation provided by me for people is clean and
+wholesome and the best as suits me. If it don't suit them
+there are other places near that makes more efforts to
+gather custom than I do. I can't take you in at present as
+I'm too full for my taste as it is.&mdash;Yours respectfully,</p></div>
+
+<p class="sig">"Martha Clay."</p>
+
+<p>This interesting rebuff inspired me to further effort, and sitting on
+the back verandah, under a giant fig-tree shedding its delicious and
+wholesome fruit also to the fowls and ants, I wrote:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Dear Madam,&mdash;Would you kindly apprise me when it would be
+convenient to accommodate me, as I'm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span> anxious to be near the
+river, where I could indulge in boating?"</p></div>
+
+<p>To this I received reply:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"There isn't any chance of me accommodating you till the
+cool weather, and then I don't take boarders at all. I like
+to have them all in the summer, and then have a little peace
+to ourselves in the winter without strangers, for the best
+of them have their noses poked everywhere they are not
+wanted. If you want to go near the river there are heaps of
+houses where there isn't no such rush of people as at my
+place."</p></div>
+
+<p>This firmly determined me to reside at Mrs Clay's, a desired member of
+the household, or perish in the attempt. Alack! I had plenty time to
+spend in such a trifle, for I was but a derelict, broken in fierce
+struggle and hopelessly cast aside into smooth waters, safe from the
+stormy currents now too strong for my timbers. That I had means to lie
+at anchor in some genial boarding-house, instead of being dependent
+upon charity, was undoubtedly food for thankfulness, and when one has
+burned their coal-heap to ashes they are grateful for an occasional
+charcoal among the cinders.</p>
+
+<p>No other place near the river but Clay's would do me, though the
+valley had much to recommend it at that season, when grapes, peaches,
+and other fruits were literally being thrown away on every hand. So I
+repacked my trunk, and the 'busman who had brought me took me once
+more along the execrable streets, past the corner pub., near the
+railway station, and, it being late afternoon, the railway employ&eacute;s,
+as they came off duty, were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span> streaming towards it for the purpose of
+"wetting their whistle" after their eight-houred day's work.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving the misguided fellows thus worse than ignorantly refreshing
+themselves, and the tin kangaroos showing that the breeze was from the
+east, I travelled farther west to a summer resort in the cool
+altitude, there to await from Mrs Martha Clay a recall to the vale of
+melons. That I would get one I was sure, and so little was there in my
+life that even this prospect lent a zest to the mail each day.</p>
+
+<p>I had neither relatives nor friends. Fate had apportioned me none of
+the former, and fierce, absorbing endeavour had left little time for
+cultivating the latter, while pride made me hide from all
+acquaintances who had known me standing amid the plaudits of the
+crowd&mdash;strong and successful; and fiercely desiring to be left to
+myself, I shrank with sensitive horror from the sympathy that is only
+careless pity.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="TWO" id="TWO"></a>TWO.</h2>
+
+<h3>AT CLAY'S.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The long hot days gave place to cooler and shorter, and there was none
+left of the beautiful fruit&mdash;peaches, apricots, figs, plums,
+nectarines, grapes, and melons&mdash;which, for want of a market, had
+rotted ankle-deep in some parts of the fertile old valley of Noonoon
+ere I received a communication from Mrs. Clay.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"If you think it worth your while you can investigate my
+place now. All the summer weather folk has gone. I would
+only take one or two nice people now that would live with us
+in our own plain way and who would be company for the
+family, so I could not undertake to give you a separate
+parlour and table and carry on that way, but if you like to
+call and see me, please yourself."</p></div>
+
+<p>Accordingly, I lost no time in once more patronising the town 'busman,
+and being his only patron that day, he rattled me past the tin
+kangaroo weather-cocks, the battered corner pub. and its colleague a
+few doors on, and entering the principal street where Jimmeny's Hotel
+filled the view, turned to the right across fertile flats held in
+tenure by patient Chinese gardeners.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Being a region of quick growth, it was of correspondingly rapid decay,
+and the season of summer fruits had been entirely superseded by autumn
+flowers. The vale of melons was now a valley of chrysanthemums, and
+with a little specialisation in this branch of horticulture could
+easily have out-chrysanthemumed Japan. Without any care or cultivation
+they filled the little gardens on every side; children of all sizes
+were to be seen with bunches of them; while discarded blossoms lay in
+the streets, after the fashion of the superabundant melons and orchard
+fruits during their season.</p>
+
+<p>About a mile from the station we halted before a ramshackle old
+two-storey house that was covered by roses and hidden among orange and
+fig trees. The approach led through an irregular plantation of cedar
+and pepper trees, pomegranates and other shrubs, and masses of
+chrysanthemums and cosmos that flourished in every available space.</p>
+
+<p>The friendly 'busman directed me to a gable sheltered by a yellow
+jasmine-tree, where I tapped on the door with my knuckle. Footsteps
+approached on the inside, and after some thumping and kicking on its
+panels it was burst open by a nimble old lady in immaculate gown, with
+carefully adjusted collar, and wavy hair combed back in a tidy knot
+and with still a dark shade in it.</p>
+
+<p>"Them blessed white ants!" she exclaimed. "They've very near got the
+place eat down, so that you have to make a fool of yourself opening
+the door, and that blessed feller I sent for hasn't come to do 'em up
+yet; but some people!" She finished so exasperatedly that I felt
+impelled to state my name and business without delay, and with a prim
+"Indeed," she led the way across a narrow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span> linoleumed hall, so
+beeswaxed that one had to stump along carefully erect.</p>
+
+<p>She invited me to a chair in a stiff room and began&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I've only got another young lady in the place now, and if you come
+you'll have to eat with the family."</p>
+
+<p>I considered this an attraction.</p>
+
+<p>"And there'll be no fussing over you and pampering you, for I'm not
+reduced to keeping boarders out of necessity. They ain't all I've got
+to depend on," she said with a fiery glance from her choleric
+blue-grey eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not; I'm sure of that by your style, Mrs. Clay."</p>
+
+<p>"But of course I like to make a little; this Federal Tariff has rose
+the price of living considerable," she said, softening somewhat as we
+now sat down on the formidable and well-dusted seats.</p>
+
+<p>"But I believe you are somethink of a invalid."</p>
+
+<p>"Unfortunately, yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, this isn't no private hospital, and never pretended to be. Sick
+people is a lot of trouble potterin' and fussin' around with. I
+couldn't, for the sake of my granddaughter, give her a lot of extra
+work that wouldn't mean nothink."</p>
+
+<p>This might have sounded hard, but with some people their very
+austerity bespeaks a tenderness of heart. They affect it as a shield
+or guard against a softness that leaves them the too easy prey of a
+self-seeking community, and such I adjudged Mrs. Clay. Her stiffness,
+like that of the echidna, was a spiky covering protecting the most
+gentle and estimable of dispositions.</p>
+
+<p>"My ill-health is the sort to worry no one but myself. I need no
+dieting or waiting upon. It is merely a heart trouble, and should it
+happen to finish me in your house,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span> I will leave ample compensation,
+and will pay my board and lodging weekly in advance."</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't a money-grubber," she hastened to assure me; "I was only
+explaining to you."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm only explaining too," I said with a smile; and having arrived at
+this understanding of mutual straight-going, she intimated that I
+could inspect a room I might have.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to a couple of detached buildings composed of rooms which
+during the summer were given to boarders, there were a few apartments
+in the main residence which were also delivered to this business, and
+I was conducted to where three in an uneven gable faced west and
+fronted the river.</p>
+
+<p>"This is my granddaughter Dawn's, and this one is empty, and this one
+is took by a young party for the winter," said the old dame.</p>
+
+<p>I selected the middle room, as it gave promise of being companionable
+with those on either hand occupied, and its window commanded an
+attractive view. A tangled old garden opened on a steep descent to the
+quiet river, edged with willows and garnished by a great row of red
+and blue boats rocking almost imperceptibly in the even flow, while a
+huge placard advertised their business&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>BEST BOATS ON THE RIVER TO BE HIRED HERE.</p></div>
+
+<p class="sig1">MRS. MARTHA CLAY.</p>
+
+<p>To the right was an imposing bridge, and on the other side of the
+water, right at the foot of the great range which in the early days
+had remained so long impassable, lay the quiet old settlement of
+Kangaroo.</p>
+
+<p>"If you think that room will do, you are welcome to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span> it," continued
+Mrs. Clay. "Seventeen-and-six a-week without washing&mdash;a pound with."</p>
+
+<p>I agreed to the "with washing" terms, so the affable jehu hauled in
+what luggage I had brought, and at last I was installed at Clay's.</p>
+
+<p>The only thing wanting to complete the incident was the advent of
+Dawn, but she was nowhere to be seen. As it was only eleven in the
+morning I sat in my room and waited for her and a cup of tea, but
+neither were forthcoming. In her own words, Mrs. Clay "was never give
+to running after people an' lickin' their boots." Eventually, having
+grown weary of waiting for Dawn and luncheon and other things, I went
+out on a tour of inspection. First find was a tall dashing girl of
+twenty-four or thereabouts, dusting the big heavily encumbered
+"parler" into which my room opened.</p>
+
+<p>"Good morning!" heartily said she.</p>
+
+<p>"Good morning! Are you Dawn?" inquired I.</p>
+
+<p>"Dawn! No. But you might well ask, for it's nothing but Dawn and her
+doings and sayings and good looks here! You'd think there was no other
+girl in Noonoon. She won't take it as any compliment to be taken for
+me."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she must be something superlative if it would not be a
+compliment to be taken for you."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh me! I'm only Carry the lady-help&mdash;general slavey like, earning my
+living, only that I eat with the family and not in the kitchen. In the
+summer they hire a cook and others, but in the winter there are only
+me and Dawn and the old woman," said this frank and communicative
+individual in the frank and communicative manner characteristic of the
+Clay household.</p>
+
+<p>Proceeding from this encounter, I went out the back way past more
+gardens and irregular enclosures, where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span> under widespreading
+cedar-trees I found a boy at the hobbledehoy age chopping wood in a
+desultory fashion, as though to get rid of time, rather than to
+enlarge the stack of short sticks, were the most imperative object.
+Driving his axe in tight and holding on to it as a sort of balance, he
+leant back, effected a passage in his nostrils, and after having
+regarded me with a leisurely and straightforward squint, observed&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon you're the new boarder?"</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon so. I reckon you belong to this place."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Mrs. Clay, she's my grandma."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that your grandfather?" I inquired, pointing to the old man who
+had travelled with me on the day of my first visit to the town, and
+now supporting an outhouse door-post, while a young man with whom he
+talked leant against the tailboard of a cart advertising that he was
+the first-class butcher of Kangaroo, and had several other
+unsurpassable virtues in the meat trade.</p>
+
+<p>"No, he ain't me grandfather, thank goodness he's only me uncle;
+that's plenty for me."</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't you fond of him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't <i>dying</i> of love for him, I promise you. Old Crawler! He
+reckons he's the boss, but sometimes I get home on him in a way that a
+sort of illustrates to his intelligence that he ain't. Ask Dawn. She's
+the one'll give you the straight tip regarding him."</p>
+
+<p>"Where is Dawn?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Dawn's in the kitchen. She an' Carry does the cookin' week about
+w'en the house ain't full. Grandma makes 'em do that; it saves rows
+about it not bein' fair. You won't ketch sight of Dawn till dinner.
+She'll want to get herself up a bit, you bein' new; she always does
+for a fresh person, but she soon gets tired of it."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And you, are you going to get yourself up because I'm new?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not much; boys ain't that way so much as the wimmin," he said, and
+the grin we exchanged was the germ of a friendship that ripened as our
+acquaintance progressed. I intended to settle down to the enjoyment
+afforded by my sense of humour. I had preserved it intact as a private
+personal accomplishment. On the stage, having steered clear of comedy
+and confined myself to tragedy, it had never been cheapened and made
+nauseous by sham and machine representations indigenous to the hated
+footlights, and was an untapped preserve to be drawn upon now.</p>
+
+<p>So I was not to see Dawn till the midday dinner; she was to appear
+last, like the star at a concert.</p>
+
+<p>A star she verily was when eventually she came before me carrying a
+well-baked roast on an old-fashioned dish. Her lovely face was scarlet
+from hurry and the fire, her bright hair gleamed in coquettish rolls,
+and a loose sleeve displayed a round and dimpled forearm&mdash;a fitting
+continuance of the taper fingers grasping the chief dish of the
+wholesome and liberal menu she had prepared.</p>
+
+<p>Old Uncle Jake took the carver's place, but Grandma Clay sat at his
+left elbow and instructed him what to do. He handed the helpings to
+her, and she supplemented each with some of all the vegetables,
+irrespective of the wishes of the consumers, to whom they were handed
+in a business-like method. The puddings were distributed on the same
+principle, grandma even putting milk and sugar on the plates as for
+children; and further, she talked in a choleric way, as though the
+children were in bad grace owing to some misdemeanour, but that was
+merely one of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span> her mannerisms, as that of others is to smile and be
+sweet while they inwardly fume.</p>
+
+<p>Excepting this, the unimpressive old smudges hung above the mantel,
+and probably standing for some family progenitors, gazed out of their
+caricatured eyes on an uneventful meal. Conversation was choppy and of
+the personal order, not interesting to a stranger to those mentioned.
+I made a few duty remarks to Uncle Jake, which he received with
+suspicion, so I left him in peace to suck his teeth and look like a
+sleepy lizard, while I counted the queer and inartistic old vases
+crowded in plumb and corresponding pairs on the shelf over the
+fireplace.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Flipp, the other boarder, was in every respect a contrast to me,
+being small, young, and dressed with elaboration in a flimsy style
+which, off the stage, I have always scorned. Her wrists were laden
+with bangles, her fingers with rings, and her golden hair piled high
+in the most exaggerated of the exaggerated pompadour styles in vogue.
+Her appetite was indifferent; the expression of her eyes bespoke
+either ill-health or dissipation, and she was very abstracted, or as
+Mrs Clay put it&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"She acts like she had somethink on her mind. Maybe she's love-sick
+for some one she can't ketch, and she's been sent up here to forget."</p>
+
+<p>This was after Miss Flipp had retreated to her room, and Carry
+continued the subject as she cleared the table.</p>
+
+<p>"She <i>says</i> she's an orphan reared by a rich uncle; she's always
+blowing about him and how fond he is of her. She's just recovered from
+an operation and has come up here to get strong. That's why she does
+nothing, so she <i>says</i>, only poke about and read novels and make
+herself new hats and blouses; but <i>I</i> think she'd be lazy without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span> any
+operation. She'd want another to put some go in her."</p>
+
+<p>"She'd require inoculating with a little of yours," said I, watching
+with what enviable vigour the girl's work sped before her as though
+afraid. I also retired to my room for a rest, intending to come out
+and pave the way for friendship with Dawn by-and-by, for I quickly
+perceived she was not the character to go out of her way to make the
+first overture.</p>
+
+<p>Some time after, when strolling around in an unwonted fashion, I was
+pleased to again encounter my friend Andrew. Evidently he had been set
+to clean out the fowl-houses, for a wheelbarrow half full of manure
+stood at the door of a wire-netted shed, and in the middle of this
+task he had sought diversion by shooting rats from among the straw in
+a big old barn, where a great heap of unused hay made them a harbour.
+In this warm valley, carpeted in the irrepressible couch-grass, there
+was no lack of fodder that season, and even the lanes and byways would
+have served as fattening paddocks. Andrew leant upon his gun, and
+having delivered himself of certain statistics in rat mortality, and
+exhibiting some specimens by the tail, he began a conversation.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, what did you think of Miss Thing-amebob, Miss Flipp I mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't bother thinking anything at all about her."</p>
+
+<p>Andrew looked interrogatively at me and broke into a grin.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I reckon she's the silliest goat I ever came across. She came
+out to me and asked did I think she looked pretty, as her uncle is
+coming up to-night, and if she looks nice he'll give her a present or
+something. I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span> reckon she'd have to look not such a mad-headed rabbit
+before I'd give her anything but some advice to bag her head. And he
+must be a different uncle to Uncle Jake; I reckon he wouldn't give you
+nothing if you had on two heads at once. Here's Larry Witcom coming
+back from his rounds, and he promised me a bit of meat for Whiskey!
+Here, Whiskey! Whiskey!" he roared, and a small canine pet that had
+been hunting rats desisted from the fray and ran with his master. I
+also walked with him&mdash;this without exception, even in slum scenes on
+the stage, being the dirtiest escort I ever had had. His face was
+grimed, his shirt like an engine-rag, and his trousers dusty, while
+from a hole in the seat thereof fluttered a flag of garment&mdash;such an
+ingratiatingly wholesome blunderbuss of a boy!</p>
+
+<p>"Here, you Larry," he yelled, "you promised me! Come on, Whiskey! Why,
+ain't he a bosker!" he enthusiastically exclaimed, as the hideously
+unprepossessing little mongrel stood on his hind legs and yelped in
+excited begging.</p>
+
+<p>"Hullo, Andrew! Don't bust! Who's that you had with you?&mdash;(I had
+turned a corner)&mdash;a new boarder, I suppose? Rather an old piece!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Andrew. "Her hair is a little white, but she ain't sour
+and stuck up."</p>
+
+<p>"A chance for you to hang your hat up, Jake," said Larry.</p>
+
+<p>"No, thanks! I'm cautious of them old maids. If you say a pleasant
+word to 'em they can't be shook off, and might have you up for breach
+of promise like with Tom Dunstan."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose there is a danger, you being so fascinating," chuckled the
+butcher as I went inside, with a premonition<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span> that should it come to
+taking sides in the Clay household, if avoidable I would not be on
+Uncle Jake's.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is Uncle Jake?" said Carry in response to my inquiry, as she
+prepared four o'clock tea; "he's Uncle Jake, that's what he is, and
+enough for me too, that he is. The old swab wants hanging up by the
+beard."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but what place does he hold in the house?"</p>
+
+<p>"Place! that of walking round poking his nose in everywhere and
+growling about things that don't concern him. Mrs Clay keeps
+him&mdash;gives him fifteen shillings a-week&mdash;because he's her brother, and
+you'd think he owned everything. If you want to know what he is, he's
+a terribly bad example to Andrew. <i>He's</i> the greatest clumsy,
+lumbering, dirty lump (oh, you should see his clothes, what they are
+like to wash, and the only way to keep him clean would be to stuff him
+in a glass case!), but for all that he's a very fair kid. You can't
+expect much of boys, you know, and have to be thankful for any good
+points at all. O Lord!" she here exclaimed, looking out a window,
+where along a path through the orchard she descried approaching a fine
+buxom dame in a fashionably cut dress, "here's Mrs Bray in full sail.
+I suppose she saw the 'busman leaving you here to-day, and her
+curiosity couldn't stand any longer without coming on a tour of
+inspection."</p>
+
+<p>"Who is Mrs Bray?"</p>
+
+<p>"She won't let you overlook who she is, and what she owns, and what
+she '<i>done</i>,' you'll soon hear it. She's the most inquisitive
+blow-hard I ever came across."</p>
+
+<p>Dawn now appeared and invited me to afternoon tea, which was a
+friendly and hospitable meal spread on a big table on a back verandah,
+so enclosed by creepers and pot-plants and little awnings leading in
+various directions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span> as to be in reality more of a vestibule. Mrs Bray
+hove into near view and took up a seat beside a bank of lovely
+maiden-hair fern.</p>
+
+<p>"How are you living?" she asked Grandma Clay as she complacently shook
+hands. "Nice cool weather now and not so many beastly mosquitoes."</p>
+
+<p>"By Jove! Did you know about the 'skeeters' here?" inquired Andrew of
+me. "They're big enough to ride bikes and weigh a pound. You wait till
+you hear 'em singing Sankey's hymns to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"If I were you I'd hold my tongue and not draw attention to my
+dirtiness," said Dawn. "It's a wonder a garden doesn't sprout upon
+you."</p>
+
+<p>I was then introduced to Mrs Bray, who acknowledged me genially, and
+seemed so flourishing, and was so complacent regarding the fact, that
+it did one good to look at her.</p>
+
+<p>After addressing a few remarks to me she had to move, for the trimming
+of her hat caught in the cage of a parakeet, and she took another seat
+in the shelter of a tree-fern near Uncle Jake.</p>
+
+<p>"You have some lovely pet birds," I remarked by way of making myself
+agreeable to Grandma Clay.</p>
+
+<p>"The infernal old nuisances!" she said irascibly, "I wish they'd die.
+Andrew calls them his, but they'd starve only for me. I'm always
+saying I'll have no more pets, and still they're brought here. Some
+day when he has a home of his own and people plague him, he'll know
+what it is."</p>
+
+<p>On the other side of the verandah above Uncle Jake stretched a passion
+vine, where a thick row of belated fruit hung like pretty pale-green
+eggs, and evil entering Andrew's mind, he remarked to me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't it be just bosker if one of them fell on his old nut," and
+going out he returned with a pair of orange clippers.</p>
+
+<p>"Where's Carry got to?" asked grandma.</p>
+
+<p>"I saw her out there doing a mash with Larry Witcom," said Andrew.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, do you think there'll be anything in that?" interestedly asked
+Mrs Bray. "I suppose she'd be glad to ketch anything for a home of her
+own."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's to be hoped the home she'd catch with him would be better
+than some of the meat we've caught from him lately&mdash;it was as tough as
+old boots," put in Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>At this point Andrew succeeded in disturbing Uncle Jake&mdash;succeeded
+beyond expectation. Uncle Jake had just sucked his fuzzy 'possum-grey
+moustache in the noisy manner peculiar to him, and was raising his tea
+again, when he was struck by the passion fruit, causing him to let
+fall the cup.</p>
+
+<p>"Just like you! On the clean boards! Carry will be pleased. I'm glad
+it's not my week in the house," said Dawn. What Uncle Jake said is
+unfit for insertion in a record so respectable as this is intended to
+be, and grandma seemed to grow too agitated for verbal utterance, but
+her facial expression was very fiery indeed as Andrew and Uncle Jake
+withdrew and settled their little score in a manner unknown to the
+company.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's an ill wind that don't blow nobody no good, and though
+there's a cup broke, it's got us rid of the men, and there's never no
+talking in comfort where they are," remarked Mrs Bray, who had a
+facility for constructing sentences containing several negatives. Two,
+we learn in syntax, have the effect of an affirmative, but there being
+no reference to a repletion, only that her utterances were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
+unmistakably plain, Mrs Bray might have reduced one to wondering the
+purport of her remarks.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you hear the latest?" she said, laughing boisterously. "You don't
+know the people yet," she continued, turning to me, "half of 'em want
+scalding."</p>
+
+<p>Here she burst into a full flood of gossip regarding the misconduct of
+the leading residents; but honest and straightforward though her
+communications were, I cannot include them here, for this is a story
+for respectable folk, and a transcript of the straight talk of the
+most respectable folk would be altogether out of the question. I must
+confine myself to the statement that Mrs Bray had found few beyond
+reproach, and "the latest," as she termed it, concerned one Dr Tinker,
+whose wife&mdash;known colloquially as the old Tinkeress&mdash;had recently
+administered a public horsewhipping to a young lady whom the doctor
+had too ardently admired. Mrs Bray had only just unearthed the facts
+that day, and was overwhelmingly interested in them.</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you what ought to be done with some people," said grandma when
+Mrs Bray halted for breath. "There's no respectability like there used
+to be in my young days. In Gool-gool&mdash;that's where I was rared&mdash;the
+people used to take up anythink that wasn't straight. There was a
+woman there. She and her husband lived happy and respectable, with no
+notion of anythink wrong, till a feller&mdash;a blessed feller," grandma
+waxed fierce, "that was only sellin' things and making a living out of
+honest folk, come to town an' turned her head. I won't say but he was
+a fine-lookin' man, had a grand flowin' beard," grandma spread her
+hands out on her chest.</p>
+
+<p>"Must have been lovely with a <i>beard</i>, especially if it was like Uncle
+Jake's!" interposed Dawn.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"How dare you, miss! Beards is a natural adornment gave to man by God,
+and it's a unnatural notion to carve them off&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Some of them do want adorning, I'll admit," said Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"He was a good-lookin' man," persisted grandma.</p>
+
+<p>"Must have been with a <i>beard</i>!" scornfully contended the
+irrepressible Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"She must be smitten on some of these clean-faced articles," said Mrs
+Bray with a laugh, which effected the collapse of Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"Hold your tongue, miss! surely I can speak in me own house!"
+continued grandma. "And he could sing and play, and that sort of
+thing. At any rate, this woman was terribly gone on him, and her
+husband was heart-broke, and they always lived so happy till then that
+the people of the town took it up. They went to the sergeant and told
+him what they was goin' to do, and he was in such sympathy with 'em
+that he got business that took him to the other end of the town for
+that night."</p>
+
+<p>"That'll tell you now!" exclaimed Mrs Bray with interest.</p>
+
+<p>"And they went and collared him," proceeded the narrator.</p>
+
+<p>"That'll tell you now, the faggot!" exclaimed Mrs Bray again.</p>
+
+<p>"So they took him and put him on a horse, naked except his trousers,
+about twenty of 'em did it, and rode on either side with tar-pots; and
+every time he'd turn his head any way to jaw about what he'd do,
+they'd swab him in the mouth with it; and they had bags of feathers,
+and nearly smothered him with 'em, till with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span> the black tar stickin'
+on every way, and all in his great beard, he would be mistook for
+Nebuchadnezzar. When they got him out of the town he was let go, an'
+they said if he showed hisself in it again worse than that would
+happen him. That's what the men of my day did with a bad egg,"
+concluded the old lady, firm in the belief of the superior virtue of
+her generation.</p>
+
+<p>"What price beards in a case like that?" came from Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"That clean-faced feller of yours would have the advantage then," said
+Mrs Bray. "And now I'll tell you the point of that story. It was just
+the men stickin' up for themselves. If that had been a woman harmed by
+her husband going away with some barmaid, or other of them hussies men
+are so fond of, there wouldn't have been nothing done to avenge <i>her</i>.
+<i>Her</i> heart could have broke, and if she said anything about it people
+would have sat on her, but when one of the poor darling men is hurt
+it's a different thing."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs Bray had yet more to tell, and after another hearty laugh divulged
+a secret that should have pleased a Government lately reduced to
+appointing a commission to inquire into a falling birth-rate.</p>
+
+<p>"This," said grandma in explanation, "is a girl who used to be
+milliner in Trashe's store in Noonoon&mdash;one of them give-herself-airs
+things, like all these county-jumpin' fools! W'en you go to buy a
+thing off of them they look as if you wasn't fit to tie their
+shoe-laces, and they ain't got a stitch to their back, only a few
+pence a-week from eternal standin' on their feet, till they're all
+give way, and only fit for the hospital. I won't say but this one was
+a sprightly enough young body and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span> carried her head high. And there
+was a feller came to town, was stayin' there at Jimmeny's pub. for a
+time, an' walkin' round as if Noonoon wasn't a big enough place for
+the likes of him to own. He talked mighty big about meat export trade,
+an' that was the end of his glory. He married this girl that was
+trimmin' hats, an' she thought she was doin' a stroke to ketch such a
+bug, an' now she lives in that little place built bang on the road as
+you go into town. Larry says he often takes her some meat, he's afraid
+she'll starve; an' you know, though he'll take you down in some ways,
+he's terrible good-natured in others, and that is the way with most of
+us; we have our good an' bad points. But the poor thing! is that what
+she has come to? I ain't had a family of me own not to be able to
+sympathise with her."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she don't deserve no sympathy, she upholds him in his pride,"
+said Mrs Bray.</p>
+
+<p>"Pride! His pride," snorted grandma, "it's of the skunk order. He'd
+make use of every one because he thinks he's an English swell, and
+then wouldn't speak to them if he met them out no more than they were
+dogs. I don't think there's a single thing he could do to save his
+life. If there's a bit of wood to be chopped, she's got to do it, an'
+yet he'd think a decent honest workin' man, who was able to keep his
+wife and family comfortable, wasn't made of as good flesh and blood as
+him. That ain't what I call pride."</p>
+
+<p>"There's one thing, if I ever fell in love with a man he'd have to be
+a man and not a crawler," said Dawn. "Some girls think if they get a
+bit of a swell he's something; but I wouldn't care if a man were the
+Prince of Wales and Lord Muck in one, if he couldn't do things without
+muddling, I'd throw water on him."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What about young Eweword, are you goin' to throw water on <i>him</i>?"
+laughed Mrs Bray.</p>
+
+<p>"Ask Carry, she knows more about him than I do."</p>
+
+<p>"Dawn finds it handy to put her lovers on to me," said Carry, who was
+washing away the spilt tea and airing some uncomplimentary opinions of
+Andrew and Uncle Jake between whiles.</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you come and see me, Carry?" continued Mrs Bray.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't be bothered, I've got my living to earn and have no time for
+visiting," said that uncompromising young woman.</p>
+
+<p>"Anything new on here, Dawn?" asked Mrs Bray, turning to her.</p>
+
+<p>"No, only Miss Flipp's uncle is coming up by this afternoon's train
+and we're dying to see him, there's been so much blow about him.
+Andrew is going to get out a tub to hold the tips."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'll be going now to get Bray his tea or there'll be a jawin'
+and sulkin' match between us. That's the way with men,&mdash;if you're not
+always buckin' around gammoning you think 'em somebody, they get like
+a bear with a scalded head. Well, come over and see me some day," she
+said hospitably to me. "Walk along a bit with me now and see the way."</p>
+
+<p>To this I agreed, and going to get a parasol heard the incautious
+woman remark behind me&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Seems to be an old maid&mdash;a gaunt-lookin' old party&mdash;ain't got no
+complexion. I wonder was she ever going to be married. Don't look as
+if many would be breakin' their necks after her, does she?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs Bray posed as a champion of her sex, but could not open her mouth
+without belittling them. However, I was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span> too well seasoned in human
+nature to be disconcerted, and walked by her side enjoying her
+immensely, she was so delightfully, transparently patronising. There
+are many grades of patronage: that from people who ought to know
+better, and which is always bitterly resented by any one of spirit;
+while that of the big splodging ignoramus who doesn't know any better,
+to any one possessed of a sense of humour, is indescribably amusing.
+Mrs Bray's was of this order, and would have been galling only to the
+snob whose chief characteristic is a lack of common-sense&mdash;lack of
+common-sense being synonymous with snobbery.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll get on very well with old grandma," she remarked, "she ain't
+such a bad old sort when you know her; she must have a bit of property
+too. Of course, I find her a bit narrer-minded, but that's to be
+expected, seeing I've lived a lot in the city before I come here, and
+she's only been up the country; but that Carry's the caution. The
+hussy! I only asked her over out of kindness, being a woman with a
+good home as I have, and did you hear her? Them hussies without homes
+ain't got no call to give themselves airs,&mdash;bits of things workin' for
+their livin'."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I'm in the same category, as I have no home," I said by
+way of turning her wrath.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, yes, but you're different; you don't have to <i>work</i> for
+your livin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you any daughters?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I had one, but she soon married. Like me, she was snapped up soon as
+she was old enough." Mrs Bray laughed delightedly.</p>
+
+<p>Here was a broad-minded democrat who considered a woman lowered in
+becoming a useful working member of society, instead of remaining a
+toy or luxury kept by her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span> father or some other man, and who, while
+loudly bawling for the emancipation of women from the yoke of men,
+nevertheless considered the only distinction a woman could achieve was
+through their favourable notice&mdash;an attitude of mind produced by moral
+and social codes so effectively calculated to foster immoral and
+untenable inconsistency!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THREE" id="THREE"></a>THREE.</h2>
+
+<h3>BECOMING ACQUAINTED WITH GRANDMA CLAY.</h3>
+
+
+<p>When I returned the 'busman was driving away after having brought Miss
+Flipp's uncle, and Andrew was assisting to fill a spring-cart with
+pumpkins. This vehicle had arrived under guidance of a tall, fair
+young man with perfect teeth and a pleasant smile, which kept them
+well before the public, seeing they were not concealed by any hirsute
+ambuscade, regarding the adorning qualities of which Dawn and her
+grandmother were divided. The former came out to inform Andrew that
+the pony had to be harnessed, as Mrs Clay had promised Miss Flipp she
+could drive her uncle back to catch the train.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope the old thing won't smash up the sulky," said Andrew. "He's
+the old bloke that come down here in the summer in a check suit, an' I
+told him you was all out an' we was full up."</p>
+
+<p>"A few of him would soon fill up. He! he! ha! ha!" laughed the fair
+young man. "He looks as if he were always full up! He! he! ha! ha!
+ha!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he's the purplest plum I ever saw," said Dawn. "He's a complete
+hog. He has one of these old noses, all blue, like the big plums that
+grew down near the pig-sty.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span> I think he was grown near the pig-sty,
+too, by the style of him. It must have taken a good many cases of the
+best wine to get a nose just to that colour. Like a meerschaum pipe,
+it takes a power of colouring to get 'em to the right tinge. And his
+eyes hang out like this," said the girl, audaciously stretching her
+pretty long-lashed lids in a way that would have been horrible on a
+less beautiful or less successfully saucy girl, but which in this case
+was irresistibly amusing. The fair young man was convulsed.</p>
+
+<p>"His figure is like as if he had swallowed our great washing-copper
+whole and then padded round it with hay bags, and he has a great
+vulgar stand with one foot here and the other over there by the
+wheelbarrow."</p>
+
+<p>"He must be a acrobat or be made of wonderful elastic, if he could
+stretch that far!" remarked Andrew.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and he gets up a gold-rimmed eyeglass and sticks it on his old
+eye like this, and so I up with my finger and thumb this way in a ring
+and looked at him," said Dawn, with a moue and the protrusion of a
+healthy pink tongue which for dare-devil impertinence beat anything I
+had seen off the stage, and I succumbed to laughter in chorus with the
+young man.</p>
+
+<p>By some intangible indications Andrew and I felt impelled to leave, he
+proceeding to harness the horse and I accompanying him.</p>
+
+<p>"Just look here, 'Giddy-giddy Gout with his shirt-tail out,'"
+exclaimed the lad, breaking into one of the poetic quotations of which
+he was rarely guilty. "Now, I didn't know me pants was tore. I must
+have looked a goat!"</p>
+
+<p>I offered to put a stitch in the breach, so he brought needle and
+thread.</p>
+
+<p>"Now don't you sew me on to me pants. Dawn done that once, thought it
+was a great lark, an' I jolly well couldn't get out; so I busted up
+the whole show, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span> grandma joined in the huspy-puspy, and there's
+been no more larks like that. Thanks, I must do a get and put the pony
+in. Did you notice that bloke fillin' up the cart with pumpkins? He's
+gone on Dawn!"</p>
+
+<p>"He shows good taste."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you reckon Dawn's fit to knock 'em in the eye?"</p>
+
+<p>"Rather!"</p>
+
+<p>"That's bein' a stranger! When you are used to a person every day an'
+they belong to you, you don't think so much of 'em, and at the same
+time think more, if you can understand. What I mean is this. When I'm
+busy fightin' with Dawn, and she's blowing me up for not doing things
+and tellin' grandma on me, I can't see what the blokes can see in her;
+but then if I caught any one saying she wasn't good for anything, if
+he was a bloke I felt fit to wallop, I'd give him a nice sollicker
+under the ear, an' I wouldn't bother about any other girl. Do you
+see?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; I'll hold up the shafts for you."</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks. Well, that's 'Dora' Eweword that's doin' a kill with Dawn
+now."</p>
+
+<p>"Dora is a funny name for a man."</p>
+
+<p>"It ain't his name. He's called it for a lark because he was after a
+girl up in town named Dora Cowper. She serves in a hay and corn store
+at the corner. Things were gettin' on pretty strong, and he used to be
+taking her out all hours of the night and day. Some reckon she's
+better-lookin' than Dawn, and her mother put it around that Eweword
+would make a brilliant match for her, and that shooed him off at once.
+I reckon if I was a girl and wanted to ketch a man I'd hold me mag
+about it, as I know two or three now has been turned off the same
+way."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps Dora Cowper didn't lose much."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he has a bosker farm, you see. He keeps a power of pigs and
+fattens 'em. Then he went after one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span> or two more girls, and now he
+comes here. Buying these pumpkins is only a dodge to get a chip in
+with Dawn. He has plenty lucerne for his pigs, but we have so many
+pumpkins rotting we are glad to get rid of them at two bob a load, and
+I suppose that is cheap to get a yarn with Dawn. He ain't preposed to
+Dawn yet, but I'm sure he's goin' to, because I asked him if he was
+goin' to marry Dora Cowper, an' he said no. Dawn is only pullin' his
+leg for him&mdash;she's got all the blokes on a string. You should see her
+with those that comes up in the summer. It's worth bein' alive in the
+summer. We had melons here in millions. We used to open a big Dixie or
+Cuban Queen and just only claw out the middle. We used to fill the
+water-cask with 'em to cool, an' every time Dawn came out to dive in
+her dipper, wouldn't she rouse! Me an' Uncle Jake used to race to see
+who could eat the most, but he beat. He's a sollicker to stuff when he
+gets anything he likes. It's a wonder we didn't bust. The oranges will
+soon be ripe, that's good luck: I can eat eighty a-day easy. Here
+comes old Bolliver!"</p>
+
+<p>A huge figure as described by Dawn came out of the house in company
+with Miss Flipp, and I recognised Mr Pornsch, the heavy swell who had
+travelled in the 'bus with me on the day of my first arrival in
+Noonoon.</p>
+
+<p>With repulsive clumsiness he climbed into the vehicle, and then said
+roughly, almost brutally, to his niece&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Get in! get in!" and scarcely gave her time to be seated ere he hit
+the pony and nearly screwed its jaw off getting out of the yard.</p>
+
+<p>"Cock-a-doodle-do! Ain't it nice to have a sweet temper," loudly
+remarked Andrew, as he stood aside. "He just is a purple plum. He's
+the kind of old cove<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span> I'd like to get real narked and then scoot.
+Wouldn't he splutter and think himself Lord Muck, and that every one
+oughter be licking his boots!"</p>
+
+<p>Dawn and "Dora" Eweword were still hanging over a garden fence as
+Andrew went after his cows and I betook myself to the house. Uncle
+Jake was in conference with his sister, and gave evidence of fearing I
+should pursue him, so I mercifully betook myself to my own apartment.
+Miss Flipp presently returned, and saying she had had tea up town with
+her uncle and would not want any more, shut herself in her room, from
+whence I soon detected the sound of impassioned sobbing. My first
+impulse was to ask her what was the matter, but my second, born of a
+wide experience of grief, led me to hold my tongue and tell no one
+what I had heard; but to escape from the sound of that pitiable
+weeping I went out in the garden, where I was joined by Mrs Clay.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you see that young feller out there this afternoon? Fine stamp of
+a young man, don't you think?" remarked she.</p>
+
+<p>"He should be able for a good day's work."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; he's none of your tobacco-spitting, wizened-up little runts like
+you'll see hangin' on to the corner-posts in Noonoon."</p>
+
+<p>"Seems to admire your granddaughter?"</p>
+
+<p>"An' he's not the first by a long way that has done that, though she
+was only nineteen this month."</p>
+
+<p>"I can quite believe it. She is a lovely girl."</p>
+
+<p>"An' more than that, a good one. I've never had one moment's
+uneasiness with Dawn; she took after me that way. I could let her go
+out in the world anywhere with no fear of her goin' astray. She's got
+a fine way with men, friendly and full of life, but let 'em attempt to
+come<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span> an inch farther than she wants, and then see! Sometimes I'm
+inclined to wish she's be a little more genteeler; but then I look
+around an' see some of them sleek things, an' it's always them as are
+no good, an' I'm glad then she's what she is. There's some girls here
+in town,"&mdash;the old lady grew choleric,&mdash;"you'd think butter wouldn't
+melt in their mouths, an' they try to sit on Dawn. It's because
+they're jealous of her, that's what it is. I wouldn't own 'em! They'd
+run a man into debt and be a curse to him; but there's Dawn, the man
+that gets her, he'll have a woman that will be of use to him and not
+just a ornament."</p>
+
+<p>"He'll have an ornament too."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps so. I've spent a lot of money on her education. She's been
+taught painting and dancing. I had her down at the Ladies' College in
+Sydney for two years finishing, an' she's had more chances of being a
+lady than most. Some of these things in town here turn up their noses
+at her an' say, 'She's only old Mrs Clay's granddaughter, who keeps a
+accommodation house,' but I pay me bills and ain't ashamed to walk up
+town an' look 'em all in the face."</p>
+
+<p>"But it's generally those who owe the most who have the most lordly
+mien."</p>
+
+<p>"You're right. I could point you out some of them up town as hasn't a
+shirt to their back, an' they look as they owned everythink&mdash;the
+brazenest things!" The old dame's indignation waxed startling in its
+intensity.</p>
+
+<p>"But I was going to tell you about young Eweword. I've set me heart on
+him for Dawn. He's somethink worth lookin' at an' worth havin' too. He
+knows how to farm and make it pay, an' owns one of the best pieces of
+land about Noonoon&mdash;all his own. Dawn don't seem<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span> to take to him as
+she ought. He was after a girl here in town, a Dora Cowper, an' so she
+says she ain't goin' to take any leavin's; but he ain't any leavin's,
+she can be sure of that, for if he'd wanted Dora Cowper they'd have
+snapped him up, an' I think as long as a young feller don't go making
+too much of a fool of a girl, a little flirtation's only natural. This
+has been the mischief with Dawn. There's a lot of people here in the
+summer from the city, and they're all taken with her, and for
+everlasting telling her she's wasting her talents here, that she ought
+to be on the stage. It's a wonder people can't mind their own
+concerns!" (The old dame grew choleric again.) "It makes her think
+what I can give her ain't good enough. It's all very fine in a good
+comfortable home of her own, with love and protection around her, to
+think people mean that sort of thing, an' that w'en she walked out in
+the world they would be anxious to worship her. Just let her go out
+an' try, an' she'd find it all moonshine; but w'en I tell her, she
+only thinks I'm a old pig, an' only she's that stubborn I know she'd
+never come back. (I would be the same myself w'en young, so can't
+blame her.) I'd let her have a taste of hardship to bring her to her
+bearin's. But while I'm alive she'll never have my consent to be a
+actress. W'en I was young they was looked upon as the lowest hussies.
+I'd like to hear what my mother would say if I had wanted to be
+one&mdash;paintin' meself up an' kickin' up me heels and showin' meself
+before men in the loudest manner!"</p>
+
+<p>I concluded not to divulge my profession while at Clay's, and to boot,
+I held much the same point of view.</p>
+
+<p>"She thinks she'd like to marry some fine feller and be a toff; an'
+she's got this danger that's always the drawback<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span> of a girl bein'
+pretty, so many fellers come after them at the start they get finnicky
+an' think they can marry any one, an' leave it too late, an' in the
+end they marry some rubbishing feller an' don't came out half so well
+as the plain ones that was content with a fair thing w'en they had the
+chance of it. Just the same with a boy; it's a bad thing for them to
+be able to do everythink, they are so terribly smart they end up by
+doin' nothink, an' the ploddin' feller they grinned at for bein' a
+booby, because he stuck to the one thing, comes out on top."</p>
+
+<p>"Just so; want of concentration plucks one every time."</p>
+
+<p>"That's wot I want to save Dawn from. It's all right while I live, an'
+I don't want her to be chuckin' herself at the head of any Tom or
+Dick, but I won't live for ever, an' marriage is like everythink else,
+you want to have your eye on a good thing an' not humbug too much.
+W'en I'm gone"&mdash;the austere old face softened&mdash;"I wouldn't like to
+think of her I've spent so much money on, an' rared with me own hand,
+as I did her an' her mother before her, growin' old an' sour an'
+lonely, or bein' a slave to some worthless crawler." The old voice
+grew perilously soft, and saved itself from a break by a swift
+crescendo.</p>
+
+<p>"As I say, I suppose she's waitin' for some great impossible feller to
+come along, like we do w'en we're young; but these upper ten is the
+worst matches a girl can make, an' besides there's too many trying to
+ketch them in their own rank. I've had lots of 'em here, an' to see
+these swell girls the way they try to ketch some one would make you
+ill. Don't you think so?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, my sympathies are always with the swell girl in the matrimonial
+market," I replied. "She has a far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span> harder time than those of the
+working classes. You see, so many of the well-to-do eligibles prefer
+working girls&mdash;actresses, chorus-singers, and barmaids, which, in
+addition to marriage in their own class, gives these girls a chance of
+stepping up; whereas the swell girls cannot marry grooms and footmen
+and raise them to their rank as their brothers can their housemaids
+and ballet-girls. To be a success the society girl must marry a man of
+sufficient means to keep her as an expensive toy, and this description
+of bachelor being scarce in any case, little wonder she has to hunt
+hard and tries to protect her preserves from poachers. Think of it
+that way."</p>
+
+<p>"There is a lot in that, and that's why I like to see Dawn have young
+Eweword, who's a man I'd be happy to leave her to; but I daren't say a
+word, she's mighty touchy an' would flash up that she'd leave if I
+want to get rid of her. But while I've got breath in me body there's
+one thing I will set me foot on, an' that's these good-for-nothing
+skunks like bankers' sons an' them sort of high an' mighty pauper
+nobodies; they're fearful matches for any one. I know too much about
+the swells an' the old families of the colony, I'm thankful I ain't
+one of them. My father came out here a long time ago, an' I was born
+out here. He was a sergeant in the police. I am near seventy-six, an'
+can remember plain for seventy years back in the days w'en there was
+plenty convicts, an' me father, seein' his position, was put to see
+the floggin' of them. Me and another little girl that's dead now used
+to climb up a tree an' look over the wall like children would. We was
+stationed in Goulburn then, an' I'll never forget the scenes to me
+dyin' day. The men used to be stripped to the waist and tied on a
+triangle and walloped till they was cut to pieces, till they screamed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
+like little children for mercy, and poor old wretches that had roamed
+the world for sixty years used to screech Mother! Mother! like little
+children. It was heart-renderin'! An' what used they be flogged for,
+do you think?&mdash;for the piggishness of the swells mostly. I'll tell
+you. There was a old feller lived out at Kaligiwa&mdash;that's more than
+twenty miles the other side of Goulburn, an' there's Parry's Lagoon
+there called after him till this day. He was a old Lord Muck if ever
+there was one, an' by reason of that got a land grant an' men
+assigned, an' he ought to have been give to them to kick&mdash;would have
+been the right thing; an' then he had a lot of skunks of sons,&mdash;took
+after their father, of course, an' hadn't much chance of bein'
+anythink else,&mdash;an' w'en they used to ride to town they used to have a
+man tied to the stirrup just to hold it."</p>
+
+<p>"What was that for?"</p>
+
+<p>"What was it for?" she raged. "It was because they was those skunks of
+swells that think other people is only made as floor wipes for 'em!
+An' this feller used to have to run all the way to town, and if he
+hadn't strength to run all the way he'd be dragged, an' if he give any
+lip the Parrys 'u'd report 'em; an' me father says he's often seen 'em
+flogged till their backs were like ploughed, an' then have to run the
+twenty miles home. Me father used to come in every day and fling
+hisself down an' cry and sob as if his heart would break, an' say he'd
+rather starve than stay in the police. Now, the Parrys got up an' one
+of them had a 'Sir' sent out to his name, and you'll see 'em writ
+about as one of the few <i>old</i> families; and I hold that Dawn come from
+better stock than them, and has more to be proud of in her
+grandfather&mdash;he had some heart in him. An' Lord! there's Miss Flipp's
+uncle, one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span> look at him ought to be sufficient warnin' to any girl.
+The likes of him is common among the swells&mdash;too much stuffin' an'
+drinkin' an' debochary. Nice thing if Dawn married a swell an' he
+developed into a old pig like that. I can tell you another great
+family of swells, the Goburnes&mdash;entertained the Royalties w'en they
+was out here, an' are such bugs one of 'em married the Governor's
+daughter. They got up about the same way. In the old days w'en things
+were carelesser an' land wasn't much, the old cock of all had the
+surveyor that was gone on his daughter measurin' the land, an' got him
+to slice in great pieces by false measurement, an' worked the lives
+out of convicts&mdash;as big a brute as the Parrys. That's the breed of the
+swells, an' I have a horror of them. The people as I consider ought to
+be the swells in this country is them that came out first, the free
+emigrants, and honestly worked up the colony with their own hands, an'
+their children done the same for four or five generations&mdash;them's the
+only proper Australian aristocracy we've got. That's why I have sich a
+contempt for this Rooney-Molyneux, Mrs Bray was tellin' of; only times
+is different he'd be the same, he's got the sort of pride that thinks
+his wife is a black gin because she was only a milliner."</p>
+
+<p>Out past the placard advertising Mrs Clay's boats gleamed the
+highroad, and from where we walked could be seen a now unused old
+stone milepeg, carved in Roman lettering, its legend differing
+somewhat from that in modern figures painted on the miniature wooden
+post by which it had been deposed. It was one of many relics of the
+dead and gone convicts who had done giant pioneer labour in this broad
+bright land in the days when Grandma Clay's mother had been young.
+Fine old grandma, daughter of a fine old dad who had wept for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>
+cruelty endured by the men who had worked in chain-gangs and were
+flogged under his superintendence, and thinking thus I turned to the
+old dame who had ceased talking and said&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"And what of your father, did he get away from seeing the convicts
+flogged?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; me mother thought he was goin' mad. He used to sob in his sleep
+an' call out and squirm that he couldn't bear to see them flogged, an'
+leap up in bed in a sweat. So he gave up the police an' we went a long
+way farther back to Gool-Gool on the Yarrangung, a tributary of the
+Murrumbidgee. The train in them days was only a little way out of
+Sydney, an' me father got a job of drivin' Cobb &amp; Co.'s coaches from
+Gool-Gool to Yarrandogi, an' me an' me mother an' sisters an' Jake
+there used to live in a little tent at the first stage out of
+Gool-Gool, an' take care of the horses. I was fond of them horses, and
+used to sneak out to harness them on to the swingle-bar w'en I was no
+higher than the table. It's a wonder I didn't get me brains knocked
+out. I was lots smarter than Jake there with the horses, though it
+ain't supposed to be girl's work. But it came nacheral to me, an' I
+think in that case it's right. That's why I never was one to narrer
+girls down an' say you mustn't do this and that because you're a girl.
+I've always found, in spite of their talk, the best and gamest mothers
+is the ones that grew out of the tomboy girls. Well, it come that me
+father, being a steady man an' very kind and well liked, he got on
+surprisin', an' soon the tent give place to a bark hut. That's the way
+people worked up in my days, an' what they had was their own. They
+didn't want to start in mansions an' eat off of silver at the expense
+of others like in these times! After that we moved a long way down an'
+took<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span> up a position on the Murra-Murra run beside the Sydney road,
+where the coaches passed in the night; an' me mother made hot coffee
+for the passengers, an' we drove a roarin' trade, had to git girls in
+to help, an' put up a large accommodation house, and respectable
+people always made to us" (the old head went high and the eyes
+flashed) "because we was clean, temperance people, there never was no
+D.T.'s or sly grog where we had the rule. An' that's why I always like
+to have a few people in the house to this day. I'm used to their
+company like, an' feel there's nothing goin' on or doing without them.
+Well, I grew up in time. I can't say it meself, but them as knew me
+then could tell you I wasn't disfigured in any way or a cripple, an'
+had no lack of admirers. Me an' me two sisters had 'em by the score
+waitin' till we grew old enough to be married. I can tell you there
+was some smart fellers among 'em. Those were the times! Me sisters
+made what is called swell matches, an' not bein' used to bein' cooped
+up, their lives was failures. I was the only one married in me own
+circle, and my life was a pattern to the others. I was the oldest an'
+waited last, an' me mother was that disappointed in me that I had to
+run away, an' I have me reasons for fearin' Dawn is on for a swell. I
+seen me sisters' lives. I call them unwholesome marriages when girls
+marries these fellers, an' their narrer-minded people sits on her an'
+is that depraved they turn him agen her!" Mrs Clay was vehement.</p>
+
+<p>"When Dawn's mother grew up she was Dawn's image, an' we was keepin' a
+accommodation house too, that is Jim Clay an' me, and Dawn's mother
+was reckoned the prettiest and best girl in them parts, an' had lovers
+from far and near; but there came a feller up from Sydney to stay,
+nothin' to blow about neither, but he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span> dreadfully gone on me
+daughter. He seemed all right, but I was agen him&mdash;being a
+swell,&mdash;till me daughter threatened she'd run away with him if I
+didn't let her have him peaceful, an' rememberin' me own youth, I let
+her have him in spite of me misgivin's. She went home with him, an' it
+appears he was like these crawlin' fellers&mdash;couldn't do nothink, only
+what their parents give them; an' w'en they found he'd married a fine,
+good, wholesome girl, instead of one of their own style&mdash;one of the
+Parrys for instance&mdash;they cut him off with a shilling, an' poor thing
+she nearly starved, an' took to work to keep him, an' he always
+growlin' at her like the coward he was, that only for her he'd have
+been well off. A mess-alliance his people called it, but the mess
+wasn't from poor Mary's side. Well, w'en it come that she was to be a
+mother, his people took her in and told her, if you please, that if it
+was a boy they'd take it theirselves and educate it fit for their
+family, but if it was a girl they wouldn't. The poor thing, not bein'
+able for anythink an' too proud to come home, stood their insults as
+long as she could, an' at last she sneaked out at night and set off to
+walk to me. It is pitiable to think of."</p>
+
+<p>The poor old voice trembled.</p>
+
+<p>"She had more'n a hundred miles to travel an' it took her days, but
+some folk was good, an' one cold night about three hours before
+daylight she startled me by comin' into my room. I remember it like
+yesterday. 'Mother,' she says, 'I'm ill; I'm goin' to die; you won't
+let them take my child, will you?' I thought her wanderin', an' she
+was so gentle it frightened me; for we was always saucy ladies, I can
+tell you&mdash;every one of us, an' you can see Dawn is the same now. But
+that's only a way; w'en I'm ill she's as tender as anythink. It's
+grandma wouldn't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span> this do you good, and that do you good? An' her
+little hands is very clever an' nice about my old bones w'en they
+ache. Well, her mother was took bad an' me an' her father done our
+best, an' her baby came into the world&mdash;a poor miserable little
+winjin' thing, an' its mother turnin' over said, 'What's that light,
+mother, comin' in, is it the Dawn?' an' lookin' up I see it was the
+Dawn; an' she never spoke again, but went off simple an' sudden just
+then, an' that's how Dawn come to get her name. I never thought she'd
+live to be called by it though. Little winjin' thing! I had to feed
+her on the bottle an' everythink disagreed with her. We had to keep a
+old cow especial. I remember her as clear as yesterday&mdash;a big old cow
+with a dew-lap an' a crumpled horn; we called her Ladybird because she
+was spots all over. As for <i>them</i> getting Dawn! They had the cheek to
+write an' say if it was a boy they'd take it. They had the cheek after
+what happened&mdash;that's swells for you again! I writ them one letter in
+return that I reckon ought to last them to their dying day. I told
+them it wasn't any matter to them what <i>my</i> child was; that they had
+<i>murdered</i> one already, let that be sufficient for them; that they'd
+get no more unless over my dead body; an' that all I regretted was
+that the child had any of their cowardly blood in it, that it almost
+discouraged me about its rarin'. An' Dawn don't know her name, an'
+won't unless she's married. Her father married again, an' I'm glad to
+say never had another child, an' I believe hankers for Dawn, an' he
+will hanker for my part; an' I've got Dawn tootered up agen him too.
+Now you can see the blow it would be to me if she took up with a
+swell&mdash;there's no happiness marryin' out of yer own religion or class.
+Mine was what I'd call a love match now. Jim<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span> Clay <i>was</i> a lover! I've
+seen him come in with a team of five all buckin', an' it snowin' an'
+never anythink but a laugh out of him. He'd ride miles an' miles to
+see me. The crawlers about these parts nowadays toddle about on bikes
+or sit like great-grandfathers in sulkies, an' if it was to sprinkle
+they'd think half a mile too far to go to see their sweetheart. I
+think the heart of the world must be dyin' out."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll tell me about Jim Clay, won't you?" I said; "for I am an
+Australian&mdash;one of those you consider entitled to be termed a real
+aristocrat. My people for several generations have practically worked
+in the building of the State, though I must admit they belonged to the
+leisured class at home."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that ain't nothink agen 'em when they don't make it nothink
+agen 'em, if you understand. If a swell can prove hisself as good an'
+useful a man as another, he deserves the credit, an' comes out ahead
+too, because he has the education, an' sometimes that is useful. I'll
+tell you about me young days. Lately me mind seems to be goin' back
+more an' more to old times."</p>
+
+<p>"Grandma! Grandma!" called Dawn's rich young voice, "come to tea.
+Andrew and Carry want to go up town after."</p>
+
+<p>As I turned and looked at this glowing vision I laughed to think of
+her as a "little winjin' thing," and was grateful to the good offices
+of old Ladybird with the dew-lap and a crumpled horn.</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't be in such a hurry all of a suddent," said grandma
+crossly. "It's a different tune w'en <i>you're</i> hangin' over the fence
+talkin' somewhere. There's no hurry roundin' me in to tea <i>then</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>We lingered awhile watching the afterglow above the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span> great range
+dividing the coast land from the vast stretches of the interior, and
+which was no longer an impassable barrier to the people of the State.
+Now the train toiled over a stile-like way connecting east and west,
+and Noonoon and Kangaroo, divided by a mile and the river, nestled
+immediately at the foot of the zigzag climb.</p>
+
+<p>They lay asleep against the ranges in a slow-going world of their own,
+their little houses gleaming white in the fading light.</p>
+
+<p>There was a flush on the old woman's face as she turned
+houseward&mdash;also an afterglow. 'Twas a fitting nook for her present
+days, the decline of those splendidly vigorous years behind! What
+satisfaction to look back on strenuous, fruitful years, and be able to
+afford rest during the last stages!</p>
+
+<p>I, too, had rest; but it was only the ignominious idleness of a young
+boat with a broken propeller yarded among honourably worn-out craft to
+await a foundering.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="FOUR" id="FOUR"></a>FOUR.</h2>
+
+<h3>DAWN'S AMBITION.</h3>
+
+
+<p>After tea grandma took to reading the 'Noonoon Advertiser'&mdash;a
+four-sheet weekly publication containing local advertisements, weather
+remarks, and a little kindly gossip about townspeople. This was her
+usual Saturday night entertainment. Carry and Andrew went to town to
+participate in the unfailing diversion of a large percentage of the
+population. This was tramping up and down the main street in a stream
+till the business places closed, from which exercise they apparently
+derived an enjoyment not visible to my naked eye. Uncle Jake and Miss
+Flipp not being in evidence, Dawn and I were the only two unoccupied,
+and noticing that she was prettily dressed, I resorted to a point of
+common interest in promoting friendliness between members of our sex
+and invited her to look at a kimono I had bought for a dressing-gown.</p>
+
+<p>This had the desired effect. A look of pleasure passed over the face
+that charmed me so, and she arose willingly.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad it is my week to stay in and make the bedtime coffee," she
+said as we examined the gorgeous kimono, a garment of dark-flowered
+silk; and Dawn,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span> having all the fetichly and long-engendered feminine
+love of self-decoration, was delighted with it.</p>
+
+<p>"Put it on," I suggested, and the girl complied with alacrity. She did
+not make a very natural Jap, being more on the robust than <i>petite</i>
+scale, but she was a very beautiful girl. With my impassioned love of
+beauty I could not help exclaiming about hers, and the foolish
+platitude, "You ought to be on the stage," inadvertently escaped me,
+seeing this is the highest market for beauty in these days when even
+personal emotions can be made to have commercial value.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think so too?" she said eagerly, betraying what lay near her
+heart. "Do you know anything about the stage? You don't think all
+actresses bad women like grandma does, do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Scarcely! Some of the most sweet and lovable women I've ever seen are
+earning their living on the boards. I'm intimately acquainted with
+several actresses, and will show you their photographs some day."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'd love to be on the stage!" exclaimed the girl.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me why and how you first came to have such a wish."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's this way," said Dawn, pulling my kimono close about her
+beautifully rounded throat and curling her pink feet on a wallaby-skin
+at the bedside as she sat down upon them. "I heard grandma telling you
+something about me this afternoon, and I suppose you think I'm a
+terrible girl."</p>
+
+<p>"A beautiful one," I said, revelling in the curling lips and rounded
+cheek and chin.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't make fun of me," said Dawn huffily, blushing like noon.</p>
+
+<p>"Good gracious, now <i>you</i> are making fun of me. I'm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span> only stating a
+patent fact. Mirrors and men must have told you a thousand times that
+you are pretty."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, them! They say it to every one. Look here&mdash;there's the ugliest
+little runts of girls in Noonoon, and they're always telling their
+conquests and that this man and that man say they're pretty, when a
+blind cat could see that they are ugly, and the men must be just
+stringing them to try and take them down. So when they say it to me I
+always make up my mind I'd have more gumption than to take notice, for
+I can't see any beauty in myself. I'm too fat and strong-looking; all
+the beauties are thin and delicate-looking in the face&mdash;not a bit like
+me. I know I'm not cross-eyed or got one ear off, but that's about
+all."</p>
+
+<p>I had been wont to think the only place unconscious beauties abounded
+was in high-flown, unreal novels; but here was one in real life, and
+that the exceedingly unvarnished existence of Noonoon. Not that I
+would have thought any the less of her had she been conscious of her
+physical loveliness, for beauty is such a glorious, powerful,
+intoxicating gift that had I been blessed with it I'm sure I would
+have admired myself all day, and the wonder to me regarding beautiful
+men and women is not that they are so conceited, but, on the contrary,
+that they are so little vain.</p>
+
+<p>"I want to tell you why I want to be on the stage. I couldn't tell how
+I hate Noonoon. It's all very well for grandma to settle down now and
+want me to be the same, but when she was young (you get her to tell
+you some of the yarns, they're tip-top) she wasn't as quiet as I am by
+a long way. Just fancy marrying some galoot about here and settling
+down to wash pots and pack tomatoes and live in the dust among the
+mosquitoes, <i>always</i>! I'd<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span> rather die. I'll tell you the whole thing
+while I'm about it. You won't mind, as I'm sure you have had trouble
+too, as your white hair doesn't look to be age."</p>
+
+<p>Comparison of her midget irritation with those that had put broad
+white streaks in my hair was amusing, but the rosy heart of a girl
+magnifies that which it doesn't contract.</p>
+
+<p>"Grandma wants me to marry. Did you see that fellow who was after
+pumpkins?&mdash;he ought to make one of his head, the great thing! Grandma
+has a fancy for me having him, but I wouldn't marry him if he were the
+only man in Noonoon. Do you know, they actually call him Dora because
+he was breaking his neck after a girl of that name. He used to be
+making red-hot love to her. Young Andrew there saw him up the lane by
+Bray's with his arm round her waist, mugging her for dear life, and
+then he'd come over here and want to kiss me! If he had seen me up a
+lane hugging the baker, I wonder would he want me then!" Dawn's tone
+approached tears, for thus are sensitive maiden hearts outraged by an
+inconsistent double standard of propriety and its consequences, great
+and small.</p>
+
+<p>"Grandma says that's nothing if it's not worse, for that's the way of
+men, but I'd rather have some one who hadn't done it so plainly right
+under my nose; people wouldn't be able to poke it at me then. I've got
+him warded off proposing, and while I guard against that it's all
+right. Now, this is why I'd like to be on the stage. I'd love to have
+been born rich and have lovely dresses, and I'm sure I could hold
+receptions and go to balls, and the stage would be next best to
+reality."</p>
+
+<p>"But why not marry some one who could give you these things?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Where would I find him? You may bet that's the sort of man I'd like
+to marry if I did marry at all," and the dullest observer could have
+seen she was heart-whole and fancy free. Certainly there would be a
+difficulty in procuring that brand of eligible. There was but a
+limited supply of him on the market, and that was generally
+confiscated to the use of imported actresses, and, could society
+journals be relied upon, it was the same in England; so Dawn showed
+good instinct in wanting to bring herself into more equal competition
+with the winners.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you sing?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've never been trained," she said, but at my request went to the
+piano in the next room and gave vent to a strong, clear mezzo. It was
+a good voice&mdash;undoubtedly so. There are many such to be heard all over
+Australia&mdash;girls singing at country concerts without instruction, or
+the ignorant instruction more injurious than helpful. These voices are
+marred to the practised ear by the style of production, which in a
+year or two leaves them cracked and awful. This widespread lack of
+voice preservation is the result of a want of public musical training.
+With all the training in Paris, Dawn would never have been a Dolores
+or Calv&eacute;, but with other ability she had sufficient voice to make a
+success in comic opera or in concerts as second fiddle to a star
+soprano.</p>
+
+<p>"You must sing again for me," I said, "and I'll discover whether you
+have any ability." For the way to wean any one from a desire is not by
+condemnation of it.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you say anything to grandma about me and the stage or she'd
+very nearly turn you out of the house. You just ask her what she
+thinks of it some time, and it will give you an idea; but I hate
+Noonoon, and would run away, only grandma goes on so terribly about
+hussies that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span> go to the bad, and she's very old, and you know how you
+feel that a curse might follow you when people go on that way," said
+the girl in bidding me good night.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn had many characteristics that made one love her, and a few in
+spite of which one bore her affection. Her method of dealing with her
+native tongue came among the latter. It was reprehensible of her too,
+seeing the money her grandmother had spent in giving her a chance to
+be a lady&mdash;that is, the type of lady who affects a blindness
+concerning the stern, plain facts of existence, and who considers that
+to speak so that she cannot be heard distinctly is an outward sign of
+innate refinement. She had made poor use of her opportunities in this
+respect, but if to be honest, healthy, and wholesome is lady-like,
+then Dawn was one of the most vigorous and thoroughly lady-like folk I
+have known, and what really constitutes a lady is a mootable point
+based largely upon the point of view.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="FIVE" id="FIVE"></a>FIVE.</h2>
+
+<h3>MISS FLIPP'S UNCLE.</h3>
+
+
+<p>I did not sleep that night. Dawn and her grandma had given me too much
+food for cogitation. I felt I had incurred a responsibility in regard
+to the former, upon which I chewed tough cud at the expense of sleep.</p>
+
+<p>While there was hard common-sense in the old grandmother's point of
+view, it was also easy to be at one with the girl's desire for
+something brighter and more stirring than old Noonoon afforded. The
+fertile valley was beautiful in all truth, but with the beauty that
+appeals only to the storm-wrecked mariner, worn with a glut of human
+strife and glad to be at anchor for a time rebuilding a jaded
+constitution.</p>
+
+<p>Upon a first impression this girl did not seem abnormally anxious for
+the mere plaudits or the notoriety part of the stage-struck's fever,
+nor was she alight with that fire called genius which will burn a hole
+through all obstacles till it reaches its goal; she appeared rather to
+regard the stage as a means to an end&mdash;a pleasant easy way, in the
+notion of the inexperienced, of obtaining the fine linen and silver
+spoon she desired. Had she been a boy, doubtless she would have set
+out to work for her ambition, but being a girl she sought to climb<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span> by
+the most approved and usual ladder within reach&mdash;the stage; for
+actresses all married the lovely, rich (often titled) young gentlemen
+who sat in rows in the front seats and admired the high-class "stars"
+and worshipped the ballerinas and chorus girls, or so at least a great
+many people believed, being led astray by certain columns in gossip
+newspapers, which doubtless have a colouring of truth inasmuch that
+the women of the stage are idealised creatures&mdash;idealised by
+limelight, and advertised by a pushing management for the benefit of
+the box-office.</p>
+
+<p>Now Dawn had ample ability and appearance for success on the stage if
+her parents had been there before her, so that she could have grown up
+in touch with it, but whether she had sufficient iron and salt to push
+her way against the barriers in her pathway I doubted. Only sheer
+genius can get to the front in any line of art with which it is not in
+touch, and even giant talent is often so mangled in the struggle that
+when it wrests recognition it is too spent to maintain the altitude it
+has attained at the expense of heart-sweat and blood.</p>
+
+<p>The girl worried me, and it worried me more to think that after all my
+experience I was so foolish and sentimental that I could be worried
+regarding her. She had a comfortable home, a loving guardian, youth,
+health, good appearance, and, to a certain extent, fitted her
+surroundings. There was nothing of the ethereally &aelig;sthetic about her,
+and no stretch of sickly imagination could picture her as pining to be
+understood. Notwithstanding this, there was I longing to help her so
+much that, in spite of my health and an acquaintance that was only
+twelve hours old, I was contemplating entering society<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span> for her sweet
+sake. The fact was, this little orphan girl who had taken up the life
+her mother had laid down at dawn of day nineteen years ago, had
+collected my scalp, and was at leave to string it on her belt as that
+of an ardent faithful lover who never entertained one unworthy thought
+of her, or wavered in affection from the hour she first flashed upon
+her.</p>
+
+<p>I desired to save her from such savage disappointment as had blighted
+my life, not that she would ever have the capacity to feel my frenzy
+of griefs, but remembering my own experience, I was ever anxious to
+save other youngsters from the possibilities of a similar fate.</p>
+
+<p>The best disposal to be made of Dawn was to settle her in marriage
+with some decent and well-to-do man on the sunny side of thirty; but
+where was such an one?</p>
+
+<p>Thus I lay awake, and heard the hours chime and the trains go roaring
+by, till all the household but Miss Flipp had returned. She entered
+from the outside, did not come in till after midnight, and was not
+alone. Her uncle accompanied her. My room had French lights opening
+into the garden in the same way as Miss Flipp's, and as my ailment was
+a heart affection it was sometimes necessary for me to go outside to
+get sufficient air, and in this instance I had the door-windows wide
+open and the bed pulled almost to the opening. Miss Flipp apparently
+had her window open too, for despite the conversation in her room
+being in subdued tones, I heard it where I lay.</p>
+
+<p>It contained startling disclosures anent these two persons' relations
+and characters, and when Mr Pornsch went his way with the uneven
+footsteps of the overfed and of accumulating years, he left me in a
+painful state of perturbation.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>What course should I pursue?</p>
+
+<p>Casting on a pair of slippers and a heavy cloak, I took a little path
+leading from my window through the garden to the pier where the boats
+were moored, and here I sat down to consider. Experience had taught me
+to be chary of entering matters that did not concern me, but it had
+not made me sufficiently callous to preserve my equanimity in face of
+a discovery so serious as this.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Flipp had sinned the sin which, if discovered, put a great gulf
+'twixt her and Grandma Clay, Dawn, Carry, and myself, but which would
+not prevent her fellow-sinner from associating with us on more than
+terms of equality. Should Grandma Clay become aware of what I knew,
+she certainly would bundle the girl out neck and crop, as she would be
+justified in doing. But the girl was in a ghastly predicament, and
+more sinned against than sinning, when one heard her grief and
+remembered the age of her betrayer, which should have made him the
+protector instead of the seducer of young women.</p>
+
+<p>Times out of number the dramatic critics have termed me an artist of
+the first rank, and it is this temperament which furnishes the faculty
+of regarding all shades and consequences of life's issues unabashed,
+and with the power to distil knowledge from good and bad and use it
+experimentally, rather than, as a judge, condemnatory.</p>
+
+<p>I determined to keep the girl's secret, and show myself
+sympathetically friendly otherwise, hoping she would extend me her
+confidence, so that in a humble way I might be privileged to stand
+between her and perdition.</p>
+
+<p>It was a beautiful night, one of those when the moon relinquishes her
+court to the little stars. Vehicular traffic had ceased, and the only
+sound breaking the still<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>ness of the great frostless, silver-spangled
+darkness was the panting of the steam-engines and the murmur of the
+river where half a mile down it took a slight fall over boulders. The
+electric lights of the town twinkled in the near distance, and farther
+east was a faint glow beyond the horizon, rightly or wrongly
+attributed to the lights of the metropolis. After a time it grew
+chilly, and I was glad to return to my bed. Dawn was separated from me
+by a thin wooden partition, and her strong healthy breathing was
+plainly discernible as she lay like an opening rose in maiden slumber,
+but there was now no sound from the room of the other poor girl&mdash;a
+rose devoured by the worm in its core.</p>
+
+<p>Next morning, however, she appeared at breakfast, for Clay's was not a
+house wherein one felt encouraged to coddle themselves without
+exceptional reason, and to all but a suspicious or hypercritical
+observer she seemed as usual.</p>
+
+<p>Carry was going to church.</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't been able to go this three weeks because my dress wasn't
+finished, and next Sunday will be my week in the kitchen, so if I
+don't go now I won't be able to show it for a fortnight," she
+announced.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I ain't going," said grandma. "Gimme back your porridge, I
+forgot to dose it"&mdash;this to Andrew, on whose oatmeal she had omitted
+to put sugar and milk. "I've always found church is a good deal of
+bother when you have any important work. I contribute to the stipend;
+that ought to be enough for 'em. If one spent all their time running
+to church they would have no money to give to it, an' I never yet see
+praying make a living for any one but the parsons."</p>
+
+<p>Thus, Dawn being engaged in the kitchen, and her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span> Uncle Jake keeping
+her company there while he perused the 'Noonoon Advertiser,' which
+descended to him on Sunday morning, Andrew having gone away with Jack
+Bray, and Miss Flipp being invisible, grandma and I were left together
+to enjoy a small fire in the dining-room, so I took this opportunity
+of inquiring how Jim Clay had managed to capture her. This sort of
+thing interested me; I liked life in the actuality where there was no
+counterfeit or make-believe to offend the sense of just proportions.
+Not that I do not love books and pictures, but they have to be so very
+very good before they can in any way appease one, while the meanest
+life is absorbingly interesting, invested as it must ever be with the
+dignity of reality.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="SIX" id="SIX"></a>SIX.</h2>
+
+<h3>GRANDMA CLAY'S LOVE-STORY.</h3>
+
+
+<p>"Oh, you don't want to hear it now," she said in response to my
+request, but she gave a pleased laugh, betraying her willingness to
+tell it. "Sometimes I get running on about old times an' don't know
+where to stop, an' Dawn says people only pretend to be interested in
+me out of politeness. I think I hinted to you that mine was a love
+match&mdash;the only sort of marriage there ought to be; any other sort, in
+my mind, is only fit for pigs."</p>
+
+<p>"But sometimes love matches would be utterly absurd," I remarked.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, people that are utterly absurd ought to be locked up in a
+asylum. Anybody that's <i>fit</i> to love wouldn't love a fool, because
+there must be reason in everything. <i>Some</i> people I know would love a
+monkey, but they ain't fit to be counted with the people that keeps
+the world going. Well, I got as far as we kep' a accommodation house
+on the Sydney road,&mdash;fine road it was too, level and strong, and in
+many places flagged by the convicts, an' it stands good to this day.
+It ain't like these God-forsaken roads about here,"&mdash;grandma showed
+symptoms of convulsions,&mdash;"but <i>some</i> people is only good for to be
+stuffed in a&mdash;a&mdash;asylum, and that's where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span> the Noonoon Municipal
+Council ought to be, an' I say it though Jake there, me own brother,
+is one of them."</p>
+
+<p>"Did Jim Clay&mdash;" I said, by way of keeping to the subject.</p>
+
+<p>"I told you how I used to sneak out to buckle the horses on; an' w'en
+Jack Clay, a great chum of me father's, used to be driving the 'Up'
+coach, me father, w'en he'd be slack of passengers,&mdash;which wasn't
+often, there being more life and people moving in the colony
+then,&mdash;an' w'en I'd be good, would put me up on the box an' take me on
+to the next stage, an' I'd come back with Jack Clay&mdash;that was me
+husband's father.</p>
+
+<p>"As it used to be in the night, it usedn't to take from me time, an'
+I'd be up again next day as if I'd slep' forty hours. I wasn't like
+the girls these days, if they go to a blessed ball an' are up a few
+hours they nearly have to stay in bed a week after it. In that way I
+come to be a great hand with the reins, an' me father took a deal of
+pride in me because all the young men up that way began to talk about
+me. Me father had the best team of horses on the road. He used to
+always drive them hisself. He was always a kind man to every one and
+everythink about him. He drove three blood coachers abreast and two
+lighter ones, Butterfly and Fairy, in the lead. Weren't them days!
+That great coach swingin' round the curves and sidlings in the dark, I
+fancy I can feel the reins between me fingers now! And there was
+always a lot of jolly fellows, and usedn't they to cheer me w'en the
+horses 'u'd play up a bit. It was considered wonderful for me to
+manage such a team. I was only a slight slip of a girl, not near so
+fat as Dawn; she takes more after her grandfather. Me and me sisters
+had no lack of sweethearts, and we didn't run<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span> after them neither.
+Some people make me that mad the way they run after people and lick
+their boots. W'en I'd be drivin' with me father, Jim Clay used to be
+with his, but he was some years older than me. He wanted to enter the
+drivin' business soon as opportunity came, an' him an' me were sort of
+rivals like. Many of the young swells used to bring me necklaces and
+brooches, but somehow when Jim Clay only brought me a
+pocket-handkerchief or a lump of ribbon I liked it better an' kep' it
+away in a little scented box an' I was supposed to be in love with a
+good many in them days. <i>Some people</i> always knows other's business
+better than they do theirselves. Me two sisters got married soon as
+they were eighteen&mdash;one to a thrivin' young squatter, an' the other to
+a rich old banker. Seein' how she got on is what makes me agen old men
+marryin' young girls. It ain't natural. A man might marry a girl a few
+years younger than hisself, but there must be reason in everythink. I
+was older than me sisters, an' people began to twit me an' say I'd be
+left on the shelf, but before this, w'en I was sixteen an' Jim Clay
+twenty, me father broke his leg and was put by. All his trouble was
+his horses; he fretted an' fretted that they'd be spoilt by a careless
+driver, an' he had 'em trained so they knew nothing but kindness. I
+was only too willin', and I up an' undertook to drive the coach right
+through. Old Jack Clay said he'd come with me a turn or two an' leave
+Jim to take his team, but just then he had some terrible new horses
+that no one could handle but hisself,&mdash;he was a wonderful hand with
+horses was Jim's father,&mdash;so Jim was sent with me. My, wasn't there a
+cheer when I first brought the mail in all on me own!" The old face
+flashed forth a radiance as she told her tale.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Some of the old gents in the town of Gool-Gool come out an' shook
+hands with me, an' the ladies kissed me w'en I got down off of the
+box. There was a lawyer feller considered a great lady-killer in them
+days. He had a long beard shaved in the Dundreary,&mdash;Dawn always says
+he must have been a howler with a beard of that description; but times
+change, an' these clean-faced women-lookin' fellers the girls think is
+very smart now will look just as strange by-an'-by. However, he was
+runnin' strong with me, an' me mother considered him favourable,&mdash;him
+bein' a swell an' makin' his way. Soon as ever I started runnin' the
+coach he was took with a lot of business down the road, an' used to be
+nearly always a passenger."</p>
+
+<p>"It appears that sweetheart tactics have not changed if the style in
+beards has," I remarked with a smile.</p>
+
+<p>"No, an' they'll never change, seein' a man is a man an' a girl a
+girl, no matter what fashions come an' go. I never can see why they
+make such a fuss and get so frightened because wimmen does a thing or
+two now they usedn't to. Nothing short of a earthquake can make them
+not men an' wimmen, an' that's the main thing. Well, to go back to me
+yarn, lots of other passengers got took the same way, an' there was
+great bidding for the box seat: that was a perquisite belongin' to the
+driver, an' me father used to get a sovereign for it often. I used to
+dispose of it by a sort of tender, an' &pound;5 was nothink for it; an' once
+in the gold-rush times, w'en money was laying around like water, a big
+miner, just to show off, gave me two tenners for it. They used to be
+wantin' to drive, but I took me father's advice an' never let go the
+reins. Well, among all these fine chaps Jim Clay wasn't noticed. He
+was always a terrible quiet feller. <i>I</i> did all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span> the jorin'. He'd
+always say, 'Come now, Martha, there's reason in everythink,' just
+w'en I'd be mad because I couldn't see no reason in nothink. He was
+sittin' in the back of the coach, an' it was one wet night, an' only a
+few passengers for a wonder, who was glad to take refuge inside. Only
+the lawyer feller was out on the box with me, an' makin' love heavier
+than it was rainin'. I staved him off all I could, an' with him an'
+the horses me hands was full. You never see the like of the roads in
+them days. It was only in later years the Sydney road, I was
+remarkin', was made good. In them times there was no made roads, and
+you can imagine the bogs! Why, sometimes you'd think the whole coach
+was going out of sight in 'em, and chargin' round the stumps up to the
+axle was considered nothink. We had more pluck in them days! Well,
+that night the roads was that slippery the brake gave me all I could
+do, an' a new horse in the back had no more notion of hangin' in the
+breechin' than a cow; so I took no notice to the lawyer, only told him
+to hold his mag once or twice an' not be such a blitherer, but it was
+no use, he took a mean advantage off of me. You can imagine it was
+easy w'en I had five horses in a coach goin' round slippery sidlin's
+pitch dark an' rainin'. He put his arms 'round me waist an' that
+raised me blood, an' I tell you things hummed a little. You'll see
+Dawn in a tantrum one of these days, but she ain't a patch on me w'en
+me dander was up in me young days." Looking at the fine old flashing
+eyes and the steel in her still, it was easy to see the truth of this.</p>
+
+<p>"I jored him to take his hands off me or I'd pull up the coach an'
+call the inside passengers out to knock him off. He gamed me to do it,
+an' laughed an' squeezed me harder, an' the cowardly crawler actually
+made to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span> kiss me; but I bit him on the nose and spat at him, an took
+the horses over a bad gutter round a fallen tree at the same time&mdash;an'
+some people is afraid to let their blessed daughters out in a doll's
+sulky with a tiddy little pony no bigger than a dog. If I had children
+like that I'd give 'em all the chances goin' of breaking their neck,
+as they wouldn't be worth savin' for anythink but sausage meat. Well,
+this cur still kep' on at his larks, so soon as I got the team on the
+level,&mdash;it was at Sapling Sidin', runnin' into Ti-tree creek; I could
+hear the creek gurgling above the sound of the rain, and the white
+froth on the water I can see it plain now,&mdash;I pulled sudden and said
+'Woa!' an' it was beautiful the way they'd stop dead. The passengers
+all suspected there must be a accident, or the bushrangers must have
+bailed us up, for they was around in full blast in them days. Well,
+w'en I pulled up I got nervous an' ashamed, an' bust out crying, an'
+the passengers didn't know what to make of it; but Jim Clay, it
+appears, had his eye an' ear cocked all the time, an' before any one
+knew what had happened he had the lawyer feller welted off of the
+coach an' was goin' into him right an' left. That's what give me a
+feelin' to Jim Clay all of a sudden, like I never had to no one else
+before or since. He was always such a terrible quiet feller that no
+one seemed to notice, an' he'd never made love to me before, but he
+got besides hisself then and shouts, 'If ever you touch my girl again
+I'll hammer you to smithereens.' Then he got back on the box an' wiped
+me eyes on his handkerchief an' protected me. The men inside&mdash;mostly
+diggers makin' through to Victoria&mdash;w'en they got the hang of things
+bust out roarin' an' cheerin', an' said, 'Leave the dawg on the road
+an' giv him a stummick ache.' He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span> tried to get up, but they pushed him
+off. He made great threats about the law, but miners is the gamest men
+alive an' loves fair play. It ain't any use in talking law to them if
+it ain't fair play, an' they give him to understand if he said
+anythink to me about it, or told any one an' didn't take his lickin'
+like a man, they'd break every bone in his body, an' they meant it
+too. Then they lerruped up the team and left him in the rain an' pitch
+dark miles from anywhere. That was the only time I give up the reins.
+I couldn't see for tears, so Jim drove; an' the men took me inside so
+he could attend to his work, they said, an' they cheered an' joked an'
+asked w'en the weddin' was comin' off, an' said they'd all come an'
+give us a rattlin' spree if we'd let 'em know. I didn't know what come
+over me; I never was much for whimperin', but I cried an' cried as if
+me heart was broke; an' it wasn't, because every time I thought of the
+way Jim Clay stuck up for me it give me the best feelin' I ever knew,
+an' the men was all on my side, an' there was no harm done, an' I
+ought to have been smilin', but I could do nothink but sob, an' I
+always think now w'en I see girls cryin' on similar occasions to let
+'em alone. Girls can't tell what's up with them, and a cry is good,
+because they ain't got the outlets that men has w'en they're worked
+up. We came to the end stage, an' w'en we got off the men all shook
+hands, an' one or two kissed me, an' pulled me curls, an' slapped Jim
+Clay on the back, an' called him my sweetheart. W'en we delivered the
+mail Jim drove me to where I stayed, an' it was terrible embarrassin'
+w'en we was left alone with no extra people to take the down off of
+the affair. Jim was painful shy, but he faced it manful; an' he said
+it didn't matter what they said about us bein' lovers, if it was
+disagreeable to me he'd<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span> never mention it nor think nothink about it,
+an' it would be forgot in a day or two, as he was a feller of no
+importance. That was the way he put it; he never was for puttin'
+hisself up half enough. So crying again I just snuggled up to him an'
+said I didn't want to forget it, I wanted to remember it more an'
+more, an' with that he took the hint an' kissed me; an' that's how we
+got engaged without no proposing or nothink. I didn't tell me mother,
+or there would have been a uproar, an' just then Jim Clay got a coach
+on the Cooma line, an' went right away. I told him I'd wait for him.
+He was away two years, an' w'en he came home we found it was still the
+same with us. I was eighteen then, an' him twenty-two.</p>
+
+<p>He went away to Queensland for two years more, an' in that time the
+sister next me was married, an' Jake there was comin' on; but he was
+never no good on the box&mdash;he pottered round and grew forage. Me mother
+began to suggest I ought to marry this one an' that one, but I waited
+for Jim Clay, an' w'en I was gettin' on for twenty-one, old Jack Clay
+reckoned he was gettin' too old for drivin' in all weathers, an' Jim
+come home an' took his place. A fine great feller he was, all tanned
+and brown, with his white teeth showin' among his black beard. He said
+he'd seen no girl that wasn't as tame as ditch water after me, an' as
+for me, no one else could ever give me the feelin' he could, so we
+reckoned to be publicly engaged. It raised the most terrible bobberie,
+and me mother nearly took a fit. She had me laid out for a swell like
+me sisters, an' she said I must be mad to throw myself away like that.
+Me brother-in-laws got ashamed of their wives' parents bein' in such a
+trade, an' as they had made a comfortable bit, they was goin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span> to give
+it best and rare a few sheep an' cattle, an' me sisters came down on
+me an' said I would disgrace them now they had rose theirselves up in
+the stirrups. Mother said she'd never give her consent, an' I told her
+very saucy I'd do without it. That's why I know it don't do to press
+Dawn over far; she must have the same fight in her, an' if drove in a
+corner there'd be no doing anythink with her. Things was very strained
+at home then; they thought to wean me of him, an' Jim Clay he hung
+back some, sayin' I'd better think twice before I threw myself away on
+him. That made me all the determinder. Jim was the only man for me. I
+never did have patience with them as can't make up their mind. So I
+waited, an' the day I was twenty-one&mdash;me two sisters was twins and
+married, one at nineteen and the other at eighteen&mdash;I gathered up a
+few things, and I had two hundred in the bank, and I went to a point
+of the road, Fern-tree Gully it was named, an' w'en Jim come down the
+hill with his horses I waved&mdash;we had it all made up&mdash;an' he stopped
+till I clambered aboard, an' the box seat was reserved for me that day
+for nothink, and at the end of the stage we was married. I stayed with
+Jim's mother for a week or two till we seen a opening, an' I kep' a
+accommodation while Jim drove a coach. Jim was always steady, an' we
+was both very popular, though I never pandered to no one, or put up
+with nothink that didn't please me. Our story was a sort of romance in
+them days, an' money was changin' hands freely, an' we was all right.
+The old folk died by-and-by; they didn't live very long, and Jake
+there come to me. He wasn't good enough for his sisters, an' somehow
+that's made us always cling together. I ain't blind, I can see he's no
+miracle; he has his faults. Who hasn't?" the old lady<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span> fiercely
+demanded. I assured her I knew none, and somewhat appeased by this she
+proceeded.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, as I say, Jake there ain't a wonder of smartness, but he's the
+only one belonging to the old days left to me, an' you couldn't
+understand what that means till you get to be my age. If I went to any
+one of your age, or old enough to be your mother, an' said, 'Do you
+remember this or that,' how far back could they go with me, do you
+think?"</p>
+
+<p>"And then did you and Jim Clay&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Me an' Jim Clay was the happiest pair I think ever lived under a
+weddin' ring, an' it was a love match. He was quiet an' easy-goin'
+like, an' I was the one to bustle, consequently there would be times
+w'en there would be a little controversy in the house; but Jim, he'd
+always put his arm round me an' kiss me, an' that's the sort of thing
+a woman likes. She doesn't like all the love-makin' to be over in the
+courtin' days, as if it was only a bit of fishin' to ketch her. Tho'
+of course I'd tell him to leave me alone, that I couldn't bear him
+maulin' me; but women has to be that way, it bein' rared into them to
+pretend they don't like what they do. An' you see Jim always
+remembered how I had stuck to him straight, an' flung up swell matches
+for him, which must have showed I loved him. That's what gets over a
+man, he never forgets that in a girl, an' always thinks more of her
+than the one with prawperty who marries a poor girl and is always
+suspicioning she took him for what he has. Of course, there are some
+crawlers of men ain't to be pleased anyhow, but they can be left out
+of it. In givin' advice to young wives, I always tell 'em w'en they
+get sick of their husbands, which they all do at times, especially at
+the start before you get seasoned to endure them, never to let him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>
+suspect it, for men, in spite of all their wonderful smartness, has a
+lot of the child in 'em after all, an' can take a terrible lot of
+love. (When it comes to givin' any in return, of course that's a horse
+of another colour.) But of course this is only dealin' with a man
+that's worth anythink; as I said, there are some crawlers you could
+make a door-mat of yourself for, an' they'd dance on you an' think
+nothink of it; but as I said before, there must be reason in
+everythink to begin with. After Jim died I didn't care for livin' in
+the old place, an' thought I'd like to get somewhere near the city.
+Old people ought to have sense. They don't want to crawl round like
+Methuselah at forty, but they know w'en they git up to seventy they
+ain't goin' to live for ever, nor get any suppler in the joints, an'
+ought to make some provision to get nearer churches an' doctors an'
+all that's necessary to old people; so I sold out an' bought this
+place down here."</p>
+
+<p>"What family have you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only Dawn's mother and Andrew's, and two sons away in America. I was
+misfortunate with me daughters; they both died young, one as I told
+you, an' the other of typhoid; and so after bein' done with me own
+family I started with others. I used to think once I'd be content to
+live till I see me little ones grown up an' settled, an' then I wanted
+to live till I see Dawn able to take care of herself, an' now I
+suppose, if I didn't take care, I'd want to be waitin' to see Dawn's
+children around me. That's the way; w'en we get along one step we want
+to go another, an' it's good some matters ain't left for us to decide.
+But it's all for Dawn and Andrew I bother now, only for them me work
+would be done; but it's good to have them, they keep me from feelin'
+like a old wore-out dress just hangin' up waitin' to be eat by the
+moths."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Grandma!" said the voice of Dawn in the doorway, "I can't get this
+beastly old stove to draw, and I'm blest if I can cook the dinner. I
+never saw such a place, one has to work under such terrible
+difficulties. It's something fearful." Her voice was cross, and her
+facial expression bore further testimony to a state of extreme
+irritation.</p>
+
+<p>Grandma rose to combat, she never meekly sat down under any
+circumstances, great or small.</p>
+
+<p>"Terrible place, indeed; see if <i>you</i> had to provide a home what you'd
+have in it. You was never done squarkin' for that stove; some one else
+had one like it, an' you was goin' to do strokes w'en you got it. It's
+always easy to complain about things w'en you are not the one
+responsible!"</p>
+
+<p>Grandma and I decided to go to the kitchen and prescribe for the
+stove.</p>
+
+<p>From an idle onlooker's point of view it seemed an excellent domestic
+implement in good health; but the beautiful cook averred it would
+produce no heat.</p>
+
+<p>"It must be like Bray's," said grandma, "they thought it was no good,
+and it was only because of some damper that had to be fixed."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; and they had a man there to fix it for them; that's the terrible
+want about this place, there being no <i>man</i> about it to do anything,"
+Dawn said pointedly, looking at Uncle Jake, who was calmly sitting in
+his big chair in the corner. He was not disconcerted. A man who could
+live for years on a widowed sister without making himself worth his
+salt is not of the calibre to be upset by a few hints.</p>
+
+<p>"I've busted up me pants again," cheerfully announced Andrew from the
+doorway&mdash;misfortunes never come<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span> singly. "Dawn, just get a needle and
+cotton and stitch 'em together."</p>
+
+<p>"I never knew you when they weren't 'busted up,' and you can get
+another pair or hold a towel round you till Carry comes home; she's
+got to do the mending, it's her week in the house. I've got enough to
+worry me, goodness knows!"</p>
+
+<p>"Dear me!" said grandma, walking away as I once more volunteered to be
+a friend in need to Andrew, "w'en people is young, an' a little thing
+goes wrong, they think they have the troubles of a empire upon them,
+but the real troubles of life teaches 'em different. You are a
+good-for-nothink lump anyhow, Andrew. Where have you been on a Sunday
+morning tearing round the country?"</p>
+
+<p>Andrew threw no light on the question, and his grandma repeated it.</p>
+
+<p>"Where have you been, I say&mdash;answer me at once?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, where haven't I been!" returned Andrew a trifle roughly, "I
+couldn't be tellin' you where I've been. A feller might as well be in
+a bloomin' glass case as carry a pocket-book around an' make a map of
+where he's been."</p>
+
+<p>The old lady's eyes flashed.</p>
+
+<p>"None of yer cheek to me, young man! You're getting too big for yer
+boots since you left school. If in five minutes you don't tell me
+where you've been an' who you was with, I'll screw the neck off of
+you. Nice thing while you're a child an' looking to me for everythink
+that goes into your stummick an' is put on your back, an' I'm
+responsible for you, that you can't answer me civil. Your actions
+can't bear lookin' into, it seems. I'll go over an' see Mr Bray about
+it this afternoon if you don't tell me at once."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I ain't been anywhere, only pokin' up an' down the lanes with Jack
+Bray."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, why couldn't you say so at once without raisin' this rumpus.
+Them as has rared any boys don't know what it is to die of idleness
+an' want of vexation."</p>
+
+<p>"It wasn't <i>me</i> rose the rumpus. Some people always blames others for
+what they do themselves: it 'u'd give a bloke th' pip," grumbled
+Andrew, as I put the last stitch in his trousers and his grandma
+departed. Her black Sunday dress rustled aggressively, and her plain
+bibless holland apron, which she never took off except when her bonnet
+went on for street appearance or when she went to bed, and her little
+Quaker collars and cuffs of muslin edged with lace, were even more
+immaculate than on week-days. She scorned a cap, and her features were
+so well cut that she looked well with the grey hair&mdash;wonderfully
+plentiful and wavy for one of her years,&mdash;simply parted and tidily
+coiled at the back. This costume or toilet, always fresh and never
+shabby, was invariably completed by a style of light house-boots,
+introduced to me as "lastings"; and there was an unimpaired vigour of
+intellect in their wearer good to contemplate in a woman of the people
+aged seventy-five.</p>
+
+<p>It came on to rain after dinner and confined us all to the house.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn borrowed an exciting love-story from Miss Flipp; grandma read a
+"good" book; Uncle Jake still pored over the 'Noonoon Advertiser,'
+while Andrew repaired a large amount of fishing-tackle, with which
+during the time I knew him I never knew him to catch a fish, and Carry
+grumbled about the rain.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor Carry!" sympathised Andrew, "she can't git out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span> to do a spoon
+with Larry, an' the poor bloke can't come in&mdash;he's so sweet, you know,
+a drop of rain would melt him."</p>
+
+<p>"It would take something to melt you," retorted Carry. "The only thing
+I can see good in the rain is that it will keep Mrs Bray away."</p>
+
+<p>And thus passed my first full day at Clay's.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="SEVEN" id="SEVEN"></a>SEVEN.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE LITTLE TOWN OF NOONOON.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The little town, situated whereaway it does not particularly matter,
+and whose name is a palindrome, is one of the oldest and most
+old-fashioned in Australia. Less than three dozen miles per road, and
+not many more minutes by train from the greatest city in the Southern
+hemisphere, yet many of its native population are more unpolished in
+appearance than the bush-whackers from beyond Bourke, the Cooper, and
+the far Paroo. It is an agricultural region, and this in some measure
+accounts for the slouching appearance of its people. Men cannot wrest
+a first-hand living from the soil and at the same time cultivate a
+Piccadilly club-land style and air.</p>
+
+<p>It is a valley of small holdings, being divided into farms and
+orchards, varying in size from several to two or three hundred acres.
+Many grants were apportioned there in the early days. Representatives
+of the original families in some instances still hold portions of
+them, and the stationary population has drifted into a tiny world of
+their own, and for want of new blood have ideas caked down like most
+of the ground, and evinced in many little characteristics distinct
+from the general run of the people of the State.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Though they were, when I knew them, possessed of the usual human
+failings in an average degree, they were for the most part a splendid
+class of population&mdash;honest, industrious producers, who, in Grandma
+Clay's words, "Keep the world going." There was only a small
+percentage of idlers and parasites among them, but they did duty with
+a very small-minded unprogressive set of ideas.</p>
+
+<p>There is a place in New South Wales named Grabben-Gullen, where the
+best potatoes in the world are grown. Great, solid, flowery beauties,
+weighing two pounds avoirdupois, are but ordinary specimens in this
+locality, and the allegorical bush statement for illustrating their
+uncommon size has it that they grow under the fences and trip the
+horses as they travel the lanes between the paddocks. Similarly, to
+explain the wonderful growth of vegetation in the fertile valley of
+Tumut, its inhabitants assure travellers that pumpkin and melon vines
+grow so rapidly there that the pumpkins and melons are worn out in
+being dragged after them.</p>
+
+<p>Now, as I strolled around the lanes of Noonoon, I felt the old slow
+ways, like Grabben-Gullen potatoes, protruding to stifle one's mental
+flights; but there was nothing representative of the Tumut pumpkin and
+melon vines to wear one out in a rush of progress. The land was rich
+and beautiful and in as genial and salubrious a climate as the heart
+of the most exacting could desire; but the residents had drifted into
+unenterprising methods of existence, and progress had stopped dead at
+the foot of the Great Dividing Range. The great road winding over it
+bore the mark of the convicts, and other traces of their solid
+workmanship were to be found in occasional buildings within a radius<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>
+of twenty miles; but their day had passed as that of the bullock-dray
+and mail-coach, superseded by the haughty "passenger-mail" and giant
+two-engined "goods" trains,&mdash;while for quicker communication with the
+city than these afforded, the West depended upon the telegraph wires.</p>
+
+<p>In days gone by the swells had patronised Noonoon as a week-end
+resort, and some of their homes were now used as
+boarding-houses,&mdash;while their one-time occupants had other tenement,
+and their successors patronised the cooler altitudes farther up the
+Blue Mountains, or had followed the governor to Moss Vale.</p>
+
+<p>Once upon a time Noonoon had rushed into an elaborate, unbalanced
+water scheme, and had lighted itself with electricity. To do this it
+had been forced to borrow heavily, so that now all the rates went to
+the usurer, and no means were available for current affairs. The
+sanitation was condemned, and the streets and roads for miles, as far
+as the municipality extended, were a disgrace to it.</p>
+
+<p>Exceedingly level, they possessed characteristics of some of the best
+thoroughfares; but the wheel-ways were formed of round river stones
+which neither powdered nor set, and to drive along them was cruel to
+horses, ruinous to vehicles, and as trying on the nerves of travellers
+as crossing a stony stream-bed. There seemed to be nothing possible in
+the matter but to abuse the municipal council as numskulls and
+crawlers, and this was done on every hand with unfailing enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>Though so near the metropolis, Noonoon was less in touch with it than
+many western towns,&mdash;in most respects was a veritable
+great-grandmother for stagnation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span> and bucolic rusticity, and in
+individuality suggested one of the little quiet eddies near the
+emptying of a stream, and which, being called into existence by a
+back-flow, contains no current. But while thus falling to the rear in
+the ranks of some departments of progress, the little town retained a
+certain degree of importance as one of the busiest railway centres in
+the state, and its engine-sheds were the home of many locomotives.
+Here they were coaled, cleaned, and oiled ere taking their stiff
+two-engine haul over the mountains to the wide, straight, pastoral and
+wheat-growing West, and their calling and rumbling made cheery music
+all the year round, excepting a short space on Sundays; while at
+night, as they climbed the crests of the mountain-spurs, every time
+they fired, the red light belching from their engine doors could be
+seen for miles down the valley. Thus Noonoon's train service was
+excellent, and a great percentage of the town population consisted of
+railway employ&eacute;s.</p>
+
+<p>What is the typical Australian girl, is a subject frequently
+discussed. To find her it is necessary to study those reared in the
+unbroken bush,&mdash;those who are strangers to town life and its
+influences. City girls are more cosmopolitan. Sydney girls are
+frequently mistaken for New Yorkers, while Bostonian ladies are as
+often claimed to be Englishwomen; and it is only the bush-reared
+girl&mdash;at home with horse, gun, and stock-whip, able to bake the family
+bread, make her own dresses, take her brother's or father's place out
+of doors in an emergency, while at the same time competent to grace a
+drawing-room and show herself conversant with the poets&mdash;who can
+rightfully lay claim to be more typically Australia's than any other
+country's daughter. Of course the city Australians are Australians
+too.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span> Australia is the land they put down as theirs on the census
+paper. She is their native land; but ah! their country has never
+opened her treasure-troves to them as to those with sympathetic and
+appreciative understanding of her characteristics, and many of them
+are as hazy as a foreigner as to whether it is the kooka-burra that
+laughs and the moke-poke that calls, or the other way about. They are
+incapable of completely enjoying the full heat of noonday summer sun
+on the plains, and the evening haze stealing across the gullies does
+not mean all it should. The exquisite rapturous enjoyment of the odour
+of the endless bush-land when dimly lit by the blazing Southern stars,
+or the companionship of a sure-footed nag taking the lead round stony
+sidlings, or the music of his hoof-beats echoing across the ridges as
+he carries a dear one home at close of day, are all in a magic
+storehouse which may never be entered by the Goths who attempt to
+measure this unique and wonderful land by any standard save its
+own,&mdash;a standard made by those whose love of it, engendered by
+heredity or close companionship, has fired their blood.</p>
+
+<p>These observations lead up to the fact that Noonoon folk boasted their
+own individuality, smacking somewhat of town and country and yet of
+neither. Some of the older ones patronised the flowing beards and
+sartorial styles "all the go way up in Ironbark," yet if put Out-Back
+would have been as much new chums as city people, and were wont to
+regard honest unvarnished statements of bush happenings as "snake
+yarns"; while the youths of these parts combined the appearance of the
+far bush yokel and the city larrikin, and were to be seen following
+the plough with cigarettes in their mouths.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The small holdings were cut into smaller paddocks, the style of fence
+mostly patronised being two or three strands of savage barbed wire
+stretched from post to post. This insufficient separation of stock was
+made adequate by the cattle themselves carrying the remainder of the
+white man's burden of fencing around their necks, in the form of a
+hampering yoke made of a forked tree-limb with a piece of plain
+fencing-wire to close the open ends. This prevented them pushing
+between the wires, and it was a pathetically ludicrous sight to see
+the calves at a very tender age turned out an exact replica of their
+elders. All the places opened on to the roads like streets; and to go
+across country was a sore ordeal, as one had to uncomfortably cross
+roughly upturned crop-land, and every few hundred yards roll under a
+line of barbed wire about a foot from the ground, at the risk of
+reefing one's clothes and the certainty of dishevelment. To walk out
+on the main roads and stumble over the loose stones ankle-deep in the
+dust was torture. Some averred they had known no repairs for ten
+years, and that they were as good as they were, because to have been
+worse was impossible. Walking in this case being no pleasure, I
+bethought me of riding for gentle exercise, and inquired of Grandma
+Clay the possibilities in that respect.</p>
+
+<p>"Ride! there ain't nothink to ride in this district, only great
+elephant draughts or little tiddy ponies the size of dogs," she said
+with unlimited scorn; "I never see such crawlers, they go about in
+them pokin' little sulkies, and even the men can't ride. In my young
+days if a feller couldn't ride a buck-jumper the girls wouldn't look
+at him, an' yet down here at one of the shows last year in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span> the prize
+for the hunters, the horses had to be all rode by one man; there
+wasn't another young feller in the district fit to take a blessed moke
+over a fence. I felt like goin' out an' tacklin' it meself, I was that
+disgusted. I never was a advocate for this <i>great</i> ridin' that racks
+people's insides out an' cripples them, there ain't a bit of necessity
+for it, but there is reason in everythink, an' they're goin' to the
+other extreme, and will have to be carried about on feather-beds in a
+ambulance soon if they keep on as they are. There's nothink as good as
+it was in the old days. As for a woman ridin' here, all the town would
+go out to gape like as she was somethink in the travellin' show
+business. I used to ride w'en I come down here first,&mdash;that was
+sixteen year ago,&mdash;but every one asked me such questions, an' looked
+at me like a Punch an' Judy show, that I got sick of it. I rode into
+Trashe's at the store there one day, an' w'en I was comin' out he
+says, 'Will you have a chair to get on?' an' as he didn't seem to be
+man enough to sling me on, I said I supposed so. He goes for one of
+them tallest chairs&mdash;it would be as easy to get on the horse as
+it&mdash;an' I sez, 'Thanks, I'm not ridin' a elephant, one of them little
+chairs would do.' But even that didn't seem to content him; he put it
+high on the pavement an' put the horse in the gutter. Then, instead of
+puttin' the reins over the horse's head proper, he left them on the
+hook, an' with both hands an' all his might holds the beast short by
+them in front of its jaw, like as it was the wildest bull from the
+Bogongs. The idiot! Supposin' the beast was flash an' pulled away from
+him, where would I be without the reins? That about finished me, I was
+sick of it, as I could not have believed any man, even out of a
+asylum, could be so simple about puttin' a person on a horse."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>For this kind of exercise there seemed no promising outlet, and I was
+put to it to think of some other. As grandma said, with few
+exceptions, the only horses in the district were draughts and ponies.
+Every effect has a cause, and the reason of this was that these big
+horses were the only ones properly adapted to agriculture, and the
+smallness of the holdings did not admit of hacks being kept for mere
+pleasure, so the cheapest knockabout horse to maintain was a pony, as
+not only did it take less fodder and serve for the little saddle use
+of this place, but tethered to a sulky, took the wives and children
+abroad. It was the land of sulkies,&mdash;made in all sizes to fit the pony
+that had to draw them, and of quality in accordance with the purse
+that paid for them,&mdash;and a pair of horses and a buggy was a rare
+sight.</p>
+
+<p>Andrew suggested that I should go rowing, and glowingly recommended a
+little two-man craft named the <i>Alice</i>, and as I could row well in my
+young days, I determined to test her capacity by going up stream very
+gently, as my time was unlimited and my strength painfully the
+reverse. It was a crisp day towards the end of April, so I was feeling
+brisker than usual, and the <i>Alice</i> was deserving of her good
+reputation. The Noonoon was one of the noblest and most beautiful
+streams in the State, and above the substantial and unique old bridge
+its deep, calm waters stretched for about two miles as straight as a
+ribbon, in a reach made historic because it has been the racecourse of
+some of the greatest sculling matches the world has known. Orange and
+willow-trees were reflected in the clear depths of the rippleless
+flow, and lured by its beauty, the responsiveness of my craft, and an
+unusual cheerfulness, I foolishly overdid my strength. I was thinking
+of Dawn. Her girlish confidence regarding the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span> desire of her hot young
+heart had so appealed to me that I was exercised to discover a
+suitable knight, for this and not a career I felt was the needful
+element to complete her life and anchor her restless girlish energy.
+To tell her so, however, would ruin all. Time must be held till the
+appearance of the hero of the romance I intended to shape. With this
+end in view I thought of recommending her grandma to let her voice be
+trained. Two years at the very least would thus be gained, and if
+properly floated and advertised in the matrimonial field, what may not
+be accomplished in that time by a beautiful and vivacious girl of
+eighteen or nineteen? I was recalled from such speculations by finding
+that it was beyond me to row another stroke, and I was in a fix. A
+slight wind turned the boat, and she drifted on to a fallen tree a
+little below the surface, and, though not upsetting, stuck there, and
+was too much for me to get off.</p>
+
+<p>At that time of the year, except very occasionally, the river was free
+from boaters and the fishers who told of the fish that used to be got
+there in other times, so there was nothing to do but wait until my
+absence caused anxiety, when some one would surely come after me. Not
+a very alarming plight if one were well, but I felt one of my old
+cruel attacks was at hand, which was not encouraging. No one was
+within sight, but in case there should be a ploughman over a rise
+within hearing, I coo-eed long and well. My voice had been trained. I
+coo-eed three times, allowing an interval to elapse, and then settled
+into the bottom of the boat to await developments. Soon I was
+disturbed by the plunk! plunk! of a swimmer, and saw a young man
+approaching by strong rapid strokes. It is strange how hard it is to
+recognise any one when only their face is above water and one meets
+them in an un<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>expected place, and though this face seemed familiar
+there was nothing unusual in that, as I knew so many theatre patrons'
+faces in a half fashion. My rescuer having ascertained the simple
+nature of my dilemma, and easily gaining the boat by reason of the
+log, exclaimed&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Why, it's never you! What on earth are you doing here?" and I
+responded&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Ernest Breslaw! It's never you! What are <i>you</i> doing here? <i>I'm</i>
+stuck on this log."</p>
+
+<p>"And I've come to get you off it," he laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but otherwise? This may be a suitable cove for a damaged hull,
+but what can a newly-launched cruiser like you be doing here?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm in training, and was just taking a plunge; it's first-class!" he
+said enthusiastically, and looking at his splendid muscles, enough to
+delight the eye of even such a connoisseur in physique as myself, and
+well displayed by a neat bathing-suit, there was no need to inquire
+for what he was in training. 'Twas no drivelling pen-and-ink
+examination such as I could have passed myself, but something needing
+a Greek statue's strength of thew.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you feeling ill?" he considerately inquired, and as I assured him
+to the contrary, though I was feeling far from normal, he put me out
+on the bank while he rowed up stream for his clothes and returned to
+take me home. Having encased himself in some serviceable tweeds and a
+blue guernsey, he rolled me in his coat ere beginning to demolish the
+homeward mile&mdash;an infinitesimal bagatelle to such a magnificent pair
+of arms. I enjoyed the play of the broad shoulders and ruddy cheeks,
+and did not talk, neither did he. He was an athlete, not a
+conversationalist, while I was a conversationalist lacking sufficient
+athletic strength to keep up my reputation just then.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It was very silly of you to come out alone or attempt to row in your
+state of health! It might have been your death," he presently remarked
+in a grandfatherly style. "Where are you putting up?"</p>
+
+<p>"At Clay's."</p>
+
+<p>"I know; the old place with the boats," he replied as the <i>Alice</i>
+whizzed along.</p>
+
+<p>"I was aching for diversion," I said, in excuse for the rashness of my
+act.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I can take you for a pull now. I'll be here for a few weeks.
+Will you come to-morrow afternoon? Would three o'clock suit you?" he
+inquired as he moored. "The scenery is magnificent farther up the
+river."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, if I'm not here at three o'clock you'll know that I'm not able
+to come. You are very good, Ernest, to waste time with me."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm only too proud to be able to row you about and expend a little
+despised brute force in returning all the entertainment with brains in
+it you have given me in the past."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, at the cost of anything under 7s. 6d. an evening,&mdash;am I to pay
+you that for rowing me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Put it in the hospital-box," he said with a laugh that displayed his
+strong white teeth between his firm bold lips. He was altogether a
+sight that was more than good in my eyes.</p>
+
+<p>I found I was not strong enough to spring ashore, but young Breslaw
+managed that and my transit up the steep bank to the house with an
+ease and gentleness so dear to woman's heart, that the strength to
+accomplish it is the secret of an athlete being in ninety per cent of
+cases a woman's ideal.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I say," as he was leaving me at the gate, "if you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span> mention me,
+speak of me as R. Ernest, as I've dropped the Breslaw where I'm
+staying. I don't want wind of my being here to get into the papers.
+I'm practising in the dark, as I'd like to give some of the cracks a
+surprise licking."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, I'm under an alias too, so please don't forget. To all
+except a few theatre patrons I'm as dead as ditch-water; but some one
+might recognise the old name, and it would be very unpleasant."</p>
+
+<p>"Right O! To-morrow at three, then, I'll give you a pull," he said,
+doffing his cap from his heavy ruddy locks, now drying into waves and
+gleaming a rival hue in the setting sun, as he bounded down the bank
+and made his way along the river-edge to the bridge, as his place of
+sojourn was farther up than Clay's and on the other side.</p>
+
+<p>The excitement of thus meeting him had somewhat revived me, for here
+at once, as though in response to my wish, was a fitting knight to
+play a leading <i>r&ocirc;le</i> with my young lady, the desire for whose
+wellbeing had taken grip of me. For her sweet sake, and the sake of
+the fragrant manliness of the stalwart and deserving knight, I
+straightway resolved to enter the thankless and precarious business of
+matchmaking, one in which I had not had one iota of experience; but as
+women have to ace marriage, domesticity, and mostly all the issues of
+life assigned them, without training, I did not give up heart. As a
+first effort I determined that Dawn should chaperon me when I went for
+my row on the morrow. As I looked at the sun sinking behind the blue
+hills and shedding a wonderfully mellow light over the broad valley, I
+thought of my own life, in which there had been none to pull a
+heart-easing string, and the bitterness of those to whom<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span> that for
+which they had fought has been won so late as to be Dead Sea fruit,
+took possession of me.</p>
+
+<p>The doctors had several long and fee-inspiring terms for my malady,
+but I knew it to be an old-fashioned ailment known as heart-break&mdash;the
+result of disappointment, want of affection, and over-work. The old
+bitterness gripped the organ of life then; it brought me to my knees.
+I tried to call out, but it was unavailing. Sharp, fiendish pain, and
+then oblivion.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="EIGHT" id="EIGHT"></a>EIGHT.</h2>
+
+<h3>GRANDMA TURNS NURSE.</h3>
+
+
+<p>When I came to it was dark enough for lights, Dawn's well-moulded
+hands were supporting my head, Grandma Clay's voice was sternly
+engineering affairs, and Andrew was blubbering at the foot of the bed
+on which I was resting.</p>
+
+<p>I tried to tell them there was no cause for alarm, and to beg
+grandma's pardon for turning her house into a "sick hospital," but
+though not quite unconscious, I appeared entirely so.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish you had sense to have gone for Dr Tinker when Dr Smalley
+wasn't in," said the old lady, with nothing but solicitude in her
+voice.</p>
+
+<p>The sternness in evidence when I had been trying to gain entrance to
+her house was entirely absent.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid she's dead," said Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she ain't; is she, Dawn?" sobbed Andrew. "She was a decent sort
+of person. A pity some of those other old scotty-boots that was here
+in the summer didn't die instead." And that cemented a firm friendship
+between the lad and myself. An individual utterly alone in the world
+prizes above all things a little real affection.</p>
+
+<p>Presently there was a clearance in the room, effected<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span> by the doctor,
+who, after a short examination, pronounced my malady a complication of
+heart troubles, gave a few instructions, and further remarked, "Send
+up for the mixture. She isn't dead, but she may snuff out before
+morning. She's bound to go at a moment's notice, sometime. Give her
+plenty of air. If she has any friends she ought to be sent to them if
+she pulls through this."</p>
+
+<p>Grandma gave the meagre details she knew concerning me, and as the
+practitioner, whom I took to be a veterinary surgeon called in for the
+emergency, went out, he said&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"If she dies to-night you can send me word in the morning; that will
+be soon enough; and if I don't hear from you I'll call again
+to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"She ain't goin' to die if I can stop her," said grandma when he had
+departed. "I'll bring her to with a powltice. I ain't given to be
+cumflummixed by what a doctor says; many a one they give up is walking
+about as strong as bull-beef to-day. I never see them do no good in a
+serious case. They are right enough to set a bone or sew up a cut, but
+when you come to think of it, what could be expected of them? They
+know a little more than us because they've hacked up a few bodies an'
+know how the pieces fit together, but as for knowin' what's goin' on,
+they ain't the Almighty, and ain't to be took notice of. The way they
+know about the body is the same as you and Carry know the kitchen, an'
+could go in the dark an' feel for anythink while all was well, but if
+anythink strange was there you couldn't make it out," and setting to
+work, brewing potions and applying remedies of her own, the practical
+old lady soon brought me around so that I was able to make my
+apologies.</p>
+
+<p>"Good Heavens! What do you take us for?" she exclaimed. "It would be a
+fine kind of a world if we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span> wasn't a little considerate to each other.
+It does the young people good to learn 'em a little kindness. I
+couldn't be askin' people like Carry there to wait on people, but it's
+Dawn's week in the house an' she'll look after you, an' you needn't be
+wantin' to clear out to the hospital. You won't be no better looked
+after there than here."</p>
+
+<p>Never was more tactful kindness on shorter acquaintance.</p>
+
+<p>Little Miss Flipp undertook to sit by my bed during the early watches
+of the night, for they could not be persuaded to leave me alone. Her
+eyes bore evidence of many more sleepless watches, but the poor little
+thing did not unburden her heart to me. Dawn appeared to relieve her
+at 2 <span class="smcap">a.m.</span>, and the engaging child manfully struggled against the sleep
+that leadened the pretty blue eyes till morning, when grandma, brisk
+as a cricket, took her turn.</p>
+
+<p>At eleven I was interested by the doctor's entrance. He came on
+tiptoe, but like a great proportion of male tiptoeing it defeated its
+intention and made more noise than walking. Bearing down upon grandma,
+he inquired in a huge whisper, "How is she?"</p>
+
+<p>At this juncture I opened my eyes, so he cheerfully remarked, in a
+strong twang known by some supercilious English as the "beastly
+colonial accent"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"So you didn't peg out after all!"</p>
+
+<p>This being the language applied to stock, confirmed me in the notion
+that he was a veterinary. I had once before heard it applied to a
+human being in a far bush place, where a man who lived unhappily with
+his wife one morning remarked to a neighbour that "The missus nearly
+pegged out last night," and it was considered a fitting remark for
+such a monster as this man was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span> supposed to have been, but this doctor
+said it quite naturally.</p>
+
+<p>I found him a friendly and communicative fellow, and as he gave in an
+hour's gossip with grandma and me for one fee, I was willing to take
+it to pass away a dull morning.</p>
+
+<p>"What on earth did you go rowing for?" he asked me.</p>
+
+<p>"The roads are too bad to go walking."</p>
+
+<p>"That's only within range of the municipality. The council wants
+bursting up. They can't do anything with everything mortgaged to old
+Dr Tinker. He holds the whole thing. It's a pity he wouldn't peg out
+one of these nights, and we might get something done. But it's not him
+who has the money&mdash;it's the old woman."</p>
+
+<p>"That's her Mrs Bray was tellin' us walloped the girl for bein'
+admired by the old doctor," explained grandma.</p>
+
+<p>"Money, that's what he married her for," continued the doctor. "I
+don't know where he could have picked her up. Some say she is a
+publican's widow, but Jackson, the solicitor here, has a different
+hypothesis. He says he's seen her running along carrying five cups and
+saucers of tea at once, and no one but a ship's waitress could do
+that. At any rate she's a great man of a woman; can swear like a
+trooper if things don't go right. She's got the old man completely
+cowed."</p>
+
+<p>"Am I to infer that cowing her spouse and swearing outrageously makes
+her <i>man</i>-like?" I laconically inquired. But the doctor's
+understanding didn't seem to go in for small satirical detail, he
+conversed on a more wholesale fashion, rattling on for a good
+half-hour to a patient for whom quietude was necessary, lest she
+should "peg out."</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't he a bosker?" enthusiastically commented<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span> Andrew, coming in to
+see what I had thought of this doctor, who was the idol of Noonoon.</p>
+
+<p>"Has he a large practice?" I cautiously inquired, seeking to discover
+was he really a doctor.</p>
+
+<p>"My word! Nearly all the people go to him, he's so friendly and don't
+stick on the jam&mdash;speaks to you everywhere, and has jokes about
+everything."</p>
+
+<p>"He's a fine man!" corroborated grandma.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; must be more than six feet high," I responded.</p>
+
+<p>"An' such a gentleman, he's never above having a yarn with you about
+anythink and everythink."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well," I said, "any time I take these turns just send for him."</p>
+
+<p>One doctor was as harmless as another to me. I knew it would relieve
+the household to have a medico, and he could not injure me, seeing I
+accorded his medicine and advice about as much deference as the hum of
+a mosquito.</p>
+
+<p>"Is he a family man?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; so there are all your chances gone in one slap," said Carry,
+appearing to inquire my state.</p>
+
+<p>I did not tell her there was the most insuperable of all barriers in
+the way of my marrying any one, and that I had no desire if I could.
+The first I did not want known, and the second would not be believed
+if it were, because, though woman is somewhat escaping from her
+shackles, the skin of old crawl subjection still clings sufficiently
+tight for it to be beyond ordinary belief that one could be other than
+constantly on the look-out to secure a berth by appending herself to
+some man, and more especially does this suspicion hang over a spinster
+with her hair as grey as mine, and who takes up a position at a
+boarding-house which is supposed to be the common<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span> hunting-ground of
+women forced on to the matrimonial war-path.</p>
+
+<p>"He has seven little children, and one's a baby, an' his wife is a
+poor broken-down little thing near always in the hospital. You'd
+wonder how he married her, <i>he's</i> such a fine-looking man," vouchsafed
+Andrew.</p>
+
+<p>"Such a fine man that you'd wonder concerning several other patent
+facts about him," I responded.</p>
+
+<p>There was quite a chorus in favour of him now. He was evidently a true
+gentleman in his patients' eyes, because he was not above stopping to
+talk to them in their own vernacular about local gossip, and had the
+reputation of great good nature in regard to the bills of the poor,
+and they loved his jokes. They were of the class within grasp of the
+elementary sense of humour of his audience. This type of gentleman he
+undoubtedly was, but to that possessed of graceful tact and expressing
+itself in good diction&mdash;by some considered necessary attributes of a
+gentleman&mdash;he could lay no claim. Neither could he to that ideal
+enshrined in my heart, who would not have had seven little
+children&mdash;one of them a baby&mdash;and a poor little broken-down wife at
+the same time; but as to what is really a gentleman depends on the
+attitude of mind.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="NINE" id="NINE"></a>NINE.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE KNIGHT HAS A STOLEN VIEW OF THE LADY.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Grandma Clay kept me in bed that day, so I forgot all about my
+appointment on the river until some time after three, when Andrew
+announced from the doorway&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"A man wants to know can he see you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Who can he be?"</p>
+
+<p>"He's a puddin'-faced, red-headed bloke, wearin' a blue sweater under
+his coat like the bike riders," was Andrew's very unknightly
+description of the knight whom I had chosen to play lead in the drama
+of the beautiful young lady at Clay's.</p>
+
+<p>"That's a particular friend of mine, you may show him in," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oughtn't Dawn to be woke up first and told to scoot out of that?"
+said he.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn was one of those young beings so thoroughly inured to easy living
+that the few hours' sleep she had lost the night before had made her
+so dozy when she had come to keep me company now, that I had persuaded
+her to rest beside me on the broad bed, where, much against Andrew's
+sense of propriety, she was fast asleep.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll hide her thus," I said, covering her with the counterpane, for
+it would not be good stage management<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span> to allow the lady to escape
+when a fitting knight was on the threshold. This satisfied Andrew, who
+withdrew to usher in the "puddin'-faced, red-headed bloke," who sat in
+the doctor's chair, and made a few ordinary remarks about the weather
+and some equally kind about my state of health.</p>
+
+<p>When in the company of ladies the only brilliance in evidence about my
+young friend was the colour of his hair, so there was little danger of
+his waking Dawn with his chatter, as he sat inwardly consumed with a
+desire to escape. As I lay with my hand where I could feel the girl's
+healthy breathing, I wondered would she too dismiss my chosen knight
+as pudding-faced and red-headed, or would she see him with my eyes!
+His locks certainly were of that most attractive shade hair can be,
+and his good looks were further enhanced by a clear tanned skin and
+dark eyes. His large clean-shaven features had the fulness and
+roundness of unspent youth in full bloom, and he was far from the
+small bullet-headed type, which accounted for Andrew's designation of
+"puddin'-faced." I had always found him one of the most virile and
+upright young creatures I had ever seen, and he had endeared himself
+to me by his simple, untainted manliness, and the fragrant evidence of
+health his presence distilled. Dawn, too, was so robust that there was
+a likelihood of her being attracted by her opposite, and inclined to
+favour a carpet knight before one of the open field.</p>
+
+<p>Some men have brain and muscle, but this is a combination as rare as
+beauty and high intellect in women, and almost as startling in its
+power for good or evil; but apart from the combination the wholesome
+athlete is generally the more lovable. When his brawn is coupled with
+a good disposition, he sees in woman a fragile flower<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span> that he longs
+to protect, and measuring her weakness by his beautiful strength, is
+easily imposed upon. His muscle is an engine a woman can unfailingly
+command for her own purposes, whereas brilliance of intellect, though
+it may command a great public position in the reflected glory of which
+some women love to bask, nevertheless, under pressure in the domestic
+arena, is liable to be too sharply turned against wives, mothers, and
+daughters to be a comfortable piece of household furniture. On the
+other hand, the athlete may have the muscles of a Samson, and yet,
+being slow of thought and speech, be utterly defenceless in a woman's
+hands. No matter how aggravatingly wrong she may be, he cannot bring
+brute force to bear to vanquish a creature so delicate, and being
+possessed of no other weapon, he is compelled to cultivate patience
+and good temper. Also, health and strength are conducive to equability
+of temper, and hence the domestic popularity of the man of brawn above
+the one of brain, who is not infrequently exacting and crossly
+egotistical in his family relations where the other would be lenient
+and go-easy.</p>
+
+<p>The silence of my guest and myself was presently broken by Dawn
+turning about under the counterpane.</p>
+
+<p>"Good gracious! what have you got there?" inquired Ernest. "Is it that
+old terrier you used to have?"</p>
+
+<p>"Terrier, indeed! I have here a far more beautiful pet. Because you
+are such a good child I will allow you just one glance. Come now, be
+careful."</p>
+
+<p>The girl's dress was unbuttoned at the throat, displaying a perfect
+curve of round white neck; her tumbled brown curls strayed over the
+dimpled oval face; the long jetty lashes resting on the flushed cheeks
+fringed some eyelid curves that would have delighted an artist;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span> the
+curling lips were slightly parted showing the tips of her pretty
+teeth, and the lifted coverlet disclosed to view as lovely a sleeping
+beauty as any of the armoured knights of old ever fought and died for.
+The latter-day one, politely curious regarding my pet, bent over to
+accord a casual glance, but the vision meeting his eyes sent the blood
+in a crimson wave over his tanned cheeks and caused him to draw back
+with a start. It was inconsistent that he should have been so
+completely abashed at sight of a fully-dressed sleeping girl who was
+placidly unconscious of his gaze, when it was his custom to regularly
+occupy the stalls and enjoy the choruses and ballets composed of young
+ladies very wide awake, and wearing only as much covering as compelled
+by the law; but where is consistency?</p>
+
+<p>"I had no idea it would&mdash;er&mdash;be a young lady," he stammered, keeping
+his eyes religiously lowered, and fidgeting in a palsy of shyness such
+as used to be an indispensable accomplishment of young ladies in past
+generations.</p>
+
+<p>"Just take a good look, she'll bear inspection," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"I'd rather not, the young lady might not like it."</p>
+
+<p>"But I'm giving you permission, she's mine, and then run before she
+discovers you have pirated a glance. I will keep the secret."</p>
+
+<p>He lifted his eyes, but so swiftly and hesitatingly that I could not
+be sure that he had discerned the beauty that was blushing half
+unseen, instead of being displayed under limelight and drawn attention
+to by brass trumpets in accordance with the style of this advertisemal
+age.</p>
+
+<p>As Ernest went out Andrew came in and awakened Dawn with a request to
+make him some dough-nuts<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span> for tea, but she ordered him to go to Carry
+as it was her week in the kitchen.</p>
+
+<p>"Bust this week in the kitchen! A feller can hear nothing else, it's
+enough to give him the pip; it ought to be put up like a notice so it
+could be known," he grumbled as he departed.</p>
+
+<p>That evening Mrs Bray made one of her calls, which were always more
+good-natured regarding the length of time she gave us than the tone of
+her remarks about people.</p>
+
+<p>The famous Mrs Tinker, it appeared, from the latest account of her
+vagaries, had enlivened the lives of Noonoon inhabitants by swearing
+in a hair-lifting manner at one of the local shows because her horses
+had not been awarded first prize, &amp;c., &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>Whether, as Carry averred, it was this conversation that did the
+mischief or not, the fact remains that I became too faint to speak,
+and the girls would not leave me all night. I lay that way all the
+next day too, so that when Ernest called to make inquiries and
+discovered my state he took a turn at making himself useful,
+prevailing upon Grandma Clay to allow him to do so by explaining that
+he was a very firm friend of mine, and had had some experience of
+invalids owing to his mother having been one for some years before her
+death, both of which statements were perfectly true.</p>
+
+<p>As I improved, I was anxious to discover what impression he had made
+on the household, and cautiously sounded them.</p>
+
+<p>"He seems to be a chap with some heart in him," said grandma. "He'd
+put some of these fine lah-de-dahs to shame. I always like a man that
+ain't above attending on a sick person. Like Jim Clay, he could put a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>
+powltice on an' lift up a sick person better'n all the women I ever
+see."</p>
+
+<p>"It's always Jim Clay," said Dawn in an irreverent aside; "I never
+heard of a man yet, whether he was tall or short, or squat or lean, or
+young or old, but he was like Jim Clay, if he did any good. I'm about
+dead sick of him."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't seem to remember Jim Clay was your grandfather," I said, as
+his relict left the room, "and that he is very dear in your
+grandmother's memory. It is pleasing how she recalls him. Wait till
+your hair is grey, my dear, and if you have some one as dearly
+enshrined in your heart it will be a good sign that your life has not
+been without savour."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, of course, I do forget to think of him as my grandfather, never
+hearing of him only as this everlasting Jim Clay, and if he was like
+that red-headed fellow it would take a lot of him to be remembered as
+anything but a big pug-looking creature that I'd be ashamed to be seen
+with."</p>
+
+<p>This was not a propitious first impression, and as she was inclined to
+be censorious I considered it diplomatic to point out his detractions,
+knowing that the combative propensity of the young lady would then
+seek for recommendations.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, he is a great, unattractive, red-headed-looking lump, isn't he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I wouldn't say that. He looks fine and healthy at all events, and
+I do like to see a man that doesn't make one afraid he'll drop to
+pieces if you look at him."</p>
+
+<p>"But he's hopelessly red-headed," I opined.</p>
+
+<p>"But it isn't that sandy, insipid sort of red. It's very dark and
+thick, and his skin is clear and brown, not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span> that mangy-looking sample
+that usually goes with red hair," contended Dawn; and being willing
+that she should retain this opinion, I let the point go.</p>
+
+<p>There is one advantage in a heart trouble, that it often departs as
+suddenly as it attacks, and ere it was again Carry's week in the
+house, I was once more able to stroll round and depend upon Andrew for
+entertainment.</p>
+
+<p>He invited me to the dairy to see him turn the hand cream-separator,
+and I remained to dry the discs out of its bowl while he washed them.
+He had a conversational turn, and in his choice of subjects was a
+patriot. He never went out of his realm for imported themes, but
+entirely confined his patronage to those at hand. This day his
+discourse was of blow-flies; I cared not though it had been of manure.
+I had knocked around the sharp corners of life sufficiently to have
+got a sensible adjustment of weights and measures, refinements and
+vulgarities. Besides, I gratefully remembered the tears Andrew had
+shed during my illness, and bore in mind that many a dandy who could
+please me by his phraseology of choice anecdotes could not be more
+than "bored" though I might die in torture at his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"My word! I'm thankful for the winter for one thing," he began, "and
+that's because there ain't any blow-flies. They'd give you the pip in
+the summer. They used to be here blowin' everything they come across.
+They'd blow the cream if we left it a day. They'd blow you if you
+didn't look sharp. I had Whiskey taught to ketch 'em. Here, Whiskey!
+Whiskey!" and as that mongrel appeared, his master tossed him pellets
+of curds dipped in cream, and grinned delightedly as they were
+fiercely snapped. "He thinks it's blow-flies. Great little Whiskey!
+good little Whiskey, catch 'em blow-flies.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span> By Jove! I've had enough
+of farming," continued he, "it's the God-forsakenest game, but me
+grandma won't let me chuck it. I notice no one with any sense stays
+farmin'. They all get a job on the railway, or take to auctioneering,
+or something with money in it. You're always scratchin' on a farm. You
+should have been here in the summer when the tomatoes was ripe.
+Couldn't get rid of 'em for a song&mdash;couldn't get cases enough. They
+rotted in the field till the stink of them was worse than a chow's
+camp, an' what didn't rot was just cooked in the sun. Peaches the
+same, an' great big melons for a shilling a dozen. That's farming for
+you! The only time you could sell things would be when you haven't got
+'em. Whiskey can eat melon like a good 'un, and grapes too." Andrew
+now threw out the wash-up water, pitching it on to Whiskey, who went
+away whimpering aggrievedly, much to the delight of his master, and
+illustrating that even the favourite pet of a youth has something to
+put up with in this imperfect life.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="TEN" id="TEN"></a>TEN.</h2>
+
+<h3>PROVINCIAL POLITICS AND SEMI-SUBURBAN DENTISTS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>May dawned over the world, and throughout New South Wales awoke a
+stir, reaching even to the sleepy heart of Noonoon. This was owing to
+the fact that the State Parliament was near the end of its term, and
+political candidates for the ensuing election were already in the
+field.</p>
+
+<p>Though not many decades settled, the country had progressed to
+nationhood, England allowing the precocious youngster this freedom of
+self-government, and sending her Crown Prince to open her first
+Commonwealth Parliament. Then the fledgling nation, bravely in the van
+of progress, had invested its women with the tangible hall-mark of
+full being or citizenship, by giving them a right to a voice in the
+laws by which they were governed; and now, watched by the older
+countries whose women were still in bondage, the women of this
+Australian State were about to take part in a political election. Not
+for the first time either,&mdash;let them curtsey to the liberality of
+their countrymen!</p>
+
+<p>The Federal elections, for which women were entitled to stand as
+senatorial candidates, had come previously, and though old prejudice
+had been too strong to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span> extent of many votes to grasp that a woman
+might really be a senatrix, and that a vote cast for her would not be
+wasted, still one woman candidate had polled 51,497 votes where the
+winning candidate had gone in on 85,387, and this had been no
+"shrieking sister" such as the clever woman is depicted by those who
+fear progress, but a beautiful, refined, educated, and particularly
+womanly young lady in the heyday of youth. The cowardly old sneer that
+disappointment had driven her to this had no footing here, as she had
+every qualification, except empty-headedness, to have ensured success
+as a belle in the social world, had she been disposed to pad her own
+life by means of a wealthy marriage instead of endeavouring to benefit
+her generation in becoming a legislator. She was a fitting daughter of
+the land of the Southern Sun, whose sons were among the first to admit
+their sisters to equal citizenship with themselves, and she
+brilliantly proved her fitness for her right by her wonderful ability
+on the hustings, which had been free from any vocal shortcoming and
+unacquainted with hesitation in replying to the knottiest question
+regarding the most intricate bill.</p>
+
+<p>The Federal election, however, in a sense had been farther
+away&mdash;fought at long-range, while that of the State was brought right
+to one's back door.</p>
+
+<p>The Federal campaign had been freer from the provincial bickering
+which was a prominent feature of the State election, and made it more
+a hand-to-hand contest, where every elector was worthy of
+consideration; and though women were debarred from entering the State
+Parliament, yet they were now beings worth fawning upon for a vote,
+and their addition to the ranks of the electors gave matters a decided
+fillip.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The first intimation that the campaign had actually started reached me
+one afternoon when Dawn drove me into town to see a dentist. The whole
+Clay household had risen up against me patronising a local dentist.</p>
+
+<p>"They're only blacksmiths," said Andrew. "I could tinker up a tooth as
+good as they can with a bit of sealing-wax."</p>
+
+<p>However, I could get no doctor to give me a longer lease of life than
+twelve months, and as it was not a very important tooth, I considered
+the local practitioners were sufficient to the evil.</p>
+
+<p>The afternoon before, when Ernest had dropped in to see <i>me</i>, I had
+<i>casually</i> mentioned that Dawn and I were going up town next day, so
+therefore, what more natural than, as we entered the main street, to
+see him very busily inspecting wares in a saddler's shop&mdash;articles for
+which he could have no use, and which if he had, a man of his means
+could obtain of superior quality from Sydney. I diplomatically, and
+Dawn ostentatiously, failed to notice him as we drove past to where
+was displayed the legend&mdash;S. Messre, Chemist and Dentist, late C. C.
+Rock-Snake, and where Dawn halted, saying, at the eleventh hour, "You
+ought to go to Sydney, Charlie Rock-Snake was all right, but I don't
+care for the look of this fellow."</p>
+
+<p>Going to Sydney, however, would not serve my ends nearly so well as
+consulting S. Messre; for while I was with him Dawn would remain
+outside, and what more certain than that Mr R. Ernest Breslaw, walking
+up the street and quite unexpectedly espying her, and being such a
+friend of mine, should dawdle with her awaiting my reappearance, while
+growing inwardly wishful that it might be long delayed.</p>
+
+<p>I knocked on the counter of the dusty, dirty shop,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span> and after a time
+an extraordinary person appeared behind it.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you Mr Messre?"</p>
+
+<p>"I believe so. Hold hard a bit."</p>
+
+<p>Probably he went to ascertain who he really was, for I was left
+sitting alone until a splendidly muscular figure in a fashionable
+pattern of tweeds halted opposite the vehicle holding my driver. I was
+quite satisfied with Mr S. Messre's methods, though his initial, as
+Andrew averred, might very well have stood for silly.</p>
+
+<p>The golfing cap came off the heavy red locks, while the bright brown
+ones under the smart felt hat with the pom-poms, bobbed in response,
+and Mr S. Messre came upon me again, wiping his fingers on a soiled
+towel, and tugging each one separately after the manner of childhood.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you want a tooth pulled?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I wished to consult you dentally, but not in public," I said,
+as two urchins came in and listened with all their features.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, hold hard a bit and I'll take you inside."</p>
+
+<p>I held or rather sat hard on the tall hard chair, and heard Ernest
+explaining to Dawn that he had been swimming in the sun, which made
+his face as red as his hair, for he gave her to understand that such
+was not his usual complexion. His red locks, very dark and handsome,
+which lent him a distinction and endeared him to me, were such a
+sensitive point with him that his mind was continually reverting to
+them, and that audacious Dawn unkindly replied&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"It wouldn't do to be all red. If my hair were red I'd dye it green or
+blue, but red I would not have."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"But it's a good serviceable colour for a <i>man</i>," meekly protested the
+knight.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps for a <i>fighting</i> man," retorted the young minx with no
+contradictory twinkle in her eye; "but I could never trust a
+red-headed person: all that I know are deceitful."</p>
+
+<p>I was dismayed. How would a gentle young athlete weather this? To a
+perky little man of more wits than muscle, or to a gay old Lothario,
+it would have been an incentive to the chase, but I feared Dawn was
+too horribly, uncompromisingly given to speaking what she felt,
+irrespective of grace, to expand this young Romeo to love; but much
+merciless fire will be stood from beauty, and he made a valiant
+defence.</p>
+
+<p>"There are exceptions to every rule, Miss Dawn. I never was known as
+deceitful; ask any one who knows me."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know any one who knows you."</p>
+
+<p>"Ask your friend inside, I think she'll give me a good character."</p>
+
+<p>"Quite the reverse. If you heard what she says about you, you'd never
+be seen in Noonoon again;" but this assertion was made with such a
+roguish smile on eye and lip that Ernest took up a closer position by
+stepping into the gutter and placing one foot on the step of the sulky
+and a corresponding hand on the dashboard railing; and in that
+position I left them, with yellow-haired Miss Jimmeny from the corner
+pub. walking by on the broken asphalt under the verandahs, and casting
+a contemptuous and condemnatory glance at the forward Dawn who
+favoured the men.</p>
+
+<p>Mr S. Messre led the way to a place at the back of the shop which was
+layered with dust and strewn with cotton<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>-wool and dental appliances,
+some of them smeared from the preceding victims, evidently. He did not
+seem to know how to dispose of me, so I placed myself in the
+professional chair and invited him to examine the broken molar.</p>
+
+<p>"The light is bad here," he remarked, fumbling with my head, and
+making towards my face with one of the soiled instruments.</p>
+
+<p>"That is not my fault," I replied.</p>
+
+<p>"This is him!" he further remarked, tapping my cheek with a finger.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"He wants patching."</p>
+
+<p>"So <i>he</i> leads me to imagine."</p>
+
+<p>"The nerve would want killing."</p>
+
+<p>"Quite so, and to attend to its wants I'm here."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd take eight shillings to kill the nerve."</p>
+
+<p>"Would you use them as an apparatus to execute it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then I'd take twelve or thirteen shillings to fill it," he continued.</p>
+
+<p>I was interested in the uniqueness of his methods.</p>
+
+<p>"Would you purpose to powder the shillings or use them whole&mdash;I would
+have thought an alligator's or shark's tooth would scarcely require
+that quantity of material?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr Messre stared at me in a dazed manner.</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't touch the tooth under that," he continued.</p>
+
+<p>"Is there another tooth under it? then extract this one and give the
+other a fair chance."</p>
+
+<p>"It would be a lot of trouble," he kept on, without specially replying
+to my remark.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps so; when one comes to think of it, teeth, I suppose, are not
+filled without some exercise on the part of the dentist."</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't think of touching that tooth for less than a guinea; why
+it would take at least an hour to do it."</p>
+
+<p>"This is the first intimation I've had that dentists calculated to
+mend teeth without spending any time on them," I said.</p>
+
+<p>Mr Messre didn't seem to grasp the drift of my remarks, and as I felt
+unequal to maintaining the conversation for a more extended period, I
+announced my intention of thinking about what he had said. He said it
+would be as well, and I emerged to find Ernest had so far progressed
+as to be seated in the sulky holding my parasol over Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>Youth and beauty is privileged to command an athlete to hold its
+sunshade, while old age has difficulty in finding so much as a small
+boy to carry its basket across the street. Mayhap this is why it is
+largely the elderly and frequently the unattractive people who fight
+for honest rights for their class and sex, while it is from pretty
+young women's lips issues most of the silly rubbish anent it being
+entirely women's fault that men will not conform to their "influence"
+in all matters. Only a very small percentage can regard conditions
+from any but a selfish point of view or conceive of any but their own
+shoe-pinch.</p>
+
+<p>"I happened to see Miss Dawn here and waited to ask you how you are,"
+said Ernest.</p>
+
+<p>"Just what you should have done," I replied; "and now if you can wait
+till I investigate another dentist I want your opinion on a purchase I
+am making."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, certainly," he hastened to reply; "I'm doing a loaf<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span> this
+afternoon. I thought I heard my oar crack this morning, so came for
+some leather to tack round it."</p>
+
+<p>This in elaborate explanation of his presence there.</p>
+
+<p>The second dentist proved the antithesis of his contemporary, being
+short, pleasant, and bright.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you what," he said, laughing engagingly, "the best thing to
+be done with that tooth is to dress it with carbolic acid. Now this is
+a secret."</p>
+
+<p>"One of those that only a few don't know, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps so," he said, laughing still more pleasantly.</p>
+
+<p>"You can do this tooth just as well as I can. Get three penno'worth of
+acid and put some in once or twice a-day and the nerve will be dead in
+two or three days, and I'll do the rest."</p>
+
+<p>As he proved such an amiable individual, though probably an
+exceedingly suburban dentist, I got rid of half an hour in desultory
+chat, as I could see from the window that the knight and the lady, if
+not progressing like a house on fire, were at least enjoying
+themselves in a casual way.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you have only one tooth to be attended to?" inquired Dawn when I
+appeared.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; and I fear that it will be one too many for Noonoon dentists," I
+replied. I could think of nothing upon which to ask Ernest's advice,
+so I feigned that I was not feeling well enough for any further worry
+that afternoon, but would command his services at a future date.</p>
+
+<p>I now held the pony while Dawn disappeared into a shop and reappeared
+with an acquaintance who invited us to attend a political meeting that
+night. The electors, alarmed at the prodigal propensities of the
+sitting govern<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>ment, were forming an Opposition League to remedy
+matters, and the first step was to choose one of the two candidates
+offering themselves as representatives of this party for Noonoon. The
+first one was to speak that night in the Citizens' Hall, and by paying
+a shilling one could become a member of the League, and vote for this
+candidate or the other.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, if I only had a vote!" regretfully exclaimed Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"He's a young chap named Walker, from Sydney,&mdash;very rich, I believe.
+Do you know him?" Mrs Pollaticks inquired of me.</p>
+
+<p>"I've heard of him," I said, exchanging glances with Ernest, "and
+should like to hear him, if convenient."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll drive you in," volunteered Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"If you're around you might act as groom," I suggested to Ernest, and
+he gladly responding, it was agreed that we should begin
+electioneering that night.</p>
+
+<p>"I knew Ernest would be delighted to be with us, he takes great
+pleasure in my company," I remarked with assumed complacence as we
+drove home; and I watched Dawn smile at my conceit in imagining any
+one took pleasure in my company while she was present, and that any
+normal male under ninety should do so would have been so phenomenal
+that she had reason for that derisive little smile.</p>
+
+<p>"You said he was hopelessly red-headed," she remarked; "why, I think
+he has a handsome kind of red hair. I never thought red hair could be
+nice, but Mr Ernest's is different."</p>
+
+<p>I smiled to myself.</p>
+
+<p>"I never thought much of men, but this one is differ<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>ent," has been
+said by more than one bride; and, "I never could suffer infants, but
+this kid is different to all I've seen," is an expression often heard
+from proud young fathers.</p>
+
+<p>"His young lady thinks so at all events," I innocently remarked, and
+we fell into silence complete.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="ELEVEN" id="ELEVEN"></a>ELEVEN.</h2>
+
+<h3>ANDREW DISGRACES HIS "RARIN'."</h3>
+
+
+<p>The silence that fell upon Dawn and myself was unbroken when we went
+to tea and seemed to have affected the whole company, or else it was
+the conversational powers of Andrew, who was absent, which were
+wanting to enliven us.</p>
+
+<p>"He ought to be home," said grandma. "He's got no business away, and
+the place can't be kep' in a uproar for him when the girls want to go
+out."</p>
+
+<p>The old lady had determined to take a vigorous interest in politics,
+and spoke of going to hear the meetings later on herself.</p>
+
+<p>It presently transpired that Andrew had not been looking to his
+grandma for all that went into his "stummick" so religiously as he
+should have been. Just as he was under discussion he made a dramatic
+entry, and fell breathlessly in his grandma's arm-chair near the
+fireplace. The usual occupant glared at him in astonishment and
+demanded "a explanation," which came immediately, but not from Andrew.
+Instead there was a loud and imperative knocking at a side door, and
+when Carry, after cursing the white ants which had made the door hard
+to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span> open by throwing it out of plumb with their ravages, at last got
+it open, there appeared an irate old man carrying a stout stick. It
+was plain that he too had been running,&mdash;in short, was in pursuit of
+Andrew, who had quite collapsed in the chair.</p>
+
+<p>"I've come, missus, to warn you to keep your boy out of my orange
+orchard," he gulped. "Six or seven times I've nearly caught him an'
+young Bray in it, but to-night I run 'em down, an' only they escaped
+me I'd have give 'em the father of a skelpin'. If I ketch them there
+again I'll bring 'em before the court an' give 'em three months; but
+you being a neebur, I'd like to give you a show of keepin' him out
+first."</p>
+
+<p>The old dame, <i>&agrave; la</i> herself, had been in the act of pouring milk and
+sprinkling sugar on some boiled rice which frequently appeared on the
+menu during Carry's week in the kitchen, previous to handing it to
+Miss Flipp, but she waved her hand, thereby indicating that in so dire
+an extremity we were to be trusted with the sugar-basin ourselves,&mdash;in
+fact, that any laxity in this item would have to be let slide for
+once.</p>
+
+<p>After the manner of finely-strung temperaments with the steel in them,
+which wear so well, and to the last remain as sensitive as a youth or
+maiden, Mrs Martha Clay then rose from her seat, visibly trembling,
+but with a flashing battle-light in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"What have you got to say to this?" she demanded, turning on her
+grandson.</p>
+
+<p>"I never touched none of his bloomin' old oranges. It was Jack Bray,
+it wasn't me."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said she; "and if you was listening to Jack Bray it would be
+you done it all, an' he who never done nothink. What's the charge, and
+what damages have you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span> laid on it?" she demanded of the accuser,
+fixing him with a fiery glance.</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't goin' to lay any damages this time, I only thought you'd
+rather me warn you than not; I know I would with a youngster. I
+suppose after all he ain't done no more than you an' me done in our
+young days, an' my oranges bein' ripe so extra early was a great
+temptation," familiarly said the man.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know what <i>you</i> done in your young days, but I know I
+never took a pin that didn't belong to me, none of me children or
+people neither; and as for Jim Clay, he wouldn't think of touchin' a
+thing&mdash;he was too much the other way to get on in the world. An' it
+ain't any fault of my rarin' that me grandson is hounded down a
+vagabond," said the old lady in a tragic manner.</p>
+
+<p>Seeing her fierce agitation, the lad's pursuer was alarmed and sought
+to pacify her by further remarking&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"He ain't done nothink out of the way, an' I admit the oranges was a
+great temptation."</p>
+
+<p>The old lady snorted, and the colour of her face heralded something
+verging on an apoplectic seizure.</p>
+
+<p>"Temptation! If people was only honest and decent by keepin' from the
+things that ain't any temptation, we'd be all fit for jail or a
+asylum. Pretty thing, if he's only to leave alone that which ain't any
+temptation to him! You could put other people's things before me, I
+wouldn't take 'em, not if me tongue was hanging out a yard for 'em.
+That's the kind of honesty that I've always practised to me neighbours
+and rared into any one under me, and that's the only kind of honesty
+that is honesty at all," she splendidly finished. "An' I'm very
+thankful to you for informin' me. I wish you had caught him an'
+skelped the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span> hide off of him. It's what I'll do meself soon as I sift
+the matter."</p>
+
+<p>The old man bade good-night and departed with his stick.</p>
+
+<p>"He's always sneakin' about the lanes, an' only poked his tongue out
+at me w'en I wanted to know where he was," maliciously said Uncle Jake
+in reference to his grand-nephew.</p>
+
+<p>"Mean old hide, always likes to sit on any one when they're down,"
+whispered Dawn and Carry to each other. "A pity Andrew hadn't two
+tongues to stick out at him."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Flipp was too dull to be aroused by even this disturbance. The
+only time she showed any feeling was when her "uncle" paid her
+clandestine visits. Her life seemed to be in a terrible tangle&mdash;more
+than that, in a syrtis,&mdash;but I did not take a hand in further crushing
+her. She had been kind to me during my indisposition, and except in
+extreme cases, "live and let live" was an axiom I had learned to
+carefully regard. Knowledge of the slight chance of circumstances or
+opportunity&mdash;which too frequently is the only difference between a
+good person and a bad one, success and failure&mdash;reminds one to be very
+lenient regarding human frailty.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, me young shaver! I'll deal with you," said grandma, turning to
+Andrew, in whom there appeared to be left no defence. Never have I
+seen so old a woman in such a towering rage, and rarely have I seen
+one of seventy-five with vigour sufficiently unimpaired to feel so
+extremely as she gave evidence of doing.</p>
+
+<p>"This is the first time anythink like this ever happened in my family,
+and if I thought it wouldn't be the last I believe I'd kill you where
+you are."</p>
+
+<p>Andrew emitted no sound, he had given himself up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span> with that calmness
+one evinces when the worst is upon them&mdash;when there is nothing further
+beyond.</p>
+
+<p>"Go off to bed as you are without a bit to eat," she continued,
+plucking at her little collar as though to get air. "To-morrow I'll
+see the Brays about this, and I'll skelp the skin off of you. I'd do
+it now, only there's no knowing where I'd end, I feel that terrible
+upset. What would Jim Clay think now, I wonder? You God-forsaken young
+vagabond, bringin' disgrace upon me at this time of me life. I'd be
+ashamed to walk up town and give me vote as I was lookin' forward to,
+and me grandson nearly in jail for stealing. <i>Stealing</i>! It's a nice
+sounding word in connection with one of your own that you've rared
+strict, ain't it? You snuffed up mighty smart when I asked you your
+doings, now it comes out why you couldn't account for 'em. 'Might as
+well be in a bloomin' glass case as have to carry a pocket-book round
+an' make a map of where he's been,' sez he. It appears a map of your
+doin's wouldn't pass examination by the police. How would you have
+been makin' a honest way in the world if I wasn't here to be
+responsible for you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, grandma!" said Dawn, seeking to calm her, lest the excitement
+would be too much. "After all it mightn't be so bad. Lots of boys take
+a few paltry oranges out of the gardens and no one makes such a fuss
+but that old creature. He just wants to be officious." This was an
+injudicious attempt at peace.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that you speakin', Dawn? '<i>Lots of boys do it.</i>' Perhaps you will
+also say, 'Lots of girls come home with a baby in their arms.' Once
+you get the idea in your head that there's no harm because lots do it,
+you're on a express train to the devil. Lots of people do things and
+some don't, and that's the only difference between the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span> vagabonds I've
+never been, and the decent folk I'd cut me throat if I wasn't among.
+An' you're the last person I ever would have thought would have upheld
+a <i>thief</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, grandma!" protested Dawn, "I don't uphold him. I'm ashamed to
+be related to him, but don't make yourself ill now. Sleep on it, and
+to-morrow give him rats."</p>
+
+<p>"Remember this," continued grandma, "an' carry the knowledge through
+life with you, that I can't make your character for you. Each one has
+to make their own, but seeing the foundation you've been give, makes
+you a disgrace to it. It takes you all your time for years an' years
+puttin' in good bricks to make a good character, but you can get rid
+of it for ever in one act, don't forget that; an' remember that
+belongin' to a respectable family won't stop you from bein' a thief.
+You are very quick to talk about some of these poor rag-tag about
+town, an' I suppose you an' Jack Bray thought you couldn't be the
+same, but you've found out your mistake! Go to bed now, and I'll
+leather you well to-morrer," she concluded encouragingly; and Andrew
+lost no time in taking this remand, looking, to use his own
+expression, as though he had the "pip."</p>
+
+<p>"Dear me!" sighed the old lady, "them as has rared any boys don't know
+what it is to die of idleness an' want of vexation. If it ain't
+somethink beyond belief, one might be that respectable theirself they
+could be put in a glass case, an' yet here would be a young vagabond
+bringin' them to shame before the whole district."</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't see that he has done anything very terrible," hazily
+interposed Miss Flipp.</p>
+
+<p>"Good gracious! If he had been cheekin' some one or playin' a
+far-fetched joke, I might be able to forgive him, but there must be
+reason in everythink, an' to go an'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span> meddle with other's property is
+carryin' things too far. 'Heed the spark or you may dread the fire,'
+is a piece of wisdom I've always took to heart in rarin' <i>my</i> family,
+and I notice them as are inclined to look leniently on evil, no matter
+how small, never come out the clean potato in the finish," trenchantly
+concluded the old woman; and Miss Flipp was so disconcerted that she
+immediately retired to her room, but noticed by no one but me.
+Probably the poor girl, if gifted with any capacity for retrospection,
+wished that she had heeded the spark that she might not now be in
+danger of being consumed by the fire.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="TWELVE" id="TWELVE"></a>TWELVE.</h2>
+
+<h3>SOME SIDE-PLAY.</h3>
+
+
+<p>As Andrew was banished, and grandma determined to retire to ponder
+upon his sin, she waived it being Carry's week in the kitchen and
+consequently her duty to prepare supper coffee, and suggested that we
+younger women should all go to the meeting, but Miss Flipp refused on
+the score of a headache.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor creature!" observed grandma, "I think she's afraid of a attack
+of her old complaint, she looks that terrible bad, and don't take
+interest in anythink. She wants rousin' out of herself more. She ain't
+a girl that will confide anythink to one, but her uncle is comin' up
+again to-morrer, an' I think I'll speak to him."</p>
+
+<p>When Carry, Dawn, and I arrived at the Citizens' Hall, Ernest was
+already waiting to act groom, while Larry Witcom also accidentally
+hovered near. He quite as casually took possession of Carry, so there
+was nothing for a common individual like myself but to become
+extremely self-absorbed, so that my keen observation might not be an
+interception of any interest likely to circulate between the knight
+and the lady. The latter seemed to be in one of her contrary moods, so
+attached herself to me like a barnacle, settled me in a seat one from
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span> wall, and peremptorily indicating to Ernest that he was to take
+the one against it, put herself carefully away from him on the
+outside. A wag would have arranged the party to suit himself, but that
+was beyond Ernest. He meekly sat down beside me, with a helplessness
+possible only to the sturdiest athlete in the room when in the hands
+of a fair and wilful maid. I could have come to his rescue, but deemed
+it wiser not to thrust him upon Dawn for the present. We had arrived
+very early, so there was time for conversation. Encouraged by me,
+Ernest leant forward and addressed a few remarks to Dawn, which she
+received so coolly that he distraitly talked to me instead, and as
+people began to gather, above the majority towered the fair head and
+striking profile of him I had first seen dealing in pumpkins, and who
+was colloquially known as "Dora" Eweword. Dawn beckoned him to the
+seat beside her, which he took with alacrity, a rollicking laugh and a
+crimsoning face, which, in conjunction with a double chin, bespoke the
+further partnership of a large and well-satisfied appetite.</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't seen you for an age," said Dawn with unusual graciousness.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you sure you wanted to see me?" he inquired, with an amorous
+look.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn used her bewitching eyes of blue in a laughing glance.</p>
+
+<p>"You know you only have to give me the wink and you'll see me as often
+as you want," straightforwardly confessed "Dora"; but Dawn having
+encouraged him to a certain distance, had a mind to bring him no
+nearer.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care if I never saw you again," she said bluntly, "but
+grandma likes yarning with you, that's why I inquired."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Dora" looked very red in the face indeed.</p>
+
+<p>"How's Miss Cowper?" mercilessly pursued Dawn, going to the point
+about which she was curious, as is characteristic of swains and maids
+of her degree. "I hope she's well."</p>
+
+<p>"So do I," said Eweword.</p>
+
+<p>"You used to ask after her health about twice a-day. I thought you
+would be taking her to Lucerne Farm to relieve your anxiety;" and in
+response to this "Dora" sealed his fate, as far as my feeling any
+compunction whether he singed his wings or not in the light of Dawn's
+bright candle, for he said with a touch of bravado&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I was only pulling her leg."</p>
+
+<p>To do the man justice he did not seem down to the full unmanliness of
+this statement; it appeared more one of those nasty and idle remarks
+to which all are prone when in a tight corner, and speaking on the
+spur of the moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, was that all!" said Dawn mockingly. "It was very nice of you. Are
+you always so kind and thoughtful?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm thinking of clearing out to Sydney in a day or two, I've spent
+enough time loafing. The only thing that has kept me here so long is
+that I wanted to hear how Les. got on in his maiden speech. We're not
+much to each other, but when a fellow has no one belonging to him he
+feels a claim on the most distant connection," said Ernest on the
+other side of me. His interest in Leslie Walker's maiden speech had
+been developed as suddenly as his opinion that he had spent enough
+time in a boat on the river Noonoon.</p>
+
+<p>The connection he mentioned between himself and the candidate about to
+speak was that old Walker, whose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span> only son the latter was, had married
+a widow with one son, by name Ernest Breslaw. Both these parents were
+now dead, leaving the step-brothers as their only offspring. The lads
+had been reared together, and though of utterly different tastes and
+callings, a mutual regard existed between them. Walker had passed his
+examinations at the bar, and Breslaw had been trained to electrical
+engineering, but both being wealthy, neither followed their
+professions except in a nominal way. Walker had put in his time in
+society, motoring, flirting, travelling, dabbling in the arts, and
+building a fine town mansion, while Ernest had spent all his time in
+athletic training, with the result that Walker had fallen a prize in
+the marriage arena, while Ernest was yet in full possession of his
+bachelorhood.</p>
+
+<p>Any further conversation was out of the question, as the candidate&mdash;a
+smart, clean-shaven man with clearly cut features&mdash;now appeared, and
+announced himself by removing his new straw "decker," and calling
+out&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Ladies and gentlemen, before we begin I would like to follow the
+democratic principle of asking you to choose a chairman from among
+yourselves."</p>
+
+<p>"We propose Mr Oscar Lawyer!" called several voices, naming a popular
+townsman, and this being seconded, the candidate and the people's
+chairman, two very gentlemanly-looking men for the hustings, ascended
+to the stage side by side.</p>
+
+<p>The chairman took up a position behind a little red table supporting a
+water-bottle and smudgy tumbler, while Leslie Walker sat on another
+chair at the end of it.</p>
+
+<p>Many members of parliament, having risen to their position from
+coal-heaving or hotel-keeping, when going on the war-path a second
+time, take great pains to get<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span> themselves <i>up</i> in accordance with
+their idea of the dignity of their office. Many old fellows, roaring
+"Gimme your votes, I'm the only bloke to save the country and see you
+git yer rights," dress this modest <i>r&ocirc;le</i> in a long-tailed satin-faced
+frock-coat, a good thing in the trouser line, and a stylish
+button-hole; but Leslie Walker, one of the champagne set, had made
+equally palpable efforts to dress himself <i>down</i> to his present
+<i>d&eacute;but</i>.</p>
+
+<p>For sure! his suit, which comprised an alpaca coat with a crumpled
+tail, must have been the shabbiest he had, while the glistening new
+white sailor hat had probably been procured at the last moment in the
+vain imagination that, dress as he would, it was not evident at a
+first glance that he had had the bread-and-butter problem solved for
+him by a provident parent before his birth, and that he had lived what
+is designated the cultured life, far and autocratically above sympathy
+with the vulgar and despised herds, upon whose sweat his class build
+the pretty villas fronting the harbour, charge haughtily along the
+roads in automobiles, and sail the graceful yachts on the idyllic
+waters of Port Jackson.</p>
+
+<p>"By Jove! Les. has different ambitions from mine," said Ernest. "I'd
+rather have to stand up to a mill with the champion pug. than face
+what he's on for to-night. Doesn't he look a case in that get up?
+Supposing he gets in, what the devil good will it do then, and it
+takes such crawling to get into parliament nowadays. There are too
+many at the game. I could never face the way one has to flatter some
+of these old creatures for their vote. I'd rather plug them under the
+jaw."</p>
+
+<p>Mr Oscar Lawyer having introduced the speaker, he came forward, and
+after explaining it was his first appearance in politics, charmingly
+proceeded, "I hope I shall not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span> bore you with my remarks as I
+endeavour to outline the various planks in the platform of the party
+to which I have the honour to belong."</p>
+
+<p>Quite superfluous for him to explain that he was a new chum in
+politics. Only a fledgling from a Brussels or Axminster carpeted
+reception-room would stand on the hustings and publish a fear that he
+might be boring his audience. One familiar with the trade of
+electioneering, as it has always been conducted by men, would strut
+and shout and brag, never for a moment worrying whether or not he came
+anywhere near the truth or feeling the slightest qualm, though he
+deafened his hearers with his trumpeting or bored them to complete
+extinction, and would refuse to be silenced even by "eggs of great
+antiquity."</p>
+
+<p>"Les. ought to stick to society," observed his step-brother; "flipping
+around a drawing-room and making all the girls think they were equally
+in the running was more in his line."</p>
+
+<p>"He's a nice, clean, good-looking young fellow at any rate, and
+doesn't look as if he gorged himself&mdash;hasn't that red-faced, stuffed
+look," said Dawn. "If I had a vote I'd give it to him just for that,
+as I'm sick of these red-nosed old members of parliament with
+corporations."</p>
+
+<p>"He's the real lah-de-dah Johnny, isn't he?" laughed "Dora" Eweword.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you say he's any relation of mine," said Ernest. "It would give
+me away, and he thinks I'm in Melbourne. I told every one that's where
+I was bound. I hope he won't catch sight of me."</p>
+
+<p>There was little fear of this; one has to be accustomed to facing a
+crowd before they can distinguish faces.</p>
+
+<p>After the meeting, which dispersed early, Ernest and I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span> hurried out
+into the galvanised iron-walled yard, in which those coming from a
+distance put their horses and vehicles.</p>
+
+<p>Having noted the disconsolate manner in which a pair of dark eyes
+below a thatch of generous hue surreptitiously glanced towards a
+tormentatious maiden with ribbons of blue matching her eyes and
+fluttering on her bosom, I thought it time to come to his rescue.</p>
+
+<p>"If you would care to talk to your friend, he can drive you home while
+I walk with 'Dora'; he says he has something to say to me," said Dawn
+in an aside.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you sure you want to hear it?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"How could I tell until I hear it?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is not a fair answer, Dawn."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it wasn't a fair question," she pouted.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, I will not press you more, but you'll tell me of it after,
+will you not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what would you like me to do?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'd like you to be naughty. Mr <i>Dora's</i> complacence inspires me
+to inveigle him into having to drive me home while you walk with some
+one else."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, anything for fun," she responded with dancing eyes; and as
+Ernest had the horse in I got into the sulky and said&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"There is room for three here, Mr Eweword, and we would be glad of you
+to put the horse out when we get home."</p>
+
+<p>He took the reins and a seat, and moved aside to make room for the
+loitering Dawn, but she said&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"No, I'll walk; I must keep Carry company, and she doesn't want to
+come just yet."</p>
+
+<p>"Drive on," I commanded, and there was nothing for the entrapped
+"Dora" to do but obey.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I saw Carry go on with another escort. "Will you permit me to see you
+to your gate?" I heard Ernest saying as we went, and Dawn asserting
+that it was unnecessary.</p>
+
+<p>It was a beautiful starry night, with a prospect of a slight frost, as
+we turned down the tree-lined streets of the friendly old town, whose
+folk on their homeward way dawdled in knots to discuss the
+interposition of the women's vote.</p>
+
+<p>"Now the women will do strokes," said one.</p>
+
+<p>"The men have things in such a jolly muddle it will take a long time
+to improve them," another retorted.</p>
+
+<p>"The women will make bloomin' fools of themselves!"</p>
+
+<p>"Couldn't be worse than the men!"</p>
+
+<p>"The women'll all go for this chap because he's good-looking."</p>
+
+<p>"Just as good a reason as going for another because he shouted grog
+for you," and similar remarks, drifted to my ears, but "Dora's" mind
+did not seem to be running on politics.</p>
+
+<p>"Who was that red-headed fellow sitting the other side of you?" he
+inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Which one?"</p>
+
+<p>"A short block of a fellow with a clean face."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he's a man I know."</p>
+
+<p>"Pretty cool of us leaving Dawn. The old dame won't like it."</p>
+
+<p>"She won't mind, considering Dawn has about the most reliable escort
+procurable."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose it's all right if you know him, but to me he looked like a
+bagman or bike-rider or something in the spieler line."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no," and pulling my boa about me I smiled to think of the chagrin
+of Dora. He was so beautifully<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span> transparent too, but to do him justice
+did not seem to resent the scurvy trick I had played him, as soon his
+equanimity was restored, and we laboured cheerfully but unavailingly
+to promote a conversation.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you really like farming&mdash;take a pleasure in it?" I inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"When I'm knocking a decent amount of money out of it I do. There's
+not much fun in anything when it doesn't pay."</p>
+
+<p>"Quite true."</p>
+
+<p>"There might be a frost to-night, but they're nothing here&mdash;always
+disappear as soon as the sun is up. Great Scott! aren't these roads?
+The council want stuffing in the Noonoon. It would be an all right
+place only for the roads."</p>
+
+<p>This brought us to Clay's gate, and no further conversational effort
+was necessary. I lingered outside till Eweword had disposed of the
+pony and trap, and by that time Ernest and Dawn, bearing evidence of
+quick walking, appeared, and we went into grandma and Uncle Jake in a
+body.</p>
+
+<p>"The women are going to form a committee to work for Mr Walker if he's
+selected," announced Dawn, "and I want to join it, grandma. I am not
+old enough to vote, but I'd like to work for Mr Walker. He looks worth
+a vote. He's nice and thin, and speaks beautifully without shouting
+and roaring,&mdash;not like these old beer-swipers who buy their votes with
+drink."</p>
+
+<p>"He is a decent-looking fellow," said Eweword.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, he'll go in then; that's all the women will care about,"
+said Uncle Jake in one of his half-audible sneers.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," contended Dawn, "men always sneer at women<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span> for doing in a
+small degree what men do fifty times worse. If a pretty barmaid comes
+to town all the men are after her like bees, and if a pretty woman
+stood for parliament the men would go off their heads about her, and
+yet they get their hair off terribly if a woman happens to prefer a
+nice gentlemanly man to a big, old, fat beer-barrel, with his teeth
+black from tobacco and his neck gouging over his collar from eating
+too much. Can I join the committee, grandma?"</p>
+
+<p>"If it's proper, and he's my man, you can, an' work instead of me, but
+I must hear them both first."</p>
+
+<p>"If Walker could get you to make a speech for him, we'd all vote for
+him in a body," laughed Eweword; but Dawn replied&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you, I suppose you say that to every girl."</p>
+
+<p>Eweword sizzled in his blushes, while Ernest's face slightly cleared
+at this rebuff dealt out to another.</p>
+
+<p>Grandma brought in the coffee and grumbled to Dawn about Carry's
+absence.</p>
+
+<p>"That Larry Witcom ain't no monk, and while a girl is in my house I
+feel I ought to look after her. I believe in every one having liberty,
+but there's reason in everythink."</p>
+
+<p>The girl did not appear till after the young men had gone and Dawn and
+I had withdrawn, but we heard grandma's remonstrance.</p>
+
+<p>"That feller, I told you straight, was took up about a affair in a
+divorce case, an' it would be as well not to make yourself too cheap
+to him. I don't say as most men ain't as bad, only they're not caught
+and bowled out; but w'en they are made a public example of, we have to
+take notice of it. Marry him if you want&mdash;use your own judgment; he'll
+be the sort of feller who'll always have a good home, and in after
+years these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span> things is always forgot, and it would be better to be
+married to a man that had that against him (seein' they're all the
+same, only they ain't found out) and could keep you comfortable, than
+one who was <i>supposed</i> to be different an' couldn't keep you. But if
+you ain't goin' to marry him, don't fool about with him. An' unless he
+gets to business an' wants marriage at once, don't take too much
+notice to his soft soap, as you ain't the only girl he's got on the
+string by a long way."</p>
+
+<p>"He acknowledges about the fault he did in his young days, and he says
+it's terribly hard that it's always coming against him now," said
+Carry.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if a woman does a fault she has to pay for it, hasn't
+she?&mdash;that's the order of things," said grandma.</p>
+
+<p>"But this was when he was young and foolish," continued Carry.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, the poor child, he was terribly innocent, wasn't he? an' was got
+hold of by some fierce designing hussy&mdash;they always are&mdash;and it was
+all her fault. It always is a woman's fault&mdash;only for the women the
+men would be all angels and flew away long ago," said grandma
+sarcastically. "They'll give you plenty of that kind of yarn if you
+listen to 'em; an' if you are built so you can believe it, well an'
+good, but the facts was always too much of a eye-opener for me," and
+with that the contention ended.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Carry's the terriblest silly about that Larry Witcom," said
+Dawn; "she swallows all he says. She said to me yesterday, 'He seems
+to be terribly gone on me.' 'Yes,' I said. 'You keep cool about his
+goneness. Wait till he gets down on his knees and bellows and roars
+about his love, and take my tip for it he could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span> forget you then in
+less than a week.' I've seen men pretending to be mad with love, and
+the next month married to some one else. Men's love is a thing you
+want to take with more discount than everything you know. You might be
+conceited enough to believe them if you went by your own lovers, but
+you want to look on at other people's love affairs, and see how much
+is to be depended on there, and measure your own by them, and it will
+keep your head cool," said this girl, who had the most sensible head I
+ever saw in conjunction with her degree of beauty.</p>
+
+<p>She had contracted the habit of slipping into my room for a talk
+before going to bed, and as her bright presence there was a delight to
+me, I encouraged her in it. The gorgeous kimono was a great
+attraction; she loved it so that I had given it her after the first
+night, but did not tell her so, or she would have carried it away to
+her own room, where I would have been deprived of the pleasure of
+seeing it nightly enhance the loveliness of her firm white throat and
+arms.</p>
+
+<p>"How did you and Dora get on together?" she presently inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you see we didn't elope; how did you and Ernest manage?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you see we didn't elope," she laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"No, but you might have arranged such a thing."</p>
+
+<p>"Arranged for such a thing!" she said scornfully. "I'm not in the
+habit of trucking with other people's belongings."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"It was you who said something about his young lady this afternoon&mdash;as
+far as I can see he doesn't behave much as if he had one."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So it was my chance remark that had run her wheel out of groove during
+the last few hours!</p>
+
+<p>"Does he not?" I replied. "I think he appears more as though he has a
+young lady now than he did during my previous knowledge of him."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know how you see it," she said, as she tore down her
+pretty hair.</p>
+
+<p>"What!" I ejaculated in feigned consternation. "He has not been making
+love to you, has he, Dawn? I always had such faith in his manliness."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he doesn't <i>say</i> anything," said Dawn, with a blush. "But he
+glares at me in the way men do, and when I mention anything I like or
+want, he wants to get it for me, and all that sort of business."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps he's falling in love unawares. Young men are often stupid,
+and do not recognise their distemper till it is very ripe. He ought to
+be removed from danger."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if I ever had a lover, and he liked another girl better, I'd be
+pretty sure he hadn't cared for me, and would not want him any more,"
+she said off-handedly.</p>
+
+<p>"But would it not be better to let him go away and be happy with the
+maid who loves him than to spoil his life by wasting his affection on
+you, when you only think him a great pug-looking creature that you'd
+be ashamed to be seen with?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I don't care for him," she said still more off-handedly; "but he
+doesn't look so queer now I've got used to him. I suppose any one who
+liked him wouldn't think him such a horror."</p>
+
+<p>"No; I for one think him handsome."</p>
+
+<p>"Handsome?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes, <i>handsome</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'll go to bed after that and think how some people's tastes
+differ."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, take care you don't think about Ernest."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you; I don't want the nightmare," she retorted, tossing her
+head.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THIRTEEN" id="THIRTEEN"></a>THIRTEEN.</h2>
+
+<h3>VARIOUS EVENTS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The following day was eventful. To begin with, after Andrew had
+discharged his early morning duties, he was to appear before his
+grandma for the execution of the sentence she had passed upon him the
+night before. I was assisting him to dry the parts of the
+cream-separator, a task which had become chronic with me, when Carry
+shouted from the kitchen, where she was putting in her week&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Your grandma says not to be long; she's waiting for you."</p>
+
+<p>Andrew unburdened his soul to me.</p>
+
+<p>"Lord, ain't I just in for it! I'll hear how me grandma rared me since
+I was born! I'm dead sick of this born and rared business. It would
+give a bloke the pip. I didn't make meself born, nor want any one else
+to do it; there ain't much in bein' alive," he said with that
+pessimism which, like measles and whooping-cough, is indigenous to
+extreme youth.</p>
+
+<p>"How could I help being rared? I didn't ask 'em to rare me. I didn't
+make meself a little baby that couldn't help itself, and they needn't
+have rared me unless they liked. Goodness knows, I'd have rather died
+like a little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span> pup before his eyes were opened," he continued so
+tragically that I took the opportunity of smiling behind his back as
+he threw out the dish-water.</p>
+
+<p>"Hurry up! your grannie is waiting!" called Carry once more.</p>
+
+<p>"Blow you! you'll have to wait till I'm done," retorted the boy in a
+tone the reverse of genial.</p>
+
+<p>"People is always chuckin' at their kids how much they owe them. I'm
+blowed if ever I can see it. I didn't want 'em to have me, and don't
+see why it should be everlasting threw at me."</p>
+
+<p>It is a wise provision that youth cannot see what it owes the previous
+generation. This is a chicken that comes back to roost in heavier
+years.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I had a grandma like Jack Bray's ma. He nicked over to me w'en
+I was after the cows, an' Mrs Bray ain't goin' to kick up any row
+about the oranges. She says she never knew of a boy that didn't go
+into orchards in their young days, and that his dad did, and people
+don't think no more of a boy pickin' up a little fruit than they do of
+pickin' up a stick. Yet grandma will tan the hide off of me. She done
+it once before, and I was stiff for a week."</p>
+
+<p>"Take a tip from me, Andrew! March into your grandma bravely; she's
+the best woman I've seen; you ought to be proud to have such a
+grandma! She's in the right and Mrs Bray's in the wrong. Let her
+hammer you for all she's worth, and every whack you get feel proud
+that she's able to give it at her time of life, and I bet when you're
+a man you'll be telling every one that you had a grandma who was worth
+owning. When she leaves off tell her that this is the last time she'll
+ever have to do it for anything like that, and see if you don't feel
+more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span> a man than you ever did before. Promise me that's what you'll
+do."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that what <i>you'd</i> do if you was me?" he inquired with surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"That's what you'd do if you were me," I replied with a smile. "Just
+try that. Never mind if your grandma does go for you hot and strong."</p>
+
+<p>Andrew wiped the table, wrung out his dishcloth in the back-handed
+manner peculiar to his sex, hung it on a nail behind the door, dried
+his hands on his trousers, which for once were not "busted up," and
+with a less rueful expression than he had exhibited for several hours,
+went forth to meet his grandma.</p>
+
+<p>About ten minutes later he returned blubbering, but it was a sunshiny
+shower, and I did not despise the lad for his tears, for he had a soft
+nature, and was quite a child despite his big stature and sixteen
+years.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" I inquired, recognising that he was anxious to relate his
+experience.</p>
+
+<p>"She banged away with the strap of the breechin' till she was winded,
+and then I said I hoped she'd never have to beat me again for acting
+the goat in other people's gardens that didn't concern me, an' she
+didn't beat me no more then, but I had plenty as it was," he said,
+rubbing his seat and the calves of his legs.</p>
+
+<p>"Well done, stick to that, and be thankful for such a grandma!"</p>
+
+<p>"She ain't a bad old sort when you come to consider," he said with
+that patronage, also an attribute of extreme youth or unsubdued
+snobbishness, and when compared, snobbishness and youth have some
+similar characteristics.</p>
+
+<p>Next item on the programme was Mr Pornsch, whom grandma invited to
+remain to midday dinner, and the old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span> lady being sufficiently human to
+denounce a swell far more fiercely behind his back than to his face,
+in consideration of this one's presence, once more entrusted us to
+sugar our own puddings, regardless of consequences.</p>
+
+<p>After luncheon she interviewed him about his niece's health. Mr
+Pornsch seemed really concerned, and said perhaps she needed to be
+diverted, and that he would see about a further change, which might
+prove beneficial. He then put up his eyeglass to inspect Dawn's
+beauty, and ogling her, attempted to engage her in conversation; but
+the girl didn't seem at all attracted by him or thankful for the
+favours he brought her in the form of an exquisite box of bonbons and
+the latest song.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't accept presents, thank you," she said uncompromisingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you never make exceptions?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only from people I like <i>very</i> much."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I trust I may some day be among the exceptions," he said, in a
+gruesome attempt to be ingratiating; but the girl replied&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Then you hope for impossibilities."</p>
+
+<p>Somewhat disconcerted though not the least abashed, Mr Pornsch
+persevered by asking if she ever went to Sydney, and stated the
+pleasure it would be to him to provide her with tickets for any of the
+plays; but even this could not overcome her unconquerable horror of
+the various intemperances suggested by his person, so he had to
+retreat.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn's grandmother remonstrated with her afterwards.</p>
+
+<p>"You ought to be a little more genteeler, Dawn, and you could refuse
+presents just as well. Even if he isn't the takin'est old chap, that
+is not any reason for you to be ungenteel."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't care," replied Dawn, whose exquisitely moulded chin,
+despite an irresistible dimple, was expressive of determination. "If I
+was a great old podge and had a blue nose from swilling and gorging,
+and was fifty if I was a day, and then went goggling after a young
+fellow of eighteen, he wouldn't be very civil to me, or be lectured if
+he spoke to me the way I deserved, and I think these old creatures of
+men ought to be discouraged by all the girls. What's sauce for the
+goose is the same for the gander."</p>
+
+<p>Mr Pornsch had not long departed when Mrs Bray favoured us with a
+call, so grandma was spared a pilgrimage to her house. She and Carry
+exchanged a stiffly formal greeting, but the visitor beamed upon the
+remainder of us and seated herself in our midst.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I say, ain't it a blessed nark to the men us going to have a
+vote? He! he! Ha! ha! It fairly maddens 'em to see us getting a bit of
+freedom&mdash;makes 'em that wild they don't know how to be sneerin' an'
+nasty enough. Every one of us will just roll up an' use our power now
+we've got it,&mdash;they've kep' our necks under their heel long enough."</p>
+
+<p>"I wasn't thinkin' of the vote at present," said Grandma Clay. "I was
+just off to see you about what our noble nibbs have been doin' in that
+old Gawling's orchard; but I beat Andrew already in case. What did you
+think of 'em?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs Bray put back her handsome head, decorated by an extremely
+fashionable hat, and laughed boisterously.</p>
+
+<p>"Fancy the old toad runnin' 'em down,&mdash;gave 'em a bit of a scare,
+didn't it? Old mongrel, to kick up a fuss over a few paltry oranges!
+As if we don't all know what boys is; why, there'd be no chance of
+rarin' them without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span> touchin' nothing, unless you carted them off to
+the back-blocks where there wasn't no one within reach. I told him
+what I thought of him. 'How dare you!' says I. 'Bring witnesses of
+this,' said I."</p>
+
+<p>Grandma Clay arose.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if that's your idea of rarin' a family, it ain't mine. Why,
+can't you hear the parson's everlastin' preaching and giving examples
+how taking a pin has been the start of a feller coming to the gallows;
+and this is a much worse beginning than a pin! If the only way of
+rarin' them not to steal was to put 'em where there was no possibility
+of stealing nothink, a pretty sort of honesty that would be; you might
+as well say the only way to rare a girl modest was to let her never
+have a chance of being nothink else. Some people, of course, has
+different views, but I believe in holding to mine; they've brought me
+up to this time very well."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you are terrible strict; you wouldn't have no peace of your life
+rarin' boys if you cut things so fine as that. Now w'en women gets the
+rule it might become the fashion for men to be more proper. Look here,
+the men are that mad&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Jake here interrupted her by appearing for four o'clock tea.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Mr Sorrel, now the women has come to show you how to do things,
+there might be something done in the country."</p>
+
+<p>"Nice fools they'll make of themselves," he sneeringly replied.</p>
+
+<p>"They couldn't make no greater fools of themselves than the men has
+always done,&mdash;lying in the gutter an' breakin' their faces," said Mrs
+Bray.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Wait till the women go at it, they'll fight like cats," continued
+Uncle Jake, whose power to annoy depended not so much upon what he
+said as his way of saying it.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn chipped into the rescue at this point.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm dead sick of that yarn about women fighting. It's a mean lie.
+They never fight half as much as men; and girls always love each other
+more, and are more friendly together than men. The only women who
+fight with their own sex and call them cats are a few nasty things who
+are trying to please men by helping them to keep women down and make
+little of them; and the fools! that sort of meanness never pleases any
+men, only those that are not worth pleasing."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now that women has the vote they ought to plough, an' drive the
+trains, and let the men sit down inside," continued Jake. But Mrs Bray
+descended upon him.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; an' the men ought to come inside an' sweep, an' sew, and have
+their health ruined for a man's selfishness, an' be tied to a baby and
+four or five toddlers from six in the mornin' till ten at night, day
+in and day out, like the women do. What do you think, Mr Eweword?" she
+inquired of this individual, who had joined the company and awaited
+the conclusion of her remarks ere he greeted us.</p>
+
+<p>"I think the women ought to vote if they want to. There's nothing to
+stop 'em voting and doing their housework as well; and the Lord knows
+it doesn't matter who they vote for, as all the members are only a
+pack of 'skytes,' after a good billet for themselves. Think I'll have
+a go for it to see if it would pay better than farmin'," he said, with
+his mouth extended in a laugh<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span> that redeemed the weakness of this
+feature by exhibiting the beauty of a perfect set of teeth.</p>
+
+<p>"What about women havin' to keep theirselves in subjection?" persisted
+Uncle Jake. This subject apparently lay near his heart.</p>
+
+<p>"I always think that means for them to take care of themselves, and
+not bust over the hard dragging work that men were meant for," said
+Mrs Bray; "for I've always noticed that any man who puts his wife to
+man's work never comes to no good in the finish. If a man can't float
+his own boat, and thinks a woman can keep his and her own end up at
+the same time, she might as well fold her hands from the start, as the
+little she can do will never keep things goin' and only pave the way
+for doctors' bills."</p>
+
+<p>"You might try to argue it, but if you believe the Bible you can see
+there in every page that women ain't meant only to be under men," said
+the gallant Jake.</p>
+
+<p>"It ain't a case of not believin' the Bible, it's only that we ain't
+fools enough to believe all the ways people twists it to suit
+theirselves; men as talks that way is always the sort would be in a
+benevolent asylum only for some woman keepin' 'em from it," said
+grandma, coming to the rescue. "Cowards always drag in the Bible to
+back theirselves up far more than proper people does; and there's
+always one thing as strikes me in the Bible, an' that is w'en God was
+going to send His son down in human form. He considered a woman fit to
+be His mother, but there wasn't a man livin' fit to be His father. I
+reckon that's a slap in the face from the Almighty hisself that ought
+to make men more carefuller when they try to make little of women."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Even Uncle Jake collapsed before this, and Mrs Bray ceased contention
+and veered her talk to gossip.</p>
+
+<p>"Young Walker has been chose by the Opposition League in Noonoon, an'
+we're goin' to form a committee at once and work for him. Ada
+Grosvenor is goin' to form a society for educating women how to vote."</p>
+
+<p>"Ada Grosvenor!" exclaimed grandma. "I thought she would be too much a
+upholder of the men to be the start of anythink like that."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see how educating one's self how to vote would be making them
+a putter down of the men," said Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's much the same thing," said Mrs Bray. "For if a woman
+educates herself on anything it will show her that a lot of the men
+want puttin' down&mdash;a long way down too. You'll see the men will think
+it's against 'em, and try to squash her and her society, for they're
+always frightened if you begin to learn the least thing you will find
+out how you're bein' imposed upon; but they don't care how much you
+learn in the direction of wearin' yourself out an' slavin' to save
+money for them to spend on themselves."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come now," laughed "Dora"; "we're not all so bad as that!"</p>
+
+<p>"Not at your time of life w'en you're after the girls and pretendin'
+you're angels to catch 'em; it's after you've got 'em in your power
+that things change," said Mrs Bray.</p>
+
+<p>The company was now further enlarged by the arrival of Ernest, soon
+followed by a young lady I had not previously met&mdash;a tall brown-eyed
+girl, with pleasant determination in every line of her well-cut face,
+and who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span> proved to be the young lady under discussion&mdash;Miss Ada
+Grosvenor, daughter of the owner of the farm adjoining Bray's and
+Clay's.</p>
+
+<p>Her errand was to invite Dawn to join the society she was promoting.</p>
+
+<p>She explained it was not for the support of a party, but for the
+exchange and search of knowledge that should direct electresses to
+exercise their long-withheld right in a worthy manner. I listened with
+pleasure to the thoughtful and earnest ideals to be discerned
+underlying the girl's practically expressed ideas, and delighted in
+the humorous intelligence flashing from her clear eyes, and was
+altogether favourably impressed with her as a type of womanhood&mdash;one
+of the best extant.</p>
+
+<p>She conversed with the elder members of the party and Ernest, and this
+left "Dora" Eweword in charge of Carry and Dawn. His giggle was much
+in evidence. Between blasts of it he could be heard inviting the girls
+to a pull on the river, and they presently set off round the corner of
+Miss Flipp's bedroom leading to the flights of wooden steps down to
+the boats under the naked willows. The nature of the one swift glance
+that travelled after them from Ernest's eyes did not escape my
+observation, so I suggested that he, Miss Grosvenor, and myself should
+follow a good example, and we did. I knew it would be a relief to him
+to overtake Eweword, pull past him with ease, and leave him a speck in
+the distance, as he did. I felt a satisfaction in noting Dawn watch
+his splendid strokes, and Miss Grosvenor's animated conversation with
+him and enthusiastically expressed admiration of his rowing. She was
+not so exacting in the matter of detail as Dawn, and red hair did not
+prevent her from enjoying the company of a splendid specimen of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
+opposite sex when she had the rare good fortune of encountering him.</p>
+
+<p>"That's a fine stamp of a girl," he cordially remarked as, having at
+her request pulled the boat to the edge of the stream, she landed and
+sprang up the bank for ferns; but not by any inveiglement could I
+induce him to give an opinion of Dawn, which was propitious of her
+being his real lady. When we pulled down stream again between the
+fertile farm-lands spread with occasional orange and lemon groves,
+beautiful with their great crops of yellowing fruit, we found that the
+other party were already deserting their craft.</p>
+
+<p>"We had to give it best. Mr Eweword soon got winded. I never saw any
+one pull a boat so splendidly as you do, Mr Ernest," called the
+outspoken Carry, who had not acquired the art of paying a compliment
+to one member of a party without running <i>amok</i> of the feelings of
+another. Eweword, despite his shapely and imposing bulk, had not
+developed his athletic possibilities so much as those of the gourmand,
+and, reddening to the roots of his stubbed hair, he looked the reverse
+of pleased with the tactless young woman,&mdash;an expression usually to be
+found on the countenance of one or more members of a company following
+the publication of her opinions.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Grosvenor and Ernest continued to chat with such apparent
+enjoyment that Dawn said pointedly&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Pooh! there's no art in pulling a boat; any galoot with a little
+brute force can do that,"&mdash;a remark having the desired effect, for the
+young Breslaw feigned not to hear, his face rivalled the colour of
+"Dora's," and his remarks grew absent.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know," persisted Carry, "I know plenty of
+galoots,&mdash;they're the only sort of men there are in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span> the Noonoon
+district, and they can't row for sour apples."</p>
+
+<p>Dawn singled out "Dora" Eweword, and went up the bank with him,
+leaving the remainder of us together. Miss Grosvenor favoured us with
+a cordial invitation to partake of the hospitality of her home during
+the following evening; and delighted with the intelligence and go of
+the girl, I was pleased to accept. Ernest said he would be delighted
+to escort me, but Carry said she had her work to do, and had no time
+to run about to people's places. Miss Grosvenor received this with a
+merry twinkle in her eye, and said to me&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Dawn will come to show you the way. It is an uncomfortable path
+if you don't know it;" and with this she bade good afternoon and ran
+around the orchard among the square weed and wild quince, across an
+area abounding in lines of barbed-wire.</p>
+
+<p>Ernest too departed in a triangular direction leading to the curious
+old bridge spanning the stream.</p>
+
+<p>"What makes him hang about here so long?" asked Carry. "Has he a girl
+in the district? Do you think he seems gone on Dawn?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps it's Carry?"</p>
+
+<p>"No such luck. I wish he were. I suppose he has money. They say over
+where he boards he has a set of rooms to himself, and is very liberal.
+What would he be doing up here so long?"</p>
+
+<p>"He doesn't publish his business. Perhaps he's staying in this nice
+quiet nook to write a book or something," I said idly, by way of
+accounting for his idleness, or the curious might have set to work to
+discover more of his doings than he wished to get abroad just then.</p>
+
+<p>"He doesn't look much like the fools that write books,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span> but every one
+is writing one these days. I know of five or six about Noonoon even;
+it seems to be a craze."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps a cycle!"</p>
+
+<p>"I often wonder who is going to read 'em all and do the work."</p>
+
+<p>This brought us to Clay's, Carry supporting me on her arm, and thus
+ended her discourse.</p>
+
+<p>Dora stayed for tea, but it was a dull meal, as Dawn now appeared
+desirous of repelling him.</p>
+
+<p>Andrew, who on account of his drubbing had been very subdued during
+dinner, had regained his usual form, and when Uncle Jake, to whom the
+freeing of women seemed an unabating irritation, remarked&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Who's this young Walker? All the women will be mad for him because
+he's good-looking and got a soft tongue. They ought to stick to the
+present member who is known, this other fellow hasn't been heard of;"
+his grand-nephew replied&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Like Uncle Jake; he's been in the municipal council fifteen years and
+never got heard of; he ought to put up an' see would the women go for
+him, because he's never been heard of an' is a bit good-lookin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, there's one thing to his credit, an' that is, he's lived over
+sixty years an' never been heard of stealing fruit out of people's
+gardens, an' as for looks&mdash;'Han'some is who han'some does,'" said
+grandma, which effected the collapse of Andrew. In the Clay household
+there were ever current reminders of the truth of the old proverb,
+warning people in glass-houses to abstain from stone-throwing.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn did not appear before me that night until I opened my door and
+called&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Lady Fair, the kimono awaits thy perfumed presence!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to come to-night; I feel as scotty as a bear with a sore
+head."</p>
+
+<p>"But I want you&mdash;youth must ever give way to grey hairs."</p>
+
+<p>With that she appeared, and throwing herself backward on my bed,
+thrust her arms crossly above her head amid a tumble of soft bright
+hair.</p>
+
+<p>"Youth, health, beauty, and lovers not lacking, what excuse have you
+for being out of tune? I want you to pilot me to tea at Grosvenor's
+to-morrow evening. Miss Grosvenor has invited you, Ernest, and
+myself."</p>
+
+<p>"She just wants Ernest&mdash;she's terribly fond of the men."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, did you ever see a normal girl who wasn't, and Mr Ernest is a
+man worth being fond of&mdash;I dearly love him myself."</p>
+
+<p>"Pooh! I don't see anything nice about him," said Dawn aggressively.</p>
+
+<p>"But you'll come to tea, won't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I can't. I never go to Grosvenors. Grandma doesn't care for them.
+She says he was only a pig buyer, and settled down there about the
+time she came here, and now they try to ape the swells and put on
+airs. They only come here to try to get on terms with some of the
+swell men. I wouldn't take him over there to please her if I were
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"That's where you and I differ. I would just like to please them, and
+I'm sure it will do Ernest good to be in the company of such a
+pleasant and sensible girl as Ada Grosvenor."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, he'd want something to do him good, if I'm any judge."</p>
+
+<p>Dawn's pretty mouth and chin were so querulous that I had to turn away
+to smile.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"So you won't come to tea?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can't; I'd like to please you," she said somewhat softening, "but
+I've promised 'Dora' Eweword I'll go out rowing with him again
+to-morrow. He says he has something to say to me."</p>
+
+<p>"He's been going to say this something a long time."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but I stave him off. I know what it is right enough, and I don't
+want to hear it; but I suppose I had better please grandma."</p>
+
+<p>"So you like him?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I detest him, and feel like smacking him on the mouth just where
+his underlip sticks out farther than the top one, every time he
+speaks; but what am I to do? I'd never be let go on the stage, and I
+might as well marry him as any one."</p>
+
+<p>"Why marry any one? At nineteen, or ninety for that matter, there is
+no imperative hurry. To marry a man you dislike because you cannot
+attain your ambition is surely very silly indeed. Would you not love
+'Dora' if you could go on the stage?"</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't be seen in a forty-acred paddock with him. I'd like some
+man who had travelled, not an old Australian thing just living about
+here. I'd like an Englishman who'd take me home to England."</p>
+
+<p>"You mustn't disparage your countrymen while I'm listening, as you'll
+find no better in any country or clime. Always remember they were
+among the first to enfranchise their women, and thus raise them above
+the status of chatteldom and merchandise."</p>
+
+<p>"They only gave us the vote because they had to. Women have had to
+crawl to them for it, and pretend it was a great privilege the sweet
+darling almighties were allowing us, when all the time it has been our
+right, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span> they were selfish cowards who deserve no thanks for
+withholding it so long. And they gave it that grudgingly and are that
+narked about it, it makes me sick."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, when the matter is stripped to bare facts, the truth of
+your remarks is irrefutable, but we must gauge things comparatively,
+and remember how many other nations won't even grudgingly free their
+women. If you don't like Eweword I can't see any pressing necessity to
+think of marriage at all."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, I'd have it done then and wouldn't be everlasting plagued
+on the subject," she said with the unreasonableness of irritability.</p>
+
+<p>"Would it not be better though to wait a little while in hopes of a
+better choice?"</p>
+
+<p>"But I suppose it will always be the same. Any man at all worth
+consideration is sure to be married or at any rate is engaged."</p>
+
+<p>Here was the clue to her irritation. It was that imaginary young lady
+of Ernest Breslaw's. Had she been a man, ere this she would have
+plunged into vigorous attempt to dislodge that or any other rival, no
+matter how assured his position, but being a woman and compelled to
+await "The idiot Chance her imperial Fate," the effect of such
+suppression on so robust and strenuous a nature was this form of
+hysteria.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what about a struggle for the desire of your heart? Undoubtedly
+you have, if well trained, sufficient voice to be a great asset on the
+stage, but it would take at the very least two years' hard work under
+a good master before it would be in the least fit for public use."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd be twenty-one then."</p>
+
+<p>"You are just at a good age to stand vigorous training."</p>
+
+<p>"But what's the use of talking," she said hopelessly,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span> "you don't know
+how mad grandma is against the stage. She says she'd rather see me in
+my grave, and I feel I'd never prosper if I went against her."</p>
+
+<p>"Very likely her point of view is founded on hard facts, but training
+your voice isn't going on the stage, and in two years, if you are able
+to sing decently, perhaps no one will be so anxious as your grandma
+that you should be heard,&mdash;I've heard of such a case before;" and I
+didn't add that two years was a long way ahead for an old woman of
+seventy-six, and also for a girl to whom study was not quite a fetich,
+and ample time for the or some knight to have come to the rescue.
+These thoughts were not for publication, as they might have made me
+appear a traitor to the prejudices of one party and the desire of the
+other, whereas I was loyal to them both.</p>
+
+<p>"It would be lovely if you could get on the soft side of grandma, but
+I'm afraid it's impossible. Fancy being able to sing and please
+people, and travel about in nice cities away from dusty, dreary, slow
+old Noonoon," said the girl, the crossness melting from her pretty
+face and giving place to radiance.</p>
+
+<p>She toyed with some silk scarves of mine, and between whiles said&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it funny some people think one thing good and others don't. No
+one around here wants to be on the stage but me, or seems to
+understand that actresses are made out of ordinary people like you and
+me. 'Dora' doesn't know anything about the stage, but Mr Ernest does.
+He doesn't think them terrible women, and says that his best woman
+friend was an actress once. If you thought grandma could be brought
+round at all I wouldn't go out with Dora to-morrow, I'd go with you to
+get out of it. Mr Ernest seemed to be very pleased with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span> Ada
+Grosvenor; is she the same style as his young lady?"</p>
+
+<p>This question wasn't asked because Dawn was transparent, but because I
+had led her to believe I was dense.</p>
+
+<p>"No, not at all," I replied.</p>
+
+<p>"What is she like?"</p>
+
+<p>"She's about five feet five, and has a plump, dimpling figure. Her
+hair is bright brown, and her nose is an exquisitely cut little
+straight one. (Here I observed Dawn casting surreptitious glances in
+the mirror opposite.) Her eyes are bright blue with long dark lashes,
+and she has a mouth too pretty to describe, fitted up with a set of
+the loveliest natural teeth one could see in these days of the
+dentist; it is so perfect that it seems unnatural and a sad pity that
+it should sometimes be the outlet of censorious remarks about less
+beautiful sisters, but its owner is very young and not surrounded by
+the best of influences at present, and no doubt will have better sense
+as she grows older."</p>
+
+<p>"What's her name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Now you want to know too much, but I never knew another girl with
+such a beautiful one."</p>
+
+<p>"She must be a beauty altogether," said Dawn rather satirically.</p>
+
+<p>"She would be if she would only guard against being cross at times,
+but you must not breathe this to a soul as I'm only going on
+supposition. Young Ernest isn't engaged to her, but I've seen him with
+her once or twice, and he looked so pleased that I suspected him of
+kind regards, as no man could help admiring her."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that all?" she said in a tone of relief; "he mightn't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span> care for
+her at all. Just walking about with her and looking happy isn't any
+criterion. Men are always doing that with every girl."</p>
+
+<p>"Dora didn't look happy with me to-night then&mdash;how do you account for
+that?"</p>
+
+<p>She accounted for it with a merry laugh, as curled in the silk kimono
+she remained in possession of my nightly couch.</p>
+
+<p>I was espousing this girl's cause because I could not bear to see her
+honest, wholesome youth and beauty making fuel for disappointment and
+bitterness as mine had done. There had been no one to help me attain
+the desire&mdash;the innocent, just, and normal desire of my girlhood's
+heart,&mdash;no one to lend a hand, till my heart had broken with slavery
+and disappointment, and at less than thirty-five all that remained for
+me was a little barren waiting for its feeble fluctuating pumping to
+cease.</p>
+
+<p>The girl presently fell asleep, so I covered her, kimono and all, and
+extinguishing the light, lay down beside what had once been a tiny
+baby, whose feeble life opening with the day had been nurtured on the
+milk of old Ladybird, the spotted cow with a dew-lap and a crumpled
+horn. She was now, I trusted, enjoying the reward of her earthly
+labours in that best of heavens we love to picture for the dear
+animals that have served us well, and but for whose presence the world
+would be dreary indeed, while the sleep of her beautiful
+foster-daughter had advanced to hold dreams of jewelled gowns,
+thrilling solos, travel, and splendid young husbands who could do no
+wrong, but she knew no room for thought of "Dora," who on the morrow
+was to row her on the Noonoon. He might as well have relinquished the
+chase, for his chances here had grown as faint as those of pretty Dora
+Cowper&mdash;whose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span> leg he classically stated he had pulled&mdash;had grown with
+him.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, well, there is a law of retribution in all things, direct or
+indirect, visible or invisible.</p>
+
+<p>I lay awake a long time contemplating the best way of approaching
+Grandma Clay in regard to Dawn's singing lessons. One by one the
+passenger trains streamed into Noonoon, halted a panting five minutes
+at the station, then rumbled over the strange old iron-walled bridge,
+slowed down again to the little siding of Kangaroo on the other side,
+from whence up, up, the mountain-sides above the fertile valley,
+leaving the peaceful agriculturists soundly asleep after their toil.
+The heavy "goods" lumbered by unceasingly, the throbbing of their
+great engines, their signalling, shunting, and tooting proving a
+perennial delight to me, comforting me with the knowledge that I still
+could feel a pulsation from the great population centres where my
+fellows congregate.</p>
+
+<p>It had lulled me to doziness, when I was aroused by the electric alarm
+bell, the purpose of which was to warn folk when a train neared the
+bridge. A very necessary device, as there was but one bridge for all
+traffic, it being cut into two departments by three high iron walls
+that shut out an exquisite view of the river, and confined and
+intensified the rumble of trains in a manner well calculated to
+inspire the least imaginative of horses with the fear that the powers
+of evil had broken loose about them. The alarm-bell was humanly
+contrary in the discharge of its duty, and rang long and loudly when
+there was no train, and was not to be heard at all when they were
+rushing by in numbers. On this occasion, there being no train to drown
+its blatant voice, it so disturbed me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span> that I was keenly alive to a
+dialogue that was proceeding in Miss Flipp's room.</p>
+
+<p>"You must go away, I tell you," said Mr Pornsch. "A nice thing it
+would be if a man in <i>my</i> position were implicated."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't think a man of <i>your</i> class would be so cruel," sobbed the
+girl.</p>
+
+<p>In rejoinder the man admitted one of the truths by which our
+civilisation is besmirched.</p>
+
+<p>"There's only one class of men in dealing with women like you."</p>
+
+<p>Then fell a silence, during which Dawn turned in her sleep, and I
+placed her head more comfortably lest she should awake and hear what
+was proceeding.</p>
+
+<p>Not that it would in any way have sullied her, for her virtue, by
+sound heredity and hardy training, was no hothouse plant, liable to
+shrivel and die if not kept in a certain temperature, but was a sturdy
+tree, like the tall white-trunked young gums of her native forests, on
+which the winds of knowledge could blow and the rains of experience
+fall without in any way mutilating or impairing its reliability and
+beauty. It was for the sake of our poor sister wayfarer who was on a
+terrible thoroughfare, amid robbers and murderers, but who did not
+want her plight to be known, that I did not wish Dawn to awake.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="FOURTEEN" id="FOURTEEN"></a>FOURTEEN.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE PASSING OF THE TRAINS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Next morning, when Andrew and I had finished the separator, grandma
+came over to inspect the work. She sniffed round the dishes and cans,
+which barely passed muster, and then descended upon the table by
+running her slender old forefinger along the eaves, with the result
+that it came up soiled with the greasy slush that careless wiping had
+left there.</p>
+
+<p>"Look at that, you dirty good-for-nothink young shaver; if the
+inspector came round we'd most likely lose our licence for it, an'
+it's no fault of mine. If a great lump your age can't be depended on
+for nothink, I don't know what the world is coming to. I have to be
+responsible for everythink that goes on your back and into your
+stummick, and yet you can't do a single thing. You think I'm
+everlastin' joring, but I have to be. Some day, if ever you have a
+house of your own, you'll know how hard it is."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm goin' to take jolly fine care I never have no house of me own.
+The game ain't worth the candle," responded Andrew; "I reckon them as
+comes and lives in the place, like some of them summer-boarders, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>
+orders us about as if they was Lord Muck an' we wasn't anybody, has
+the best of it."</p>
+
+<p>"That ain't the point. I'm ashamed of that table. W'en I was young no
+one ever had to speak to me about things once, before I knew. Once I
+left drips round the end of my table, and me mother come along and
+'Martha,' says she&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It's a wonder the wonderful Jim Clay didn't say it," muttered the
+irreverent representative of the degenerate rising generation <i>sotto
+voce</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"'If that's the way you wash a table,' says she, 'no blind man would
+choose you for his wife,' for that was the way they told if their
+sweetheart was a good housekeeper, by feelin' along the table w'en
+they was done washin' up."</p>
+
+<p>"An' what did you say?" interestedly inquired Andrew.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't say nothink. In them days young people didn't be gabbing
+back to their elders w'en they was spoke to, but held their mag an'
+done their work proper," she crushingly replied.</p>
+
+<p>"But I was thinkin'," said Andrew quite unabashed, "that you was a
+terrible fool to be took in with that yarn. For who'd want to be
+married by a blind man, an' I reckon that blind men oughtn't be let to
+marry at all, and I think anyhow he ought to have been glad to get any
+woman, without sneakin' around an' putting on airs about being
+particular," he earnestly contended.</p>
+
+<p>"But that ain't the point, anyhow," said she.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what did you tell it to me for, grandma?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hold your tongue," said the old lady irately; "sometimes you might
+argue with me, but there's reason in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span> everythink, an' if you don't
+have that table scrubbed and cleaned proper by the next time I come
+round you'll hear about it."</p>
+
+<p>With this she walked farther on towards the pig-sty and cow-bails, and
+considering this a good opportunity for private conversation I went
+with her, remarking in a casual manner&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Your granddaughter has a very good voice."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; a good deal better than <i>some people</i> that think they can sing
+like Patti, and set theirselves up about it."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but she badly needs training."</p>
+
+<p>"She sings twice as well as some that has been trained and fussed
+with."</p>
+
+<p>"Probably; but she requires training to preserve the voice. She
+produces it unnaturally, and in a few years the voice will be cracked
+and spoilt."</p>
+
+<p>"All the better, an' then she'll give up wanting to go on the stage
+with it."</p>
+
+<p>"Is there anything frightful in that?" I said gently. "A great many
+mothers would give all they possessed to get their daughters on the
+stage. It is an exploded idea to think the stage a bad place."</p>
+
+<p>"A lot is always tellin' me that, an' I believed them till I went to
+see for meself, and the facts was too much of a eye-opener for me.
+I'll keep to me own opinions for the future. It will be three years
+ago this month, Dawn prevailed upon me to go to a play there was a lot
+of blow about, an' I was never so ashamed in me life. I didn't expect
+much considerin' the way I was rared regardin' theayters, but it beat
+all I ever see."</p>
+
+<p>"What was it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know the name, but it was a character of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span> a play. There was
+women in it must have been forty by the figure of them, and they had
+all their bosoms bare, and showed their knees in little short skirts.
+They stood in rows and grinned&mdash;the hussies! They ought to have set
+down an' hid theirselves for shame! I thought we must have made a
+mistake and got into a fast show, but we read in the paper after that
+among the audience was all the big bugs, an' they seemed to be
+enjoyin' theirselves an' laughing as if it was a intellectual,
+respectable entertainment. I wanted to get up an' leave, but Dawn
+coaxed me an' I give in, an' thought the next might be better, but it
+was worse. I give you my word for it, there was hussies there on that
+stage, before respectable people's eyes, trying all they knew to make
+men be bad. They was fast pure and simple, just the same as some Jim
+Clay told me about once when he went to Sydney on his own. The way he
+described their carryin's on was just like them actresses on the
+stage, an' me a respectable married woman who's rared a family, havin'
+paid to look at them! I was ashamed to hold me head up after it for a
+long time. 'It's only actin', grandma,' says Dawn, but to think that
+people would act things like that; no good modest woman would ever do
+it, an' the Bible strictly warns us to abstain from the appearance of
+evil. An' even that wasn't all; they come out an' kissed one
+another&mdash;married women supposed to be kissing other men. What sort of
+a example was that to be setting other men an' women? It was the
+lowerin'est thing I ever see. I told Dawn she was not to breathe where
+we had been, an' from that day to this I never would have a actor or a
+actress in my house. I'd just as soon have a <i>real</i> loud woman as one
+who gets out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span> on a stage where every one is lookin' at her and
+pretends to be one. She'd have no shame to stand between her and the
+bad. Oh no! there must be reason in everythink. I was prepared for a
+terrible lot of fools and rot, but that I should be so lowered was a
+eye-opener."</p>
+
+<p>"I feel exactly the same in regard to the stage, Mrs Clay, but I like
+concerts, when the singers just come out and sing&mdash;do you not?"</p>
+
+<p>"That ain't so bad, I admit."</p>
+
+<p>"You would not object to Dawn singing on a platform, would you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; doesn't she often sing on the platform in Noonoon? They're always
+after her for some concert or another. It's a bad plan to sing too
+much for them. They don't thank you for it. They'd only say we're
+tired of him or her, and the one who'd be sour an' wouldn't sing often
+would be considered great."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, let her have lessons, so she could sing with greater ease at
+these concerts."</p>
+
+<p>"She can sing well enough for that. It would be throwing away money
+for nothink."</p>
+
+<p>"But if trained she could sometimes command a fee."</p>
+
+<p>"I've got plenty to keep her without that," said the old lady,
+bridling, "and it might give her stronger notions for the stage."</p>
+
+<p>I was thankful that I had never published my calling.</p>
+
+<p>"I had me own ideas of them before&mdash;walkin' about, and everythink they
+do or say they're wonderin' what people is thinkin' of them, and if
+they're observin' what great bein's they are. An' I've seen 'em
+here&mdash;goin' in fer drink an' all bad practices, and w'en I remonstrate
+with 'em, 'It's me temperament,' says they, an' led me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span> to believe by
+the airs of them that this temperament makes 'em superior to the likes
+of ordinary human bein's like me an' you; an' this temperament that
+makes 'em not fit to do honest common work, but is makin' 'em low
+crawlers, is the thing that at the same time makes 'em superior. I
+don't see meself how the two things can be reconciled. There must be
+reason in everythink."</p>
+
+<p>"If you want to turn your granddaughter from the stage, let her start
+vocal training. You'll see that before twelve months she'll have
+enough of it. It would keep her content for the present, and in the
+meantime she might marry," I contended.</p>
+
+<p>"If I could be sure she wouldn't come in contact with them actin' and
+writin' fools; if she was to marry one of them it would be all up with
+her. Do you know anythink about teachers?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; I would be only too pleased to see to that part of it. Your
+granddaughter is a great pleasure to me. She gives me some interest in
+life which, having no relations and being unfit for permanent
+occupation, I would otherwise lack."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm sure Dawn would interest anybody, and I think you're a good
+companion for her. She seems to have took up with you, and you've
+evidently been a person that's seen somethink, an' can tell her this,
+that, an' the other, but as for that she don't want no tellin' to be
+better than most. <i>Some people!</i>&mdash;" Grandma always worked herself up
+to a pitch of congested choler when these unworthy individuals were
+mentioned.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll think about the singin' lessons if they ain't beyond reason.
+She's been terrible good lately, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span> deserves somethink. Here's Larry
+Witcom arrove, an' there's Carry gone out to him. I want to see him
+meself; he's been a little too strong with his prices lately, but he's
+the obliginest feller in many ways. I don't hear anythink about it not
+bein' Carry's week in the kitchen w'en Larry comes. She's always ready
+to give Dawn a hand then. But we was all young once; I can remember
+w'en I worked a point, whether it was me turn or not, to get near Jim
+Clay."</p>
+
+<p>"Dawn, I think the battle for the singing lessons is half won," I said
+to that individual when I met her privately a few minutes later.</p>
+
+<p>"Really, it can't be true!" said the girl with an intonation of
+delight, as she drew a tea-towel she had been washing through her
+shapely hands and wrung it dry.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Jake then entered, and cut short further private discussion.</p>
+
+<p>"There, Dawn!" he said, tossing a pair of trousers on the
+kitchen-table, "the seat of them is out, an' I want to put 'em on to
+do a little blacksmithin'&mdash;they're dirty."</p>
+
+<p>"That's easy to be seen and known too, as some people's things are
+always dirty," said she. "When do you want them?"</p>
+
+<p>"At once."</p>
+
+<p>"At once! You'd come in the middle of cooking some pastry and want a
+woman to put patches on a dirty old pair of trousers, and then want to
+know why the dinner wasn't up to tick; and besides, it's Carry's week
+in the house."</p>
+
+<p>For Dawn's sake I would have offered to do the patching, but feared
+Uncle Jake might suspect me of matrimonial designs upon him, such
+being the conceit of old men.</p>
+
+<p>"I never go to Carry," he snapped, "an' it's a pity your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span> mother
+wasn't alive instead of you, she could put a patch on in five minutes
+any time you asked her, but she never spent her time in roarin' and
+bellerin' round after a vote;" and so saying Uncle Jake disappeared,
+leaving his grandniece with her pretty pink cheeks deepened to
+scarlet, and a spark in her blue eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"The old dog! if he wasn't grandma's brother I'd hate him. It's always
+these crawling old things who can do nothing themselves, and have to
+be kept by a woman, who are always the worst at trying to make women's
+position lower, and talk about them as inferior. He's always after a
+woman to do this and to do that, and comparing her&mdash;I'd like to see
+the woman, mother or father&mdash;who could put a patch on those pants in
+five minutes."</p>
+
+<p>"There's one way it could be done in the time," I said, calling to
+mind a prank related by a gay little friend&mdash;"clap it on with
+cobbler's wax."</p>
+
+<p>Dawn's eyes danced, and the irritation receded from the corners of the
+pretty mouth as, procuring a piece of cloth and a lump of cobbler's
+wax, she did the deed in less than five minutes, and Uncle Jake
+contentedly received his trousers, while I departed to put in some
+more time with my friend Andrew, without telling her there might be a
+sequel to patching trousers with cobbler's wax.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Andrew, how goes the scrubbing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, great! Look at that!" said he, drawing back to exhibit a really
+clean table; and as it would not have conduced to our friendship had I
+pointed out that it had been arrived at at the expense of slushing the
+lime-washed wall and the stand of the separator, I wisely kept
+silent.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"There! I reckon me grandma nor Jim Clay neither never done a table
+better," he said with enviable self-appreciation. "You know I reckon
+them old yarns about the people bein' so good w'en they was young is a
+little too thin to stand washin'&mdash;don't you? You've only got to take
+the things the wonderful Jim Clay and me grandma done w'en they was
+courtin',&mdash;you get her on a string to tell you,&mdash;an' if Dawn done the
+same with any of the blokes now, she'd jolly soon hear about it; an'
+as for old Jake there, I reckon I'd be able to put him through meself
+at his own age&mdash;don't you? Anyhow, I'm full of farmin'. It's only
+fools an' horses sweat themselves, all the others go in for
+auctioneering, or parliament, or something, and have a fine screw
+comin' in for nothing."</p>
+
+<p>"But think of those water-melons," I said; for as a subject of
+conversation he most frequently and most lovingly referred to these.</p>
+
+<p>"But I could buy a waggon-load of 'em for one day's pay, an' not have
+any tuggin' and scratchin' with 'em. Melons ain't too stinkin', but
+lor', tomatoes is a stunner! They rotted till you couldn't stand the
+smell of them, and it would give a billy-goat the pip to hear them
+mentioned. There was no sale, and the blow-flies took to 'em. One man
+down here had thirty acres. I'm goin' to be somethink, so I can make a
+bit of money. No one thinks anythink of you if you ain't got plenty
+money. You know how you feel if a person has plenty money, you think
+twice as much of him as if he hasn't any. There's nothink to be made
+at farmin', delvin' and scrapin' your eyeballs out for no return,"
+said this youngster, who did barely enough to keep him in exercise,
+who had been fed to repletion,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span> and comfortably clothed and bedded all
+his sixteen years.</p>
+
+<p>Luncheon or dinner was enlivened by an altercation between Dawn and
+her uncle.</p>
+
+<p>The blacksmithing to which he had referred was the act of sitting down
+beside the forge, where he had grown so warm that the sequel to
+mending trousers with cobbler's wax had eventuated. The melted wax had
+attached the garment to the old man's person, and he had sat&mdash;his
+sitting capacity was incalculable&mdash;until it had cooled again, and on
+rising suffered an amount of discomfort it would be graceful to leave
+to the imagination. Uncle Jake however was not so considerate, and
+aired his grievance in a manner too brutally real for imagination.</p>
+
+<p>To do her justice Dawn did not think of the joke going thus far, so I
+attempted to take the blame, but she would not have this.</p>
+
+<p>"I want him to think I knew how it would turn out. I'd do it to him
+every day if I could."</p>
+
+<p>Grandma fortunately took her part, and the mirth of Andrew and Carry
+was very genuine.</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon I was as smart as my mother that time," giggled Dawn, as she
+carried in the dinner.</p>
+
+<p>"It would have been a funny joke if you played it on some
+good-humoured young feller," said grandma, "but Jake there is entitled
+to some kind of consideration, because he is old and crotchety."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd play it on 'Dora' Eweword," said Dawn, "only that he might stick
+here so that he'd never move at all if I didn't take care."</p>
+
+<p>The first moment we had in private she took opportunity of saying&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I think I'll go over to Grosvenor's with you this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span> evening, but not
+to tea. I'll go over to bring you home, if you'll help me make some
+excuse to get out of going rowing with 'Dora.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not come to tea? that would be sufficient excuse."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but they try to ape the swells, and grandma doesn't like them;
+but I'll be sure to go for you after it, and that will save Mr Ernest
+coming round with you."</p>
+
+<p>I thanked her, though her escort was not at all necessary, seeing that
+instead of saving Ernest it would only make his presence surer. There
+being nothing else to do during the afternoon, I awaited the time of
+setting out for the Grosvenor's, who tried to ape the swells&mdash;the
+swells of Noonoon! These being, as far as I could gather, the doctors,
+the lawyer, a couple of bank managers on a salary somewhere about &pound;250
+per annum, the Stip. Magistrate, and one or two others&mdash;surely an
+ordinarily harmless and averagely respectable section of the
+community, in aping whom one would be in little danger of being called
+upon to act up to an etiquette as intricate and tyrannous as that in
+use at court.</p>
+
+<p>In the old days the town had been the terminus of the train, and it
+had squatted at the foot of the mountains, while strings of teams
+carried the goods up the great western road out to Bathurst and
+beyond, to Mudgee, Dubbo, and Orange. Nearly all the old
+houses&mdash;grandma's and Grosvenor's among them&mdash;had been hotels in those
+days, when the miles had been ticked off by the square stones with the
+Roman lettering, erected by our poor old convict pioneers, who blazed
+many a first track. Every house had found sufficient trade in giving
+D.T.'s to the burly, roystering teamsters who lived on the roads,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>
+dealt in no small quantities, and who did not see their wives and
+sweethearts every week in the year.</p>
+
+<p>As the afternoon advanced, true to appointment, "Dora" Eweword arrived
+to take Dawn for a row. His chin was red from the razor, and he looked
+well in a navy-blue guernsey brightened by a scarlet tie knotted at
+the open collar, displaying a columnar throat which, if strength were
+measured by size, announced him capable of supporting not only a Dawn,
+but a Sunset. He sat on an Austrian chair, for which he was some sizes
+too large and too substantial, and reddened as he laughed and talked
+with Carry, till I appeared and spent some time in talking and
+admiring his appearance until Dawn came upon the scene.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Dawn," he said, "I'm waiting for this row; are you ready?"</p>
+
+<p>Dawn glanced at me.</p>
+
+<p>"Dawn has promised to chaperon me to-night," I said. Dawn decamped.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Grosvenor has invited Mr Ernest and me to tea, and to go without
+a representative of Mrs Grundy, I believe, is not correct in the
+social life of Noonoon."</p>
+
+<p>Eweword laughed; but his face fell, and his reply showed him less
+obtuse than he appeared on the surface, seeing he was the first and
+only person to see through my matchmaking tactics.</p>
+
+<p>"Touting for the red-haired bagman," he said, as Ernest could be seen
+swinging up the path.</p>
+
+<p>"Supposing I am, what then?" I asked, regarding him with a level
+glance, and feeling more respect for his intelligence than I had
+heretofore experienced.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, I suppose all is fair in some things."</p>
+
+<p>He would not say <i>love</i>, as that would have admitted too<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span> much, and a
+lover admitting his passion and a drunkard confessing his disease are
+exceptions that prove the rule.</p>
+
+<p>His remark was uttered with a broad good nature that would lead him to
+do and leave undone great things. In a desire to please the present
+girl he was not above saying he had been "pulling the leg" of the one
+absent, but he would also be capable of standing aside when he felt
+deeply&mdash;as deeply as he could feel&mdash;to allow a better man sea-room;
+and he was further capable of sufficient humility to think there could
+be a better man than himself, or so I adjudged him, and being the only
+narrator of this, the only history in which he is likely to receive
+mention, this delineation of his character will have to remain
+unchallenged.</p>
+
+<p>Ernest had a geranium in his button-hole, and looked more immaculately
+spruce than ever, and even his red hair could not obliterate the fact
+of his being a goodly sight, and as such grandma recognised him.</p>
+
+<p>"That's a fine sturdy chap," she afterwards observed. "It's a pity he
+ain't got somethink to do to keep him out of mischief. Is he a
+unemployed? He don't look like one of these Johnnies that has nothink
+to do but hang around a street corner and smoke a cigarette."</p>
+
+<p>The two young men measured glances every whit as critically as girls
+do under similar conditions, and then equally as casually made
+reference to the weather. Ernest was somewhat overshadowed by Eweword,
+as the latter was superior in size and cast of features, being fully
+six feet, while Ernest was not more than five feet nine inches; but as
+a girl very rarely, if she has a choice, cares most for the handsomest
+of her admirers, I was not in the least cast down about this.</p>
+
+<p>When it was time for me to depart, Ernest rose too,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span> but not Dawn.
+Ernest's face went down, Eweword's brightened.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Dawn is not coming over now, but later on," I said.</p>
+
+<p>The men's glances reversed once more. As the former and I
+departed&mdash;Ernest carrying a wrap for me&mdash;I heard Eweword say&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Well, come on, Dawn, you're not going to Grosvenor's after all. It
+seems that old party was only pulling my leg."</p>
+
+<p>Ernest good-naturedly struggled to talk with me, but I spared him the
+ordeal, and, arrived at Grosvenor's, interestedly studied them to
+discover what manner of procedure "trying to ape the swells" might
+be&mdash;the swells of Noonoon&mdash;the doctor who thought I might "peg out"
+any minute, and the bank managers and the parsons.</p>
+
+<p>The only difference to be observed between the tea-table at Clay's and
+Grosvenor's was that at the latter the equivalents of Uncle Jake and
+Andrew did not appear in a coatless condition, were treated to the
+luxury of table-napkins, and Mrs Grosvenor, who served, attended to
+people according to their rank instead of their position at the table,
+and entrusted them with the sugar-basin and milk-jug themselves.
+Farther than this there was no distinction, and this was not an
+alarming one. Certainly Miss Grosvenor, who had not enjoyed half
+Dawn's educational advantages, did not as glaringly flout syntax, and
+slang was not so conspicuous in her vocabulary. She and Ernest got on
+so well that none but my practised eyes could detect that as the
+evening advanced his brown ones occasionally wandered towards the
+entrance door, which showed that much as Miss Grosvenor had got him
+out of his shell, she had not obliterated Dawn.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>That young lady arrived at about a quarter to ten, and we started
+homewards, determining to go a long way round, first by way of the
+Grosvenor's vehicle road to town, by this gaining the public highway,
+along which we would walk to the entrance to grandma's demesne. This
+was preferable to a short-cut and rolling under the barbed-wire
+fencing in the long grass sopping with dew, which at midnight or
+thereabouts would stiffen with the soft frosts of this region that
+would flee before the sun next morning.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn's cheeks were scarlet from rowing on the river with "Dora"
+Eweword, and she spoke of her jaunt as soon as we got outside,
+apparently pregnant with the knowledge innate in the dullest of her
+sex, that the most efficacious way of giving impetus to the love of
+one lover is to have another.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, is another art which, like good cooking, must be "done
+to the turn," and in this instance there was danger of it being done
+too soon, as Ernest's amour had not taken firm root yet; and a man,
+unless he be either of gigantic pluck or no honour at all, will not
+hurry to interfere with the secured property of another man.</p>
+
+<p>They chatted in a desultory fashion while I man&oelig;uvred to relieve
+them of my presence. The night was lit by a million stars, paling
+towards the east, where behind the hills a waning moon was putting in
+an appearance. The electric lights of the town scintillated like
+artificial stars, and away down the long valley could be seen here and
+there the twinkle of a farmhouse light, showing where some held mild
+wassail or a convivial evening; for there were not many of the
+agriculturalists, tired from their heavy toil, who were otherwise out
+of bed at this ungodly hour of the night.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The crisp winter air agreed with me, and I felt unusually well.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me walk behind, this night is too glorious to waste in talking
+politics, so you young people get out of my hearing and thresh out
+your candidate's merit and demerit and leave me to think," I said, for
+politics were in the air and they were touching upon them. They obeyed
+me, and soon were lost to view in the dark of the osage and quince
+hedges grown as breakwinds on the west of Grosvenor's orangery. Soon I
+could not hear their footfalls, for I stood still to watch the trains
+pass by. 'Twas the hour of the last division of the Western passenger
+mail, bearing its daily cargo of news and people to the great plains
+beyond the hills that loomed faintly in the light of the half moon.
+Haughtily its huge first-class engine roared along, and its carriage
+windows, like so many warm red mouths, permitted a glimpse of the folk
+inside comfortably ensconced for the night. It slowed across the long
+viaduct approaching the bridge, and crossed the bridge itself with a
+roar like thunder, then it swerved round a curve to Kangaroo till the
+window-lights gave place to its two red eyes at the rear. As it
+climbed the first spur of the great range, and all that could be seen
+was a belch of flame from the engine-door as it coaled, something of
+the old longing awoke within me for things that must always be far
+away. The throbbing engines spoke to my heart, and forgetting its
+brokenness, it stirred again to their measure&mdash;the rushing, eager
+measure of ambition, strife, struggle! I was young again, with youth's
+hot desire to love and be loved, and as its old bitter-sweet
+clamourings rushed over me I rebelled that my hair was grey and my
+propeller disabled. The young folks ahead had put me out of their life
+as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span> young folks do, and, measuring the hearts of their seniors by the
+white in their hair and the lines around their eyes, would have been
+incredulous that I still had capacity for their own phase. Only the
+royalty of youth is tendered love in full measure; those who fail to
+attain or grasp it then find this door, from which comes enticing
+perfume and sound of luring music, shut against them for all time, and
+no matter how appealingly they may lean against its portals, it will
+rarely open again, for they have been laid by to be sold as remnants
+like the draper's goods which have failed to attract a buyer during
+the brief season they were displayed. I stood under the whispering
+osage and listened to the now distant train puffing its way over the
+wild mountains, also to be crossed by the great road first cut by
+those whose now long dead limbs had carried chains&mdash;members of a
+bygone brigade as I was one of a passing company. But probably they
+each had had their chance of love, and the old bitterness upsprung
+that mine had not fallen athwart my pathway. Fierce struggle had
+always shut me away from similar opportunity to that enjoyed by the
+young people ahead.</p>
+
+<p>"Put back your cruel wheel, O Time!" I cried in my heart, "and give me
+but one hour's youth again&mdash;sweet, ecstatic youth with the bounding
+pulse, led by the purple mirage of Hope, whose sirens whisper that the
+world's sweets are sweet and its crowns worth winning. Let me for a
+space be free from this dastard age creeping through the veins,
+dulling the perspective of life and leadening the brain, whose carping
+companions draw attention to the bitters in the cups of Youth's
+Delights, and mutter that the golden crowns we struggle for shall
+tarnish as soon as they are placed on our tired brows!" Suddenly my
+bitter reverie was broken by the knight and the lady calling in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>
+startled tones. I replied, and presently they were upon me, Dawn very
+much out of breath.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, goodness, we thought you were ill again. You have given us such a
+shock. You should not have been left behind. I was a terrible brute
+that I didn't harness the pony and drive over for you;" and Ernest
+came in a slow second with&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You should have taken my arm," and he wrapped my cloak about me with
+the high quality of gentleness peculiar to the best type of strong
+man.</p>
+
+<p>Despite my assurance that I never had felt better, they insisted upon
+supporting me on either side; so slipping a hand through each of the
+young elbows conveniently bent, I playfully put the large hand on the
+right of me over the dimpling one on the left.</p>
+
+<p>"There!" I said, taking advantage of the liberties extended a probable
+invalid, "I've made a breastwork of the hands of the two dearest young
+friends I have, so now I cannot fall;" and seeing I put it at that, at
+that they were content to let it remain, and the big hand very
+carefully retained the little one, so passive and warm, in its shy
+grasp. At the gate I dismissed Ernest, and Dawn condescended to remark
+that he wasn't <i>quite</i> such a fool as usual, which interpreted meant
+that he had not been so guardedly stand-off to her as he sometimes
+was.</p>
+
+<p>The trains once more entertained my waking hours that night. Under
+Andrew's tutorage I had learned to distinguish the rumble of a "goods"
+from the rush of a "passenger," a two-engine haul from a single, and
+even the heavy voice of the big old "shunter" that lived about the
+Noonoon station had grown familiar; but the haughtiest of all was a
+travelling engine attended only by its tender, and speeding by with
+lightsome action, like a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span> governor thankfully free from officialdom
+and hampered only by a valet.</p>
+
+<p>Musing on what a little time had elapsed since the work of the
+passenger trains had been done by the coaches with their grey and bay
+teams of five, swinging through the town at a gallop, and with their
+occupants armed to the teeth against bushrangers, I dozed and dreamt.
+I dreamt that I was in one of the sleeping-cars which had superseded
+Cobb &amp; Co.'s accommodation for travellers, and that from it I could
+see in a bird's-eye view not only the magnificent belt of mountains,
+the bluest in the world, but whirling down their westward slopes with
+a velocity outstripping the scented winds from sandal ridges and myall
+plains, I slid across that great western stretch of country where a
+portion of the railway line runs for a hundred and thirty-six miles
+without rise or fall or curve in the longest straight ribbon of steel
+that is known. But ere I reached its end I wakened with a start
+through something falling in Miss Flipp's room.</p>
+
+<p>Surely I had not slept for more than half an hour, because the light
+which had shone in the adjoining room as we returned from Grosvenor's
+was still burning. Presently Miss Flipp put it out, and closing her
+door after her, stealthily made her way from the house. She trod
+cautiously and noiselessly, but her gown caught on the lower sprouts
+of the ragged old rose-bushes beside the walks, and though she took a
+long time to open the little gate opening towards the wharves and the
+narrow pathway running along the river-bank to the bridge, it creaked
+a little on its rusty hinges, so that I heard it and fell to awaiting
+the girl's return.</p>
+
+<p>I waited and waited, and beguiled the time by counting the trains that
+passed with the quarter hours. There<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span> were so many that I soon lost
+count. This line carried goods to the great wheat and wool-growing
+west and brought its produce to the city. Many of the noisy trains
+were laden with "fifteen hundred" and "two thousand" lots of "fats,"
+and the yearly statistics dealing with the sales at Homebush
+chronicled their total numbers as millions. From beyond Forbes,
+Bourke, and Brewarrina they came in trucks to cross the bridge
+spanning the noble stream at the mountain's base, but they never went
+back again to the great plains where they had basked in plenty or
+staggered through droughts as the fickle seasons rose and fell. The
+voracious, insatiable maw of the city was a grave for them all, and
+the commercial greed which falls so heavily on the poor dumb beasts in
+which it traffics, caged them so tightly for their last journey that
+by the time they reached Noonoon they were bruised and cramped and not
+a few trodden under foot. The empty trucks going west again made the
+longest trains, as they could be laden with nothing but a little
+wire-netting for settlers who were fighting the rabbits, and were
+easily distinguishable from other "goods," as when they clumsily and
+jerkily halted the clanking of their couplings and the bumping of
+their buffers could be heard for a mile or more down the valley. The
+splendid atmosphere intensified all sounds and carried them an unusual
+distance, and many a time at first I was wont to be aroused from sleep
+in the night with a notion that the thundering trains were going to
+run right over the house.</p>
+
+<p>On the night in question I had not heard Miss Flipp return from her
+midnight tryst, though all the luggage trains had passed and it neared
+the time of the first division of the up or citywards mail from the
+west, which was the earliest train to arrive in town from the country<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>
+daily. It passed Noonoon in the vicinity of 4 <span class="smcap">a.m.</span>&mdash;a radiant hour in
+the summer dawn, but then in winter, the time when bed is most
+alluring, when the passengers' breath congeals on the window-panes,
+they complain that the foot-warmers have got cold, and give yet one
+more twist to their comforters and another tug at their 'possum or
+wallaby rugs. This train passed with its shaking thunder, drew into
+Noonoon for refreshments, then on and on with noisy energy, but still
+Miss Flipp did not return.</p>
+
+<p>I concluded that she must have decided to leave us in this fashion, or
+that I had missed her entry during the rumble of a passing train, or
+mayhap I had snoozed for a moment, or perhaps an hour, as the
+unsympathetic heavy sleepers aver the insomnists must do; and ceasing
+to be on the alert any longer, I really slept.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="FIFTEEN" id="FIFTEEN"></a>FIFTEEN.</h2>
+
+<h3>ALAS! MISS FLIPP!</h3>
+
+
+<p>I hastened to appear at the half-past seven breakfast, as no excuse
+for non-appearance was taken, and the only concession made to Miss
+Flipp, who had not been present at it for some time, was that she
+could make herself a cup of cocoa when she chose to rise. For this
+meal grandma ladled out the porridge and flavoured it with milk and
+sugar in the usual way.</p>
+
+<p>"I say, Dawn, which of them blokes, Ernest or Dora, is the best
+boat-puller?" inquired Andrew as he received his portion. "You were
+mighty stingy with the sugar, grandma!"</p>
+
+<p>"Dora isn't in it," responded Carry. "Mr Ernest could get ahead of him
+every time."</p>
+
+<p>"So he ought!" said Dawn. "His ears are the size of a pair of sails,
+and would pull him along."</p>
+
+<p>Thus was published another defect in my knight, till I feared that it
+must be only my partial gaze that discerned a knight at all.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear me," interposed grandma, "a man can't look or speak or walk but
+he's this, that, and the other. Things weren't so in my day. Of course
+there were some things that were took exception to, but there must be
+reason in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span> everythink, an' I don't see what difference a man's ears
+being a little big makes. My father's ears&mdash;your
+great-grandfather's&mdash;was none too small, an' he was always a good kind
+man."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care if my own ears were big, it wouldn't make me like them,"
+said the irrepressible Dawn; and grandma had just finished what she
+termed "dosing" the last plate of porridge, when we were interrupted
+by the appearance of policeman Danby at the French Lights. There was
+nothing strange in this appearance of the embodiment of the law, even
+at that early hour of the morning; for the huge young man with the
+rollicking face and curly hair, though a good officer in attending to
+his work, was a better in admiring a girl, which, after all, taking
+matters at the base, is the chief and most vital business of life, as,
+were it neglected, there would be no police or populace.</p>
+
+<p>Well, as I said, policeman Danby knew a pretty girl when he saw one,
+and there being two at Clay's, that household, in the way of the law,
+was very well looked after indeed; and for the purpose of escaping the
+annual registration fee, Andrew's little dog, "Whiskey," had remained
+a puppy as long as some young ladies tarry under thirty.</p>
+
+<p>Carry on rising to admit the caller had the usual tussle with the
+door, while grandma reiterated uncomplimentary remarks about the
+"blessed feller" who should some time since have effected repairs, and
+Danby upon entering wore an extremely grave face, looked neither at
+Dawn nor Carry, but addressed himself straight to Mrs Martha Clay.</p>
+
+<p>"I have to trouble you about a very unpleasant matter," he said, and
+cruelly all eyes went to poor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span> Andrew, as it was but recently he had
+to be chased home for breaking the law.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said grandma, rising actively, and though a flurried colour
+came to the old withered cheek, the spark of battle flashed in the
+stern blue-grey eye.</p>
+
+<p>"Could I see you privately?" said Danby.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly," said Mrs Clay: "but I'm not fond of secrecy; things is
+better open, and this is the first time in my life I've had to be seen
+secret by the police. Come this way."</p>
+
+<p>We said nothing, but dropped our feeding tools and waited in suspense,
+till in less than a minute grandma thrust her head in the dining-room
+door.</p>
+
+<p>"For mercy's sake, Dawn, look in Miss Flipp's room and see is she
+there."</p>
+
+<p>Dawn rose in a hurry and boxed Andrew's ears as she passed, because he
+too rose and tumbled over his chair in her way.</p>
+
+<p>"Some people ought to tie themselves up to be out of the way," she
+ejaculated.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Flipp is not in her room," she presently called, "and her bed is
+smooth and made up."</p>
+
+<p>"God save us, then! Mr Danby says she's drownded in the river,"
+exclaimed her grandma. "What's to be done?"</p>
+
+<p>"We'll spare you all the trouble possible, Mrs Clay," said the man,
+with the respect always tendered the old dame; "but I'm afraid it's a
+suicide. Some men going to work on the new viaduct just noticed her
+clothes sticking up as they crossed the bridge at daylight and
+reported it, and I was sent down. We've taken the body to Jimmeny's
+pub., and sent for the coroner, at all events."</p>
+
+<p>Dawn and Andrew howled together in a frightened<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span> manner, while the
+sensible Carry, who never lost her head, admonished them&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be jackdaws. That won't mend matters. Perhaps it isn't half as
+bad as some make out. Things never are when you get the right hang of
+them."</p>
+
+<p>"Things are bad enough anyhow, but the way to mend 'em ain't to be
+snivelling," rapped out grandma, giving Dawn and Andrew a shaking that
+braced them up.</p>
+
+<p>Things were indeed bad enough, and nothing could mend them. They had
+gone beyond repair. It transpired that my senses had been correct, and
+poor Miss Flipp had <i>not</i> returned that moonlit night as I lay
+listening to the passing trains. She had ended her ruined life by
+weighting her feet and dropping into the pretty stretch of water under
+the bridge, where the locomotives rushed by like thunder, and from
+where could be seen the twinkling electric lights of one of the oldest
+towns in Australia.</p>
+
+<p>The inquest, at which we all had to appear, elicited information that
+fairly stood poor grandma's hair on end. It was a great blow to find
+that she had been harbouring a woman who was not as C&aelig;sar's wife, and
+that it was fear of the penalty of her divergence from what is
+accepted as virtue, had driven her to take her life ere she had
+transmitted the tribulation of being to a nameless child.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing was cleared up regarding her antecedents. The person by whom
+she was supposed to be recommended to Mrs Clay knew of no such
+individual, and no one came to claim her.</p>
+
+<p>Her uncle, it was discovered, had a day or two previously sailed for
+America on urgent business, and after the girl's death an affectionate
+letter for her arrived from him. She had left nothing to fix the blame
+where it belonged,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span> but with a misdirected loyalty so common in her
+sex had paid all the debt her frail self.</p>
+
+<p>The post on the day of her death brought me a pathetic little note, in
+which she stated that she wished to bear the whole blame; a woman
+always had to in any case, and as she could not face it she had
+decided upon death. She had written this to me because she felt I had
+had an inkling of how matters had been with her, and she thanked me
+that I had kept silent, in conjunction with the observation that it
+was not usual for such as she to meet with forbearance from those who
+had had sense to preserve their respectability. Ah, the regret that
+consumed me that I had not risked the unpopularity of interference and
+sought her confidence. I might have been able to have saved her from
+such an end!</p>
+
+<p>I kept my knowledge to myself. It would scarcely have hurt Mr Pornsch.
+Under the British Constitution property is far more sacred than women.
+But having a fatality in belief that there is a law of retribution in
+all things, I hoped to be able to sheet this crime home to its
+perpetrator in a way that should put him to confusion when he least
+expected it.</p>
+
+<p>There was ample money for burial among the girl's belongings, which
+were taken in charge by the police, and there let the cruelly common
+incident rest for the present.</p>
+
+<p>The affair so upset Dawn that she refused to occupy her usual room any
+longer, and at her suggestion she and I determined to occupy a big
+upstairs room, up till that time filled with rubbish. This being
+agreed upon we forsook the apartments opening into the river garden,
+and betook ourselves to an altitude from which we had even a better
+view of the valley, river, and trains.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn so perceptibly went "off colour" that I persuaded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span> her
+grandmother to let the singing lessons begin by way of diverting her
+mind.</p>
+
+<p>The old lady would not contemplate paying more than two guineas per
+quarter, so I saw a six guinea teacher, arranged with him to take the
+pupil at four, two of which I privately paid myself, and Dawn at last
+set out for the city for her first lesson in the arduous and
+unattractive boo-ing and ah-ing that lie at the foundation of a
+singer's art.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="SIXTEEN" id="SIXTEEN"></a>SIXTEEN.</h2>
+
+<h3>ADVANCE, AUSTRALIA!</h3>
+
+
+<p>In the career of a prodigy there invariably comes a time when it is
+compelled to relinquish being very clever for a child, and has to
+enter the business of life in competition with adults.</p>
+
+<p>This crisis had arrived in the career of the prodigy Australia.</p>
+
+<p>It is at the time of electing new or re-electing old representatives
+of the people to the legislature that the state of a country's affairs
+is more prominently before the public than at any other, and preceding
+the State election in which Grandma Clay was to exercise the rights of
+full citizenship for the first time, it was a lugubrious statement.</p>
+
+<p>That the country had gone to the dogs was averred by each candidate
+for the three hundred a-year given ordinary State members, and each
+described himself as the instrument by which it could be restored to a
+state of paradisaical prosperity.</p>
+
+<p>This is an old bogey, unfailingly revived at elections. The
+Ministerialists invariably roar how they have improved the public
+finances, while the Opposition as blatantly tries to drown them by
+bellowing that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span> retiring government has damned the country, and
+that the Opposition has the only recipe of satisfactory
+reconstruction, but in spite of this threadbare election scare the
+Commonwealth remained the freest and one of the wealthiest
+abiding-places in the world.</p>
+
+<p>Just then its business affairs were undoubtedly badly managed, and
+mismanagement, if continued, inevitably leads to bankruptcy.
+Undeniably there was an unwholesome percentage of
+unemployed&mdash;inexcusable when there abounded vast areas of fertile
+territory quite unpeopled, mines as rich as any known to history all
+untouched; the sugar, grape, timber, and other industries crying aloud
+for further development, and countless resources on every hand
+requiring nothing but that these and men should meet on healthy and
+enterprising business terms. The population, instead of gaining in
+numbers, was foolishly leaving the country, like over-indulged,
+spoiled children, imagining themselves ill-treated, while others
+hesitated to come in because the Australian trumpet was not blown
+loudly enough nor in the right key.</p>
+
+<p>The administration, like a young housewife tossed into an overflowing
+storehouse, had spent lavishly, but the bank of a multi-millionaire
+will come to an end in time, and so with the play-days of Australia.</p>
+
+<p>The hour had arrived for her to be up and doing, to marshal her
+forces, advertise her wares, and take her place as a worker among the
+nations.</p>
+
+<p>There are always old bush lawyers and city know-alls beside whom
+Chamberlain and Roberts are but small tomahawks as empire-builders,
+and these now were predicting that to make a nation of her Australia
+needed war and many other disasters to harden her people from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span> the
+amusement-loving, sunny-eyed folk they were; but this was an
+extremist's outlook. She was in greater need of a land law that would
+sensibly and practically put the right people on the soil, and entice
+population of desirable class&mdash;independent producers&mdash;so that the
+development of the industries would follow in natural sequence. In
+short, Australia was languishing for a few patriotic sons with strong,
+clear, business heads to apply the science of statecraft, as
+distinguished from the self-seeking artifices of the mere job
+politician at present sapping her vitals, and all the elements for
+success were within her gates.</p>
+
+<p>I had long had an eye open for the discernment of such an embryo
+statesman, and looked forward with interest to the study of the
+present crop of political candidates.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as Leslie Walker&mdash;Ernest Breslaw's step-brother&mdash;had been
+elected as the Opposition candidate for Noonoon, canvassing,
+"spouting," war-whooping, and all manner of "barracking" began with
+such intense enthusiasm that fortunately Miss Flipp's sad fate was
+speedily driven out of our thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn and Mrs Bray were on Walker's committee, and nearly every night
+there was an advocate of one party or the other gasconading in
+Citizens' Hall.</p>
+
+<p>To Noonoon residents it became what the theatre is to city patrons of
+the drama, and more, for this was invested with the dignity of a
+certain amount of reality. To women being in the fray many attributed
+the unusual interest distinguishing this campaign, but the real cause
+was that public affairs had come to such a deadlock that legislature,
+as the medium through which they might be moved, had become a vital
+question to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span> the veriest numskull, and all were mustering to ascertain
+who put forth the most favourable policy.</p>
+
+<p>With politics and her newly started singing lessons, Dawn was too
+thoroughly engrossed for thought of any knight to pierce her armour of
+indifference, which was the outcome of full mental occupation. I
+invested in a nice little piano, that was carried upstairs to our big
+room, and had undertaken to superintend her practising, but she was a
+more enthusiastic politician than a vocal student, as I pointed out to
+her grandmother's satisfaction. These happenings had eventuated during
+the first fortnight of May, and in the third week of this month Leslie
+Walker imported a couple of experienced ranters to renew the attack
+and denounce the villainy of the present government in loud and
+blustering vote-catching war-whoops.</p>
+
+<p>In the town itself, nearly every third person was employed on the
+railway, and their only care in casting their vote was to secure a
+representative who would not in any way reduce the expenditure of the
+railways. Thus a parliamentary candidate in Noonoon had to trim his
+sails to catch this large vote or be defeated. It was the same with
+other factions: any man with a common-sense platform, impartially for
+the good of the State at large, might as well have sat down at home
+and have saved himself the labour of stumping an electorate and
+bellowing himself hoarse for all the chance he had of being returned.</p>
+
+<p>We turned out <i>en masse</i> from Clay's to hear the second speech of
+young Walker, assisted by two M.P.'s belonging to his party. Grandma
+and I drove in the sulky, while the girls and Andrew walked ahead, the
+latter under strict orders to behave with reason, and not make "a fool
+of hisself with the larrakins."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was well we arrived early, as there was not sitting room for half
+the audience, though more than half the hall being reserved for the
+ladies, we got a front seat, and long before the time for the speakers
+to appear every corner was packed, and women as well as men were
+standing in rows fronting the stage. A great buzz of conversation at
+the front, and stampeding and cat-calling among the youths at the
+back, was terminated by the arrival of the three speakers of the
+evening, who were received amid deafening cock-a-doodling, cheering,
+stamping, and clapping. An old warrior of the class dressed <i>up</i> to
+the position of M.P. sat to one side, and next him was the barrister
+type so prolific in parliament, who had himself dressed <i>down</i> to the
+vulgar crowd, while third sat Leslie Walker.</p>
+
+<p>Surely not the first Leslie Walker who had appeared a week or two
+previously! His bright, restless eye, though too sensitive for that of
+an old campaigner, now took in the crowd with complete assurance, and
+there was no hint of hesitation discernible. Having once smelt powder
+he was ready for the fray.</p>
+
+<p>"By Jove! hasn't Les. bucked up!" whispered Ernest, who sat on one
+side of me, where he had landed after an ineffectual attempt to sit
+beside Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; if he can only roar and blow and wave his arms sufficiently he
+may have a chance."</p>
+
+<p>"But he's still nervous," said the observant Andrew from the rear.
+"You watch him go for that flea in the leg of his pants!"</p>
+
+<p>Sitting in full view of a "chyacking" audience is a severe ordeal to
+an inexperienced campaigner with a sensitive temperament, and this
+action, indeed peculiarly like an attempt to detain an annoying insect
+in a fold<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span> of his lower garment, was one of those little mannerisms
+adopted to give an appearance of ease.</p>
+
+<p>Behind the speakers came, as chairman, one of the swell class almost
+extinct in this region, and he, too, had rather an effete attitude and
+physique, as he took up his position behind the spindley table
+weighted by the smeared tumblers and water-bottle. He rose with the
+intention of flattering the speakers and audience in the orthodox way,
+but the electors, among whom a spirit of overflowing hilarity was at
+large, took his duties out of his mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't smoodge, old cockroach, let the other blokes blaze away, as we
+(the taxpayers) are paying dear for this spouting."</p>
+
+<p>The barrister man M.P. burst upon them first with the latest trumpet
+blare with which speeches were being opened. Having been primed as to
+the magnitude of the railway vote in Noonoon, first move was to throw
+a bone to it, and, metaphorically speaking, he got down on his knees
+to this section of the electors, and howled and squealed that all
+civil servants' wages would be left as they were.</p>
+
+<p>He took another canter to flatter the ladies regarding the remarkably
+intelligent vote they had cast in the Federal elections, and asserted
+his belief that they would do likewise in the present crisis, and
+introduce a nobler element into political life.</p>
+
+<p>Creatures, a few months previously ranked lower than an almost
+imbecile man, and with no more voice in the laws they lived under than
+had lunatics or horses&mdash;it was miraculous what a power they had
+suddenly grown! The man at the back saw the point&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Blow it all, don't smoodge so. It ain't long since<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span> you was all rared
+up on yer hind legs showin' how things would go to fury if wimmen had
+the vote."</p>
+
+<p>Having got past this prelude, he proceeded with a vigorous volley of
+abuse against the sitting government, and showed how Walker, the
+Opposition candidate, was the only man to vote for. He shook his
+fists, stamped and raved, and illustrated how much a voice could
+endure without cracking, the back people carefully waiting till he had
+to pull up to take a drink out of one of the glasses on the spindley
+table, when they got in with&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You're mad! Keep cool! You'll bust a blood-vessel! When are you going
+to give Tomato Jimmy a show to blow his horn?" This being a reference
+to the calling of the other speaker, who was a middleman in the
+vegetable and fruit-market. The first speaker, however, was not nearly
+exhausted yet&mdash;he had to thump his fists on the unfortunate spindley
+table, and work off several other oratorical poses and a deal of
+elocutionary voice-play, ere he was finished. I fairly rolled with
+enjoyment of the wonderful wit and humour of the crowd at the back,
+which, unless it be put down as the critical faculty, is an
+inexplicable phenomenon. Not one of the interrupters, if drafted on to
+the hustings, could have given a lucid or intelligent statement of his
+views, or indication that he was furnished with any, and yet not one
+slip on the part of a candidate, one inconsistent point, personal
+mannerism or peccadillo, but was remarked in an astonishingly humorous
+and satirical style.</p>
+
+<p>The barrister man having finished "spouting," the common-sense
+individual, who always sits half-way down the hall, and who, when he
+asks a question, has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span> to face the double ordeal of the crowd and the
+candidate, said&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"The speaker has shown us all the things the other fellows <i>can't do</i>,
+we'd like another speech now stating what <i>he can</i> do." The chairman
+rose to say this was out of order, but his voice was lost in the din.</p>
+
+<p>"You sit down, old chap, we can manage this meetin' ourselves."</p>
+
+<p>"But out of respect to the ladies present!"</p>
+
+<p>"We'll look after the ladies too," was the good-humoured rejoinder.
+"Why, they're enjoyin' it as much as we are. They've got a vote now,
+you know, and are going to use it in an intelligent manner."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you know Queen Anne was dead?" said another.</p>
+
+<p>"The ladies won't be harmed. Any one that disrespects the ladies will
+be chucked out."</p>
+
+<p>The ladies had to laugh at this, and the meeting went right merrily,
+and more merrily in that half the "blowing" from the stage was drowned
+by the interjectory din from the rear of the building, where lads and
+men stood chock-a-block, the former, and the latter too, making right
+royal use of their licence to be rowdy; but such a good-natured crowd
+could not often be seen. There were no altercations, only laughter and
+the crude repartee of such a gathering.</p>
+
+<p>The first speaker having returned to his seat and sanity, the second
+took his place.</p>
+
+<p>"Hullo, Tomatoes! What's the price of onions and spuds?"</p>
+
+<p>"Now begin and tell the ladies how intelligent they are, so you'll get
+their vote."</p>
+
+<p>"Tomatoes" did butter the ladies, next yelled that the civil servants
+would not be retrenched, and then upheld<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span> the virulent attack on the
+government. Keeping in time with the utterances of "Tomato Jimmy," the
+boys at the back grew so boisterous that at one time it appeared
+inevitable that the meeting must break up in disorder. The chairman,
+the candidates, the ladies, the whole house rose, and one man towards
+the front made himself heard amid the babel to the effect that the
+ladies ought to walk out to show their resentment of the insults that
+had been offered their presence by this disorderly behaviour.</p>
+
+<p>"Ladies, don't go. <i>Dear</i> ladies, don't go," called some wags. "We're
+only educatin' you in politics,&mdash;learning you how to be like your
+superiors&mdash;men."</p>
+
+<p>This evoked a round of laughter, and order was restored.</p>
+
+<p>"That's right, ladies, don't go; if you was to turn dawg on us now,
+we'd be so crestfallen we couldn't think about politics and save the
+country at all."</p>
+
+<p>Once more "Tomatoes" belched forth the infamy of the government, and
+louder and louder he yelled, till one marvelled at his endurance.
+Rougher and hotter grew his repartee till, by sheer abuse, he gained
+the ascendancy; but there was no sane statement of what he would
+propose as a remedy. Grandma Clay happened to rise as he neared the
+finish to see about a reticule she had dropped, and proved a target
+for those at the rear.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello, grandma! are you going to contradict him? Give us a straight
+tip about women's rights while you're up;" and poor grandma sat down
+very precipitately with an exceedingly deep blush.</p>
+
+<p>"If I could only get the chance," she gasped, "I'd give 'em a piece of
+me mind."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Third on the list came Leslie Walker, whose improvement was beyond
+belief. No notes or hesitation this time. Each sentence was crisp and
+clear, and in every detail he evinced the facility for enacting his
+<i>r&ocirc;le</i> which is supposedly a feminine accomplishment.</p>
+
+<p>The chairman, in closing the meeting, rose to say&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"In reference to the interjector who said the speaker was mad&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that's what every one said about <i>you</i> when you were in the
+council, and so you were too, and so are they all. Look at the roads
+we've got in the municipality," said a voice.</p>
+
+<p>So the chairman had to let the meeting terminate with the candidates
+thanking the electors for the extraordinarily good hearing they had
+been accorded; it being part of the humour of politics that the worse
+a candidate is boo-hooed the more stress he lays upon the <i>good
+hearing</i> given him, and the more scurrilous he is regarding his
+opponent the more frantically he assures one that he is a bosom
+<i>personal</i> friend.</p>
+
+<p>Andrew and I had the distinction of going home under grandma's
+tutelage, while Carry and Dawn stayed behind to go to the ladies'
+committee rooms, and Ernest lingered to escort them.</p>
+
+<p>"I say, grandma, are you goin' to vote for that bloke?" inquired
+Andrew.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm goin' to hear the other side first, and give me opinion after.
+There wasn't one of the swells there, was there?"</p>
+
+<p>"Dr Smalley and Dr Tinker both was."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but I mean the wimmen: an' how on earth did old Tinker ever get
+away from Mrs Tinker for that length of time? You'll never see one of
+them kind of wimmen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span> at anythink that makes for progress. That's the
+way they make theirselves superior to the likes of you an' me&mdash;by
+never doin' nothink only for theirselves. 'Oh, we've got all we want
+as it is, an' don't want the vote; a woman's place is home,' they say
+if you ask 'em. It's all very fine for them as has a man to keep them
+like in a band-box; they would have found it different if they had to
+act on their own like me. I'm sick of this intelligence in women they
+make a fuss about all of a sudden. I've rared a family and managed me
+business better than a man could; and what's there been all along to
+prevent a woman from stroking out a name on a paper I never could see.
+And it never seems to me much difference which name was struck out,
+for they're mostly a lot of impostors that only think of featherin'
+their own nests. You'll always hear of wimmen not bein' intelligent
+enough to do this and that, and these things is only what men like
+doin' best theirselves, and the things they make out God intended
+women to do is them the men don't like doin'. You don't ever hear of
+them thinkin' women ain't intelligent enough to do seven things at
+once." Grandma was in great form that night, and not only led but
+maintained the conversation.</p>
+
+<p>"I rather like this young feller, but he ain't no sense much either.
+All he thinks of is buttoning for the railway people, and it's the
+people on the land that ought to be legislated for first. They are the
+foundation of everythink; other things would work right after. Every
+one can't live in Sydney, an' that's what they're all makin' for now.
+Every one is getting some little agency&mdash;parasite business. They've
+got sense to see the people on the land is the most despised and sat
+upon. You don't hear no squallin' about they'll protect the farmer.
+No, he's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span> a despised old party that them scuts of fellers on the
+railway would grin at and think theirselves above, and scarcely give
+him a civil answer if he asked a question about his business what he's
+payin' them fellers there to do for him, and which only for the
+prodoocers wouldn't be there at all. Things is gettin' pretty tight on
+farms now. It means about sixteen hours hard graft a-day to make not
+half what a railwayman makes in eight hours. If you happen to have
+grapes or oranges, if they manage to escape the frost, an' hail, an'
+caterpillar, then the blight ketches 'em, or there's a drewth, and
+there ain't none; an' if there's any, there's so much that there ain't
+no sale for 'em; and the farmer's life I reckon ought to be stopped as
+gamblin', for a gambler's life ain't one bit more precarious."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why the jooce do you want me to go on the land?" said Andrew.</p>
+
+<p>"That ain't the point."</p>
+
+<p>"It's the most sticking out point to me," protested the lad. "I reckon
+bein' on the land is a mug's game; scrapin' like a fool when a feller
+could be sittin' in an office an' gettin' all they want twice as
+easy."</p>
+
+<p>"Here, you don't know what's good. It's more respectabler bein' on the
+land. You get the pony out, an' make the coffee, an' hold your
+tongue."</p>
+
+<p>Andrew and I had undertaken to make the coffee for supper, and thus
+give Carry, whose week in the kitchen it was, a chance to go to the
+meeting.</p>
+
+<p>They all arrived from it after a time&mdash;Dawn and the knight together,
+Carry and Larry Witcom following. Oh, where was "Dora"?</p>
+
+<p>"Who's that with you, Carry?" asked Andrew. "There was a young lady
+named Carry, who had a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span> sweetheart named Larry; at the gate they often
+would tarry, to talk about when they would marry."</p>
+
+<p>But this remark of Andrew's to parry, Dawn good-naturedly plunged into
+an account of the meeting.</p>
+
+<p>"What did they do?" asked grandma.</p>
+
+<p>"Do?&mdash;they only blabbed. Mr Walker was there to-night. We asked that
+Jimmeny girl from the pub. to join, and she delivered a great parable
+at us, looking round all the time to see if the boot-licking tone of
+it was pleasing the men. She said that women ought to bring up their
+children to respect them&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The most commonest idea some people has of bringin' up their children
+to respect them," grandma chipped in, "is to let youngsters make
+toe-rags of their mother; and boys only as high as the table think
+they can cheek their mother because she's only a woman an' hasn't as
+much right to be livin' in the world as them, and when they are
+twenty-one the law confirms this beautiful sentiment. Leastways, until
+just lately," she concluded.</p>
+
+<p>"And this Jimmeny piece," continued Dawn, "said women ought to treat
+their husbands decently, and she thinks a woman disgraces her sex by
+getting up on a platform to speak. I asked her if she thought they did
+not disgrace themselves and the other sex too by standing behind a bar
+and serving out drinks and grinning at a lot of goods that ought to be
+at home with their families,&mdash;and that was a bit of a facer. Then she
+said it was only the ugly old women who wanted to shriek round and get
+rights,&mdash;that men would give the young pretty ones all they wanted
+without asking! Of all the old black gin ideas, I always think that
+the terriblest. A nice state of affairs, if people couldn't get honest
+civilised rights without being young and pretty; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span> <i>the fools</i>!"
+said the girl heatedly, "can't they look round and see how long the
+beauty and youth business will work! 'Men,' she says, 'ought to rule;
+they're the stronger vessel.'" And Dawn gave inimitable mimicry of
+Miss Jimmeny of the pub. "If you take my tip for it, those girls that
+sing out that men are the stronger vessel are the sort that have a
+dishcloth of a husband, and never let him off a string."</p>
+
+<p>This attitude of mind was one of Dawn's distinctive characteristics.
+Having that beauty, which in the enslaved condition of women has
+always been an unfair asset to the possessor, to the exclusion of
+worthier traits, she was not like most beauties, content to sit down
+and trade upon it, but had wholesomer, honester, workaday ideals in
+regard to the position of her sex.</p>
+
+<p>She was going to Sydney in the morning for her second singing lesson,
+and as Ernest, by a strange coincidence, happened to have business
+that would take him on the same journey by the same train, I
+accompanied him to the gate to warn him against inadvertently
+divulging that I had been an actress by trade.</p>
+
+<p>"I want to take you into my confidence," I said, as we passed several
+naked cedar-trees, and halted in the shelter of some fine peppers that
+grew to perfection in this valley, where I related the trouble I had
+had to bring the old lady round to the idea of Dawn's singing lessons,
+and mentioned the girl's ambition regarding the stage.</p>
+
+<p>"Now," I continued, "if the old dame were to discover I had been on
+the stage, she would think I was leading Dawn to the devil, and would
+not credit that no one is more anxious than I am to save her from the
+footlights, or that the best way to stave her off is this training.
+My<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span> secret ambition regarding her," I said, critically observing the
+strong knobby profile, "is that within the next five years she should
+marry some nice youngster with means to place her in a setting
+befitting her intelligence and beauty."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you got any one in your eye now?" he irrelevantly inquired. And,
+considering he stood where he filled my entire vision, as he rose
+between me and the light shed by the last division of the western
+passenger mail as it self-importantly crossed the viaduct, I
+answered&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; I think I know a man who would just fill the bill."</p>
+
+<p>He did not ask for further particulars, but remarked warningly&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Decent fellows with cash are scarce. They are inclined to get into
+mischief if they have too much time and money on their hands."</p>
+
+<p>"That's it; and I would not like to make a mess of things now that
+I've taken up matchmaking. You'll have to advise me when matters get
+out of hand; a little practice may come in handy some day when you
+have half a dozen daughters."</p>
+
+<p>"It would come in still handier now."</p>
+
+<p>"Pshaw, now! You'd only have to ask to receive, at your time of life
+and with your qualifications."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not so sure. You're the only one who has such an opinion of me,"
+he said disconsolately. "Others look upon me as a red-headed fool with
+big ears, &amp;c.;" and thus I knew Dawn's idle words had returned to his
+ears, as these things invariably do, and had stung.</p>
+
+<p>"Silly-billy! I'll take you in hand when I've settled Dawn. I'm the
+one to advertise your wares, for could I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span> turn back the wheel of time
+eight or nine years and make us of an age, I'd make it leap-year and
+propose to you myself."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd like to propose to you without altering the time," he gallantly
+responded, apparently not in such deadly fear of a breach of promise
+action as was Uncle Jake.</p>
+
+<p>"If I don't move in the matter Dawn will be marrying that Eweword, and
+though he's a most handsome and worthy&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Soft as a turnip," contemptuously interposed Ernest; "eats too much.
+It would take twelve months hard training to make any sort of a man of
+him."</p>
+
+<p>"It would be a pity to see Dawn just settling down into the dull,
+drudging life of a farmer's wife, going to an occasional show or
+tea-meeting in a home-made dress, with two or three children dragging
+at her skirts and looking a perfect wreck, as most of the mothers do."</p>
+
+<p>"By Jove, yes!"</p>
+
+<p>"She has a right to be on the lawn on Cup Day or in the front circle
+on first nights. She'd surprise some of the grandees, and with her
+vivacity and courage she'd make a furore for a time."</p>
+
+<p>"She'd make a good sport if she were a man," assented Ernest. "No
+running stiff or jamming a jock on the post or anything like that from
+her&mdash;she'd always hit straight out from the shoulder and above the
+belt."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; she has particularly infatuated me, and I'd like to save her
+from Eweword."</p>
+
+<p>"Marry him to the girl Grosvenor while you're about it and that will
+dispose of him and suit her, for she strikes me as anxious for
+matrimony."</p>
+
+<p>"She hasn't been&mdash;" I began.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, I think she's a splendid woman in every way, but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>But</i>, even the finest and most chivalrous man, while he thinks the
+only sphere for women is matrimony, yet is shocked if a woman betrays
+in the least way that her ambitions lie in the domestic line&mdash;strange
+inconsistency. However, you will not let Dawn know my ideas of
+disposing of her;" and with the want of perspicacity of his sex, or
+else with a wonderful power of covering his thoughts excelling that of
+women, and of which women never suspect men, Ernest promised without
+sensing what I had in view.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="SEVENTEEN" id="SEVENTEEN"></a>SEVENTEEN.</h2>
+
+<h3>MRS BRAY AND CARRY COME TO ISSUES.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Contention arose in the Clay household next day, Dawn's singing
+lessons being at the root of the trouble. It was her week in the
+kitchen, and that she should be two days absent from the cooking,
+displeased Carry.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if you don't think the place fair, you can go!" said grandma.
+"But I think you're a fool, an' you're giving me a lot of worry. It's
+all very fine in other people's places, but some day w'en you have a
+home of your own you'll know the worry of it. Next time I make a
+arrangement with a girl she'll have to take a extra day in the kitchen
+without humbuggin'."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll vote for me grandma on that bill," said Andrew, "for I've often
+been give the pip by who is in the kitchen an' who is out of it.
+Grandma, did you hear the latest? Young Jack Bray's been in another
+orange orchard and didn't do a get quick enough, and has got took up,
+and his father will have to pay money to keep him out of quod."</p>
+
+<p>The old lady bristled.</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't I tell you! Who knows how to receive these things best now?
+I've always believed in rarin' me family me own way, an' Mrs Bray is a
+fine woman, moral<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span> and decent, but she's got too many stones to throw
+at others and doesn't see to it sharp enough that less stones can't be
+threw at her. I thought she didn't take it serious enough. You'd have
+been in this too only for me dreadin' the spark. What are they goin'
+to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Pay the money, of course; an' Mr Bray is goin' to tan the hide off
+Jack."</p>
+
+<p>"Some people don't get frightened of dishonesty unless it costs 'em
+something," said the old lady.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'll vote for me grandma every time," said Andrew, "and Jim
+Clay every second time," as he went out the door, "and meself the most
+times of all," he concluded in the back yard.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs Bray dropped in that afternoon for a chat, and grandma mentioned
+that we were without afternoon tea because Carry had "jacked up" about
+getting it, for reasons before mentioned.</p>
+
+<p>"Just like her!" said Mrs Bray; "she gives herself as much side as if
+she was one of us. She's the sort of girl who wouldn't think twice of
+telling you to do a thing yourself, and you've made an awful fool of
+her by making so much of her. Them things of girls <i>earnin' their own
+livin'</i> ought to be kept in their place more," was the utterance of a
+woman who believed herself a staunch advocate for the freedom of her
+sex; but when Mrs Bray spoke of sex she meant self.</p>
+
+<p>"That ain't the point," said grandma; "I never think it anythink but a
+credit to a girl to be earnin' her living, an' would never be narrer
+enough to make them feel it. I always make a practice of treatin' the
+girls as near equal as within reason, for Carry's every bit as
+fine-lookin' an' good a girl as me own, an' if I wasn't here, wouldn't
+Dawn have to be foragin' for herself too? but there's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span> reason in
+everythink, and Carry might be a bit obligin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course she ought to be; but what could you expect of her, took up
+with that Larry Witcom, an' does the ass think he really wants her?
+He's only got her on a string for his own amusement? He goes to see
+that Dora Cowper at the same time; Jack seen him there. I wonder will
+<i>he</i> be scared off by being thought a ketch before the pot's boiled,
+so to speak. Good ketches, eh? I don't see nothing in none of them.
+They're only thought something because men is scarce here; they've all
+cleared out to the far out places, and West Australia. It's like a
+year the pumpkins is scarce, you can sell little things you'd hardly
+throw to the pigs another time, and that's the way it is with the few
+paltry fellers round here. It makes me mad to see the girls after
+them&mdash;<i>the fools!</i> and the men grinnin' behind their backs. There's
+that Ada Grosvenor, if Eweword just calls up and talks to her she
+tells you about it as if it was something, and inviting him down
+there, an' then the blessed fellers gets to think they're gods. It
+makes me sick!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said grandma; "I see the girls after fellers now,&mdash;there's that
+Danby for instance, he's a fine lump of a man, but w'en I was a girl I
+wouldn't have made toe-rags of a policeman."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, a blessed feller strollin' up and down the street lookin' at his
+toes or runnin' in a drunk. I say, did you hear the latest about old
+Rooney-Molyneux? He didn't believe in women having the vote, didn't
+consider they had intellect to vote, so <i>he</i> says (not as much brain
+as he has, don't you see, to marry a woman, and a baby to be coming
+and nothing to put on its back, while he strolls round and gets
+drunk), but now they've got the vote, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span> says (the great Lord Muck
+Rooney-Molyneux says it, remember) that it is their <i>duty</i> to use it,
+and he intends to <i>make</i> (mind you, <i>make</i>; I'd like to hear a man say
+he'd <i>make</i> me do anything; I'd scald him, see if I wouldn't, and
+that's what wants doing with half the men anyhow, for the way they
+carry on to women), and he's going to <i>make</i> his wife go round
+canvassing, <i>Now</i>! Men make me sick; w'en they're boys they're that
+troublesome they ought to be kep' under a tub, and we'n they get older
+they're that cantankerous and self-important they all want killin'
+off."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll bet Mrs Rooney won't be workin' for a different man to him. If
+her convictions led her that way, you'd see he'd have a flute about
+her not bein' fit to be out of her home," said grandma astutely.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that's the way with 'em; first they thought the world would
+tumble to pieces if women stirred out of the house for a minute to
+vote, and now that we've got the vote in spite of them, they'd make
+their wives walk round after votes for their side whether they was
+able or not."</p>
+
+<p>"They kicked agen us having the vote, and now we've got it they think
+we ought to vote with them like as if we was a appendage of theirs;
+men will be learnt different to that by-and-by, but it's best to go
+gradual; they've had as much as they can swaller for a time."</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't it just the very devil to them to think women is considered as
+important as themselves now, instead of something they could just do
+as they like with? Old Hollis there says he won't vote this year
+because the women have one. Did you ever hear of an insult like that?
+He says the monkeys will have a vote next, and that shows you what men
+think of women,&mdash;like as if they was some sort of animals."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well, if you ask me," said grandma, "the monkeys have been havin' a
+vote all along in the case of old Hollis."</p>
+
+<p>Any further discussion in this line was terminated by the entrance of
+Carry, with her good-looking face flushed and hard set, as, rolling
+down her sleeve and buttoning it aggressively as the finishing touch
+to her toilet after completing her afternoon's work, she confronted
+Mrs Bray, on battle bent.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Mrs Bray, I'd like to have given my opinion of you to your
+teeth long ago, but I held my tongue as it wasn't my house, and some
+people have different tastes and have folk around that I'd be a long
+time having anything to do with. Now, I think things do concern me,
+and I'm going to have my say; I couldn't have it sooner because I'm a
+<i>thing</i> earning my living and had to finish my work. I haven't got a
+home of my own, and like some people, if I had, I'd be in it teaching
+my dirty rude brats not to be thieves. I wouldn't for everlasting be
+at other people's places scandalising people twice as good as myself.
+I didn't think Mrs Clay was the sort of person to go
+tittle-tattling&mdash;she can please herself; but it doesn't concern you if
+I do put on airs. I want to know what you mean by that I should be
+kept in my place. I'll swear I know how to carry my day as well as you
+do, and to keep in my place too well to be going round meddling with
+other people's business."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't say nothing but was correct, an' what right have you to come
+bullying me? It's like your impudence&mdash;you a hussy out to work for
+your living at a few shillings a-week, and calling yourself a <i>lady</i>
+help when you're a servant, that's what you are; to bully <i>me</i>, a
+woman with a good home, and the mother of a family."</p>
+
+<p>Carry snorted contemptuously.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"That old 'mother of a family' racket needn't be brought forward. It
+doesn't hold as much water as it used to. Women are thought just as
+much of now who are good useful workers in the world, and not tied up
+to some man and the mother of a few weedy kids that aren't any credit
+to king or country."</p>
+
+<p>"Mercy!" exclaimed grandma. "What am I to?"</p>
+
+<p>"Let 'em fight it out," I laconically advised in an aside, and she
+seemed disposed to take my advice.</p>
+
+<p>"You dare," blustered Mrs Bray. "And what else have you got to say?"</p>
+
+<p>"I want an explanation of the aspersion on my character when you said
+I had taken up with Larry Witcom. I'm not going to stand anything on
+my character in that line if I <i>am</i> earning my living, and you <i>are</i>
+the mother of one or fourteen families, all as great a credit to you
+as the one Jack represents. And as for me earning my living, what are
+<i>you</i> doing? If a man wasn't keeping you to suit himself, how would
+you be earning your living? I could earn my living the same way as you
+are doing to-morrow if I liked; but of the two, I think my present
+occupation is the decentest and less dependent. Apart from your
+bullying selfishness, a nice sensible way you have of talking! If you
+killed off the men, who would you have to keep you? And that's a nice
+civilised way to speak about your fellow creatures anyhow; whether
+they be men or black gins, they've just as much place in the scheme of
+creation as you have. We would have been a long time getting the vote
+or any other decent right if the men were like you. It's because you
+are the same stamp as so many of the men that we've been kept down so
+long as we have; and now, what about me taking up with Larry Witcom?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's well known what Larry is."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what is he?"</p>
+
+<p>"You ask him about Mrs Park's divorce case."</p>
+
+<p>"I hope you don't think your old man is a saint, do you? As big a fool
+as you are, you're surely not fool enough for that, are you? Perhaps
+he isn't as clean a potato as Larry if it was all brought out."</p>
+
+<p>"But he's a married man this many a year, with a married daughter, and
+his young days are lived down long ago."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, so would Larry be married many a year and have things lived
+down in time, and not as many to live down either as your husband has
+at present, if things are true; for all your everlasting shepherding
+he gets off the chain sometimes."</p>
+
+<p>Hoity-toity! this was putting a fuse to gunpowder.</p>
+
+<p>"You hussy! What have you got to say about my husband? Prove it, and
+I'd make short work of him; and if it's lies, I'll bring you into
+court for it."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll leave it for you to prove; you're one of those who thinks every
+yarn entertaining till they touch yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"Two to one on Carry every time when me grandma's the umpire," grinned
+Andrew round the corner.</p>
+
+<p>"Carry, you've had enough to say. I forbid any more in my house," said
+grandma, rising to order.</p>
+
+<p>"I declare this a drawn fight," said Andrew.</p>
+
+<p>"You can have it out with Mrs Bray in her own house if you want, but
+no more of it here," continued grandma.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you dare come to my house," said Mrs Bray.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Your</i> house! no fear; I never associate with scandal-mongers,"
+contemptuously retorted Carry, as Mrs Bray made a precipitate
+departure, emitting something about a hussy who didn't know her place
+as she went.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I'm surprised at you!" said grandma. "Her tongue does run on a little
+sometimes, but you ought to remember she's old enough to be your
+mother, and girls do owe somethink to women with families."</p>
+
+<p>"And women with families and homes ought to remember they owe
+something to girls that aren't settled, because they haven't got a man
+caught yet to keep them."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, this ain't my quarrel, an' don't you bring it up to me again. A
+woman that's rared a family, and two of them like I have done, has
+enough with her own dissensions."</p>
+
+<p>It was rather a sullen party at tea that evening, so Dawn's return
+from Sydney immediately after, with her cheeks radiant from travel in
+the quick evening express, and herself brimming over with her day's
+adventures, formed a welcome relief.</p>
+
+<p>"I had a great time coming home," said she. "Mr Ernest and Dora
+Eweword both went to Sydney this morning, and Mr Ernest and I raced
+into a carriage to escape Dora, and we did; and he must have asked the
+guard, for he found our carriage, but he had only a second-class
+ticket, and wouldn't be let in."</p>
+
+<p>"And how came you to be in a first-class carriage?" inquired grandma.
+"I can't stand that; there's expense enough as it is, and your betters
+travel second."</p>
+
+<p>"It wasn't my fault. Mr Ernest bought the tickets like a gentleman
+should (it says in the etiquette book), and I couldn't fight with him
+there and then,&mdash;you're always telling me to be more genteel."</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't want strangers paying anything for my granddaughter."</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't mind in this instance," I interposed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Mr Ernest probably wished to be gentlemanly to Dawn because she has
+been so good to me." Once more I saw the little derisive smile flit
+across the exquisite face, but she said&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; he said that you're looking so well it must be our nursing, and
+that he will try and get grandma to take him in if he falls ill."</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder if he's going to get took bad&mdash;love-sick&mdash;like the other
+blokes," said Andrew.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn cast a murderous glance at him, and covered the remark by making
+a bustle in sitting to her tea, and in retailing minute details of her
+singing lesson.</p>
+
+<p>We retired early, and she produced from the basket in which she
+carried her music a most pretentious box of sweets and various society
+newspapers.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr Ernest said you might like some of these, and I was to have a
+share because I carried them home, though he got the 'bus and brought
+me to the door, so I hadn't to walk a step."</p>
+
+<p>"Good boy! What did he talk about to-day?"</p>
+
+<p>"I asked him about all the actresses he has seen. He's going to give
+me the autographed photos he has of them. You wouldn't think he'd like
+to part with them, but he says he's tired of them all now&mdash;they're
+nearly all married, and are back numbers. Actresses are only thought
+of for a little while, he says."</p>
+
+<p>"That is the natural order of things, and applies to others as well as
+actresses. Pretty young girls are not pretty for long. They should see
+to it that they are plucked by the right fingers while their bloom is
+attractive. The old order falls ill-fittingly on some, but is fair in
+the main,&mdash;we each have our fleeting hour."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but where is there a desirable plucker?" said<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span> the practical
+girl. "There are scarcely any good matches and the few there are have
+so many running after them that I wouldn't give 'em the satisfaction
+of thinking I wanted them too."</p>
+
+<p>True, good matches are few. In these luxurious times the generality of
+girls' ideas of a good match being very advanced&mdash;in short, a man of
+sufficient wealth to keep them in petted idleness. There can be no
+shade of reproach on women for this ambition, it is but one outcome of
+the evolution of civilisation, and is merely a species of common-sense
+on their part; for the ordinary routine of marriage, as instanced by
+the testimony of thousands of women ranked among the comfortably and
+happily married, is so trying that girls do well to try for the most
+comfortable berths ere putting their heads in the noose.</p>
+
+<p>"And Dora, where was he all this time?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he brought Ada Grosvenor home; thought that would spite me. She
+was in town too, and you should just hear her after this. The silly
+rabbit can't open her mouth but she tells you what this man did and
+that one said to her, when all the time it's nothing but some ordinary
+courtesy they ought to extend to even black gins."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="EIGHTEEN" id="EIGHTEEN"></a>EIGHTEEN.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE FOUNDATION OF THE POULTRY INDUSTRY.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Peace was restored in the Clay household through my interviewing Carry
+and offering to teach her music and allow her the use of my piano if
+she would do some of Dawn's work for two days during every second
+week. The next irritation arose from the male portion of the family.</p>
+
+<p>Now, we had all been so vigorously on political entertainment bent,
+that no one had given a thought to Uncle Jake and his doings or
+political opinions, or whether he had any, but it transpired, though a
+"mere man," he had been pursuing his course with as much attention to
+electioneering technique as the most emancipated woman among us.</p>
+
+<p>On the afternoon following Carry's little difference with Mrs Bray,
+Ada Grosvenor called to invite us to accompany her to hear Olliver
+Henderson, the ministerial candidate, who was to address the women at
+the hall first, and the men at Jimmeny's pub. afterwards, and we all
+went. Next morning at breakfast, when we had set to work upon the
+"dosed" porridge, Andrew again catechised his grandma concerning the
+casting of her vote.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm goin' for young Walker of course; as for that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span> other feller!"
+said she cholericly, "I was that sick of his stuttering and muttering,
+an' holdin' his meetin's at Jimmeny's (we all know that that means
+free drinks), an' after waitin' all my life fer it I'm not goin' to
+cast the only vote that maybe I'll live to have, for a feller that
+buys his votes with grog. There's precious little to choose between
+them. They only want the glory of bein' in parliament for theirselves,
+and for the time bein' have rose a flute about the country goin' to
+the dogs and them bein' the people to save it; but once the election's
+over that's all we'll hear of 'em, and though they'd lick our boots
+now, they're so glad to know us, they'd forget all about us then. The
+one who can blow the loudest will get in, and as it must be one it
+might as well be this feller that can talk, an' could keep up his end
+of the stick in parliament, as there's no doubt this talkin' an' blow
+has become such a great trade one has to go to the wall without it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm going for Walker too, because he's something to look at,"
+said Carry.</p>
+
+<p>"The women was goin' to put in <i>clean</i> men an' do strokes," sneered
+Uncle Jake, "an' it turns out they'd vote for the best-lookin'
+man,&mdash;nice state of affairs that is."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! it's all very fine for a man to buck w'en a thing treads on his
+own toes; it would be thought a terrible thing for a woman to vote for
+a good-lookin' man an' pass over merit, but that's what's been done to
+women all the time. The good-lookin' ones got all the honours, whether
+they deserved 'em or not, and those complainin' agen this was jeered
+at an' called 'Shrieking sisters,' but it's a different tune now."</p>
+
+<p>"Uncle, <i>darling</i>, who are you going to vote for?" inquired Andrew.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"For Henderson, of course, an' I reckon all the women here with votes
+ought, too."</p>
+
+<p>"And why, pray?" asked grandma, her eyes flashing a challenge, while
+her faithful guardswomen, Carry and Dawn, suspended work to see how
+the argument ended.</p>
+
+<p>"For the look of the thing to start with. It don't look well to see
+the wimmen of the family goin' agen the men."</p>
+
+<p>"No, it don't look like Nature as men make believe it ought to be, for
+once to see a woman have a opinion of her own, and not the man just
+telling that his opinion wuz hers too, without knowing anythink about
+it, an' women having to hold their tongue for peace' sake because they
+wasn't in a position to help theirselves. An' if it seems so dreadful
+that way, you better come over to our side, as there's more of us than
+you, an' majority ought to rule."</p>
+
+<p>"What did you do at <i>your</i> meeting last night, uncle?" inquired Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"Old Hollis is head of the committee, an' he says the first thing for
+all the committee men to do was to see the women of the men goin' for
+Henderson was the same way," he replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, an' so you thought you could come the Czar on us, did you? an'
+the Government, accordin' to Hollis's make out, is a fool to give
+women a vote; like in your case instead of giving me an' Carry a vote
+each, it ought to have give you three."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mr Sorrel!" said I, "what a joke! Was he really so ignorant as
+that; surely he was joking too?"</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Jake had sufficient wit to take this opportunity of changing his
+tactics.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said, "some people is terrible narrer; for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span> my part I always
+believe in wimmen holdin' their own opinion."</p>
+
+<p>"So long as they didn't run contrary to yours," said grandma with a
+sniff. "There's heaps more like you. Women can always think as much as
+they like, an' they could get up on a platform an' talk till they
+bust, as long as they didn't want the world to be made no better, an'
+they wouldn't be thought unwomanly. It's soon as a woman wants any
+practical good done that she is considered a unwomanly creature."</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Jake was outdone and relapsed into silence.</p>
+
+<p>"An' that's just what I would have expected of old Hollis," continued
+grandma, who seemed to have a knowledge of people's doings rivalling
+that necessary to an efficient police officer. "I'll tell you what he
+is," and the old dame directed her remarks to me. "He is the old chap
+Mrs Bray was sayin' ain't goin' to vote this time because the women
+has got one and the monkeys will be havin' one next. Just what the
+likes of him would say! He's a old crawler whose wife does all the
+work while he walks around an' tells how he killed the bear, an'
+that's the sort of man who's always to be heard sayin' woman is a
+inferior animal that ought to be kep' on a chain as he thinks fit.
+You'll never hear the kind of man like Bray (who is a man an' keeps
+his wife like a princess) sayin' that sort of thing&mdash;it's only the old
+Hollises and such. I'll tell you what old Hollis is. He got out of
+work here a few years back, w'en things was terrible dull, an' so his
+wife had to keep him, and with a child for every year they had been
+married. She rared chickens an' plucked 'em and sold 'em around the
+town, an' went without necessaries w'en she was nursin' to keep him in
+tobacco. That's the kind of man <i>he</i> is, if you want to know. Of
+course, bein'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span> a animal twice her superior, he had to go about suckin'
+a pipe, and of course he couldn't deny hisself anythink. What do you
+think of that?"</p>
+
+<p>"That its pathos lies in its commonness."</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon you didn't hear of him goin' out an' pluckin' the fowls then
+an' sayin', 'Wife, a woman's place w'en she has a young family is in
+the house.' No fear! She worked at this poultry business, an' it was
+surprisin' how she got on&mdash;worked it up to a big poultry farm, till he
+took a hand in doin' a little of the work an' takin' <i>all</i> the credit.
+Now they live by it altogether; an' he was interviewed by the papers a
+little while ago, and it was blew about the reward of enterprise,&mdash;how
+he had started from nothink, an' it never said a word how she started
+an' rared his babies an' done it all, an' does most now, while he
+walks about to illustrate what a superior bein' he is. That's the way
+with all the poultry industry. Women was the pioneers in it, an' now
+it's worked up to be payin', men has took it over and think they have
+done a stroke. Not so far back a man would consider hisself disgraced
+that knew one kind of fowls from another,&mdash;he would be thought a old
+molly-coddle. The women tried to keep a few hens an' the men always
+tried to kill them, an' said they'd ruin the place, an' at the same
+time they hunt them was always cryin' out an' gruntin' that there
+wasn't enough eggs to eat, an' why didn't the hens lay the same as
+they used w'en they was boys. They expected the women to rare them on
+nothink, or at odd moments, the same way as they expect them to do
+everythink else. Now, even the swells is gone hen mad, an' the papers
+are full of poultry bein' a great industry, but it was women started
+it."</p>
+
+<p>Upon strolling abroad that morning we found a huge placard bearing the
+advice&mdash;"Vote for Olliver Henderson,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span> M.L.A., the Local Candidate,"
+decorating the post of the gateway through which we gained the
+highroad.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Jake was credited with this erection, so Andrew made himself
+absent at a time when there was need of his presence, and thereby
+caused a deal of friction in the vicinity of grandma, but with the
+result that by midday Uncle Jake's placard was covered by another,
+reading: "Vote for Leslie Walker, the Opposition Candidate, and Save
+the Country!"</p>
+
+<p>At three o'clock this was obscured by a reappearance of Henderson's
+advertisement, which was the cause of Uncle Jake being too late to
+catch that evening's train with a load of oranges he had been set to
+pack. At the risk of leaving the milking late, Andrew was setting out
+to once more eclipse this by Walker's poster, only that grandma
+adjudicated regarding the matter.</p>
+
+<p>"Jake, you have one side of the gate, an' Andrew you take the other.
+Put up your papers side by side and that will be a good advertisement
+of liberty of opinion; an' Jake, if you haven't got sense to stick to
+this at your time of life, I'm sorry for you; and if you haven't
+Andrew at yours, I'll have to knock it into you with a strap,&mdash;now
+<i>mind</i>! An' if you don't get your work done you'll go to no more
+meetin's."</p>
+
+<p>"Right O! I'll vote for me grandma every time," responded Andrew.</p>
+
+<p>This proved an effective threat, for political meetings had become the
+joy of life to the electors of Noonoon. As a tallow candle if placed
+near can obscure the light of the moon, so the approaching election
+lying at the door shut out all other worldly doings. The
+Russo-Japanese war became a movement of no moment; the season, the
+price of lemons and oranges, the doings of Mrs Tinker,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span> the inability
+of the municipal council to make the roads good, and all other
+happenings, became tame by comparison with politics. They were
+discussed with unabating interest all day and every day, and by
+everyone upon all occasions. Even the children battled out differences
+regarding their respective candidates on the way home from school,
+rival committees worked with unflagging energy, and all buildings and
+fences were plastered with opposing placards. This pitch of enthusiasm
+was reached long before the sitting parliament had dissolved or a
+polling day had been fixed; for this State election was contested with
+unprecedented energy all over the country, but in no electorate was it
+more vigorously and, to its credit, more good-humouredly fought than
+in the fertile old valley of Noonoon.</p>
+
+<p>It was the only chance the unfortunate electors had of bullying the
+lordly M.P.'s and would-be M.P.'s, who, once elected, would fatten on
+the parliamentary screw and pickings without showing any return, and
+right eagerly the electors took their present opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>Zest was added to the contest by both the contestants being wealthy
+men, and with youth as well as means to carry it out on expensive
+lines. They were equally independent of parliament as a means of
+living, and being men of leisure were merely anxious for office to
+raise them from the rank and file of nonentityism. Independent means
+are a great advantage to a member of parliament. The penniless man
+elected on sheer merit, to whom the country could look for good
+things, becomes dependent upon politics for a living, is often
+handicapped by a family who are loth to leave the society and comfort
+to which their bread-winner's official position has raised them, and
+he, held by his affection, is ready to sacrifice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span> all convictions and
+principle to remain in power. To this man politics becomes a desperate
+gamble, and the country's interests can go to the dogs so long as he
+can ensure re-election.</p>
+
+<p>Another advantage in the Noonoon candidates which should have silenced
+the pessimists, who averred there were no good clean men to enter
+parliament, was that these men were both such exemplary citizens,
+morally, physically, and socially, that it seemed a sheer waste of
+goodness that only one could be elected.</p>
+
+<p>The newspapers went politically mad, and those not any hysterical
+country rags, but the big metropolitan dailies, and there was one
+thing to be noted in regard to their statements that seriously needed
+rectifying. What is the purpose of the great dailies but to keep the
+people correctly informed as to the progress of public affairs and
+events of the community at large? Most of the people are too hard at
+work to forage information for themselves, or even to be thoroughly
+cognisant of that collected in the newspapers, and therefore
+parliamentary candidates, if not correct in their figures and
+statements, should be publicly arraigned for perjury. The
+Ministerialists gave one set of figures dealing with national
+financial statistics and the Oppositionists gave widely different. How
+was an elector to act when the platform of the former contained
+nothing but a few false statements and glowing promises, and the
+policy of the latter was only a few counter-acting war-whoops, and
+there was no honesty, common-sense, or matter-of-fact business in the
+campaign from end to end?</p>
+
+<p>In this connection that remote rag, 'The Noonoon Advertiser,' shone as
+a reproach to its great contemporaries. Not by their grandeur and
+acclamations<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span> shall they be judged, but by the quality of their
+fruits.</p>
+
+<p>No bias or spleen seemed to sway the mind of this journal to one side
+or the other. It recognised itself as a newspaper, not as a political
+tout for this party or that, and so kept its head cool and its honour
+bright and shining.</p>
+
+<p>Three days after Leslie Walker's second speech he sent up a woman
+advocate to address <i>the ladies</i> and start the business of
+house-to-house canvassing. This plenipotentiary, a person of rather
+plethoric appearance, made herself extremely popular by assuring every
+second <i>vote-lady</i> she met that she was sure she (the vote-lady) was
+intended by nature for a public speaker. This worked without a hitch
+until the votresses began to tell each other what the great speaker
+had said, when it naturally followed that Mrs Dash, though she thought
+that Mrs Speaker had been discerning to discover this latent
+oratorical talent in herself, immediately had the effervescence taken
+out of her self-complacence on finding that that stupid Mrs Blank had
+been assured of equal ability.</p>
+
+<p>Then the Ministerialists discovered Mrs Speaker's place of abode in
+Sydney, and averred her children ran about so untended as to be
+undistinguishable from aboriginals, and that her housekeeping was
+sending her husband to perdition; and such is the texture of human
+nature unearthed at political crises, that some even went so far as to
+suggest that she was a weakness of Walker's, and sneered at the
+<i>ladies'</i> candidate who had to be "wet-nursed" in his campaign by
+women speakers. Henderson, they averred, had not to do this, but
+fought his own battle.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Grandma Clay; "he mightn't be wet-nursed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span> but he is
+bottled, <i>brandy</i>-bottled, by the men." And this could not be denied.</p>
+
+<p>The women rallied round Walker because he was a temperance candidate,
+whereas the tag-rag rolled up <i>en masse</i> for Henderson, who shouted
+free drinks and carried the publican's flag.</p>
+
+<p>Each candidate, while praising his opponent, wound up with <i>but</i>&mdash;and
+after that conjunction spoke most damningly of his policy.</p>
+
+<p>Underneath the ostensible war-whoops many private and personal
+cross-fires were at work to intensify the contest. The people on the
+land quite naturally had a grudge against the railway folk, who only
+had to work eight hours per day for more than a farmer could make in
+sixteen; further, the perquisites of the railway employ&eacute;s were
+inconceivable. By an unwritten but nevertheless imperative etiquette,
+farmers had to render them tribute in the form of a portion of
+whatever fruit or vegetables were consigned at Noonoon, and the
+townspeople also had little to say in favour of them, averring they
+were a floating population who had no interest in the welfare of the
+town in which they resided, were bad customers&mdash;patronising the
+publicans more than the storekeepers, and by means of their connection
+with the railway were able to buy their meat and other necessaries
+where they listed&mdash;where it was cheapest, and frequently this was
+otherwhere than Noonoon, and yet they were in such numbers that they
+could rule the political market.</p>
+
+<p>Then the men on the Ministerial side were nearly gangrene with
+disgust, because, as one put it, "nearly all Walker's men were women,"
+and rallied round him thick and strong, and with a thoroughness and
+energy worthy of their recent emancipation.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Dawn's next day for Sydney fell on another night when Leslie Walker
+was speaking, but she and I did not attend this meeting, the family
+being represented on this occasion by Andrew, and we went to bed and
+discussed the Sydney trip while waiting for his return.</p>
+
+<p>Ernest Breslaw, it appeared, had again had urgent business in Sydney
+that day.</p>
+
+<p>"Dawn," I said, "this is somewhat suspicious. Are you sure you are not
+flirting with Ernest? I can't have his wings singed; I think too much
+of him, and shall have to warn him that you are booked for 'Dora'
+Eweword." This was said experimentally, for to do Dawn justice, though
+she had every temptation, she had nothing of the flirt in her
+composition.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't go and say to him, 'Don't you fall in love with me,'" said
+Dawn contentiously.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you sure he has never in any way attempted to pay you a lover's
+attentions?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's this way," she said confidentially&mdash;"you won't think me
+conceited if I tell you everything straight? There have been two or
+three men in love with me, and I was always able to see it straight
+away, long before <i>they</i> knew; but with Ernest, sometimes he seems to
+be like they were, and then I'm afraid he's not,&mdash;at least not
+<i>afraid</i>&mdash;I don't care a hang, only I wonder does he think he can
+flirt with me, when he is so nice and just waltzes round the subject
+without coming up to it?"</p>
+
+<p>Ah! ha! In that <i>afraid</i>, which she sought to recover, the young lady
+betrayed that her affections were in danger of leaving her and
+betaking themselves to a new ruler, and this sudden inability to see
+through another's state<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span> of mind towards her was a further sign that
+they were not secure.</p>
+
+<p>We are very clear of vision as to the affection tendered us, so long
+as we remain unmoved, but once our feelings are stirred, their
+palpitating fears so smear our sight that it becomes unreliable.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, it does not matter to you," I said; "you are not likely to
+think of him, he's so unattractive, but I must take care that he does
+not grow fond of you. If I see any danger of it, I'll tell him
+something about you that will nip his affections in the bud. You won't
+mind me doing that&mdash;just some little thing that won't hurt you, but
+will save him unnecessary pain?" And to this she replied with seeming
+indifference&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I wish you'd tell Dora Eweword something that would shoo him off that
+he'd never come back, and then I would have seen the last of him,
+which would be a treat."</p>
+
+<p>After this we were silent, and I thought she had gone to sleep, for
+there was no sound until Andrew came tumbling up the stairs leading
+from his room.</p>
+
+<p>"I say!" he called, "have you got any more of that toothache stuff
+from the dentist?"</p>
+
+<p>"Come along," I answered, "I'll put some in for you."</p>
+
+<p>"I think it's the oranges that's doin' it, I eat nearly eight dozen
+to-day."</p>
+
+<p>"Enough to give you the pip; you ought to slack off a little," I said,
+extending him the courtesy of his own vernacular.</p>
+
+<p>"I bet I'd vote for Henderson after all if I could," he continued, in
+referring to the meeting, "only I'll gammon I wouldn't just to nark
+Uncle Jake. Henderson is the men's man, that other bloke belongs to
+wimmen.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span> You should have heard 'em to-night! The fellers behind was
+tip-top, and made such a noise at last that Walker could only talk to
+the wimmen in the front. We gave him slops because he gets wimmen up
+to speak for him, an' we can't give <i>them</i> gyp. One man asked him was
+he in favour of ring-barkin' thistles, and another wanted to know was
+he in favour of puttin' a tax on caterpillars. He thinks no end of
+himself, because he's one of these Johnnies the wimmen always runs
+after," gravely explained Andrew, aged sixteen.</p>
+
+<p>"We cock-a-doodled and pip-pipped till you couldn't hear your ears.
+Half couldn't get in, they was climbed up an' hangin' in the
+windows&mdash;little girls too along with the boys. I suppose now that
+they're as near got a vote as we have, they'll be poked everywhere
+just the same as if they had as good a right as us," said the boy with
+the despondence of one to whom all is lost.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a terrible thing they can't be made stay at home out of all the
+fun like boys think they ought to be. No mistake the woman having a
+vote is a terrible nark to the men&mdash;almost too much for 'em to bear,"
+said Dawn, whom I had thought asleep.</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon I'm goin' to every meetin', they're all right fun,"
+continued Andrew. "At the both committee room they're givin' out
+tickets with the men's names on, an' whoever likes can get them an'
+wear 'em in their hats. Me an' Jack Bray went to this Johnny Walker's
+rooms and gammoned we was for him, an' got a dozen tickets, an' when
+we got outside tore 'em to smithereens; that's what we'll do all the
+time."</p>
+
+<p>After this Andrew disappeared down the stairs, spilling grease, and
+being admonished by Dawn as he went as the clumsiest creature she had
+ever seen.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Silence reigned between us for some time, and in listening to the
+trains I had forgotten the girl till her voice came across the room.</p>
+
+<p>"I say, don't tell that Ernest anything not nice about me, will you?
+I'll take care not to flirt with him, and I wouldn't like him to think
+me not nice. I wouldn't care about any one else a scrap, but he's such
+a great friend of yours, and as I hope to be with you a lot, it would
+be awkward; and you know he has <i>said</i> nothing, it might only be my
+conceit to think he's going the way of other men. He took me to
+afternoon tea to-day at such a lovely place,&mdash;he said he wanted to be
+good to your friends, that's why he is nice to me. I don't suppose he
+ever thinks of me at all any other way," she said with the despondence
+of love.</p>
+
+<p>So this had been chasing sleep from Beauty's eyes, as such trifles
+have a knack of doing!</p>
+
+<p>"Very likely," I said complacently, and smiled to myself. The only
+thing to be discovered now was if the young athlete's emotions were at
+the same ebb, and then what was there against plain sailing to the
+happy port where honeymoons are spent?</p>
+
+<p>Fortune favours the persevering, and next afternoon an opportunity
+occurred for procuring the desired knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Ernest and Ada Grosvenor came in together, and to the casual observer
+seemed much engrossed with each other, but I noticed that Dawn could
+not speak or move, but a pair of quick dark eyes caught every detail.
+So far so good, but it was necessary for Dawn to think the prize just
+a little farther out of reach than it was to make it attractive to her
+disposition, so I set about attaining this end by a very simple
+method.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Miss Grosvenor had called to invite us to a meeting she had convened,
+to listen to a public address by a lady who was going to head a
+deputation to Walker afterwards, and we had decided to go. Mrs Bray's
+husband also dropped in, and to my surprise proved not the hen-pecked
+nonentity one would expect after hearing his wife's aggressive
+diatribes, but a stalwart man of six feet, with a comely face
+bespeaking solid determination in every line. And when one comes to
+think of it, it is not the big blustering man or woman that rules, but
+the quiet, apparently inane specimens that look so meek that they are
+held up as models of propriety and gentleness. Miss Grosvenor
+immediately nailed him for her meeting, and politics being the only
+subject discussed, he aired his particular bug. This was his disgust
+at the top-heaviness of the Labour party's demands, and the railway
+people's easy times as compared with that of the farmer.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe," said he, "in every man, if he can, working only eight
+hours a-day&mdash;though I have to work sixteen myself for precious little
+return, but these fellows are running the country to blazes. The rules
+of supply and demand must sway the labour or any other market all the
+world over, and they'll have to see that and haul in their sails."</p>
+
+<p>"Who are you going to vote for?" inquired Andrew.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm goin' for Henderson, and the missus for Walker."</p>
+
+<p>"It's a wonder you don't compel Mrs Bray to vote for your man."</p>
+
+<p>"No fear; I'm pleased she's taken the opposite chap, just to
+illustrate my opinion on what liberty of opinion should be; but I
+won't deny," he concluded, with a humorous smile, "that I mightn't be
+so pleased with her going against me if I was set on either of them,
+but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span> as it is neither are worth a vote, so that I'm pretty well
+sitting on a rail myself."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought your first announcement almost too liberal to be true,"
+laughed Miss Grosvenor.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I will say that Mr Bray is a man does treat his women proper, and
+give 'em liberty," said grandma.</p>
+
+<p>"An' a nice way they use it," sniffed Carry <i>sotto voce</i>.</p>
+
+<p>As we set out to the meeting Miss Grosvenor mentioned to me that she
+was endeavouring to find suitable speakers to address her association,
+and asked did I know of any one. Here was an opening for a thrust in
+the game of parry I was setting on foot between Dawn and Ernest
+Breslaw.</p>
+
+<p>"Ask my friend Mr Ernest to deliver an address: 'Women in Politics,'"
+I said, "that is his particular subject. He is a most fluent speaker,
+and loves speaking in public, nothing will delight him more."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll ask him at once," said she.</p>
+
+<p>This was as foundationless a fairy-tale as was ever spun, for Ernest
+could not say two words in public upon any occasion. That he was
+usually tendered a dinner and was called upon to make a speech, he
+considered the drawback of wresting any athletic honours. Whether
+women were in politics or the wash-house was a sociological abstrusity
+beyond his line of thought, and not though it cost him all his fortune
+to refuse could he have decently addressed any association even on
+beloved sporting matters. Hence his consternation when Miss Grosvenor
+approached him. At first he was nonplussed, and next thing, taking it
+as a joke on my part, was highly amused. Miss Grosvenor, on her side,
+thought he was joking, with the result that there was the liveliest
+and most laughable conversation between them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Dawn did not know the reason of it. She could only see that Ernest and
+Miss Grosvenor were engrossed, and at first curious, a little later
+she was annoyed with the former.</p>
+
+<p>"I think," she whispered to me, "it's Mr Ernest you'll have to see
+doesn't flirt with every girl he comes across."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps he isn't flirting," I coolly replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Not <i>now</i>, perhaps," she said pointedly; "perhaps he's in earnest
+with one and practises with others."</p>
+
+<p>Arrived at the hall, we found the women swarming around Walker like
+bees.</p>
+
+<p>"Good Lord! Look what Les. has let himself in for," laughed Ernest; "I
+wouldn't stand in his shoes for a tenner."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on! Surely you too are partial to ladies?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But there must be reason in everythink," I quoted. He laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; and reason in this sort of thing to suit my taste would be a
+small medium. But what a fine old sport the old dame Clay would have
+made&mdash;no danger of her not standing up to a mauling or baulking at any
+of her fences, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>Dawn would not look at Ernest after the meeting and deputation came to
+an end, but walked home with "Dora" Eweword, laughing and talking in
+ostentatious enjoyment; while Ernest and the Grosvenor girl were none
+the less entertained.</p>
+
+<p>"'Pon my soul, I couldn't make a speech to save my life," he
+reiterated. "My friend only laid you on for a lark, did you not?" he
+said, turning to me, whom he gallantly insisted upon supporting on his
+arm&mdash;that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span> splendid arm in which the muscles could expand till they
+were like iron bands.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you believe him, Miss Grosvenor," I replied; "he's a born
+orator, but is unaccountably lazy and vain, and only wants to be
+pressed; insist upon his speaking, he's longing to do so." And then
+his merry protesting laugh, and the girl's equally happy, rang out on
+the crisp starlight air, as they went over and over the same ground.</p>
+
+<p>As we neared Clay's I suggested that he should see Miss Grosvenor
+home, while I attached myself to Dawn and "Dora"; and I invited him to
+come and sing some songs with us afterwards, for the night was yet
+young.</p>
+
+<p>To this he agreed, and supposed to be with the other young couple, I
+slipped behind, and could hear their conversation as they progressed.</p>
+
+<p>"You're not struck on that red-headed mug, are you?" said Eweword, for
+general though political talk had become, there was still another
+branch of politics more vitally interesting to some of the electors.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not the style to be struck on a fellow that doesn't care for me."</p>
+
+<p>"But he does!"</p>
+
+<p>"Looks like it, doesn't it?" she said sarcastically.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it does, or what would he be hanging around here so long for?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps to see Ada Grosvenor; I suppose she'd have him, red hair and
+all."</p>
+
+<p>"Pooh! he never goes there; but he comes to your place though, too
+deuced often for my pleasure."</p>
+
+<p>"He comes to see the boarder&mdash;he's a great friend of hers."</p>
+
+<p>"Humph! that's all in my eye. He'd be a long time<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span> coming to see her
+if you weren't there, if she was twice as great a friend. What sort of
+an old party is she? Must have some means."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, lovely!"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose the red-headed mug thinks so too, as she is touting for
+him."</p>
+
+<p>"For him and Ada Grosvenor."</p>
+
+<p>"Have it that way if you like it, but you know what I mean all right."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, don't you! I say, Dawn, just stop out here a moment will you? I
+want to tell you something else, I mean."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, tell it to me some other time," said she, "it's too beastly cold
+to stay out another minute. Come and tell it to me while we are having
+supper round the fire."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd have a pretty show of telling it there. I don't want it put in
+the 'Noonoon Advertiser,' but that's what I'll have to do if you won't
+give me a chance. If you keep pretending you don't get my letters,
+I'll write all that I put in them to your grandma, and tell her to
+tell you," he said jokingly; but the girl took him up shortly.</p>
+
+<p>"If you dare do that," said she, aroused from her indifference, "I'd
+never speak to you again the longest day I live, so you needn't think
+you'll get over me that way. You'd better tell Uncle Jake and Andrew
+too while you're about it, and Dora Cowper might be vexed if you don't
+tell her."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I bet you'd listen to what the red-headed mug said quick
+enough," replied "Dora" Eweword in an injured tone.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"The red-headed mug, as you call him&mdash;and his hair isn't much redder
+than yours, and is twice as nice," she retaliated, "he would be a
+gentleman anyhow, and not a bear with a scalded head."</p>
+
+<p>By this time they had reached the gate, and Dawn was carelessly
+inviting him to enter, but he declined in rather a crestfallen tone.</p>
+
+<p>"Better invite red-head, not me, if you won't listen to what I say,
+and pretend you never received my letters."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you for the good advice. I hope he'll accept my invitation,
+because he is always pleasant and agreeable," she retorted.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="NINETEEN" id="NINETEEN"></a>NINETEEN.</h2>
+
+<h3>AN OPPORTUNELY INOPPORTUNE DOUCHE.</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was just as well that "Dora" Eweword had been too chopfallen to
+come in, for we found the place in what grandma termed "a uproar."</p>
+
+<p>As we had gone out Mrs Bray had arrived to relate her speculations in
+regard to Mrs Rooney-Molyneux. Mrs Bray did not live a great distance
+from the latter's cottage, and as she had not seen her about during
+the day, wondered had she come to her travail.</p>
+
+<p>Andrew decided the matter when he came home by relating what he had
+heard when passing the cottage; and he supplemented the statement by
+the deplorable information that "the old bloke is up at Jimmeny's
+tryin' if he can get a free drink."</p>
+
+<p>"I must go to her," said grandma, rising in haste.</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't if I was you," said Mrs Bray. "You don't never get no
+thanks for nothing like that, and might get yourself into a mess; I
+believe in leaving people to manage their own affairs."</p>
+
+<p>Carry sniffed in the background.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll risk all that," said grandma. "For shame's sake an' the sake of
+me daughters, an' every other woman, I couldn't leave one of me sex in
+that predicament."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, some people is wonderful strong in the nerve that way,"
+said Mrs Bray, and Carry interjected in an aside&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"And others are mighty strong in the nerve of selfishness."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course nothing would give me greater pleasure than to go,"
+continued Mrs Bray, "but I would be of no use. I'm so pitiful,
+sensitive, and nervous that way."</p>
+
+<p>"It's a grand thing, then, that some are hard and not so sensitive, or
+people could die and no one would help 'em," said Carry, no longer
+able to contain her measure of Mrs Bray.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Jake had the sulky in readiness, and grandma with a collection
+of requisites appeared with a great old shawl about her, Irish
+fashion.</p>
+
+<p>"Come you, Dawn, I might want your help, I'm not as strong as I was
+once; and Andrew, you come too, you'll do to send for the doctor; an'
+who'll take care of the pony?"</p>
+
+<p>I volunteered, and though a rotten stick to depend on, was accepted,
+and we three women rode in the sulky while Andrew ran behind. Having
+arrived at the little cottage half-way between Clay's and town, we
+found it was too sadly true that the poor little woman was alone in
+her trouble, and worse, she had not had the means to prepare for it,
+while most ghastly of all, there was no trace of her having had any
+nourishment that day.</p>
+
+<p>These are the sad cases of poverty, when the helpless victim is not of
+the calibre which can beg, and suffers an empty larder in silence and
+behind an appearance of respectability.</p>
+
+<p>The capable old grandmother had prepared herself for this possibility,
+and from under her capacious shawl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span> produced a bottle of broth which
+she set about warming. She may not have been at first-hand acquainted
+with the few silk-wrapped lives run according to the methods scheduled
+in first-class etiquette books, but she had a very resourceful and
+far-seeing grip of that style of existence into which, regardless of
+inclination or capability, the great majority are forced by
+domineering circumstance; and being competent to grapple with its
+emergencies, she took hold of this case without humbug and with the
+fortitude and skill of a Japanese general.</p>
+
+<p>As though the main trouble were not enough, the poor little wife was
+further smitten with the two-edged mental anguish which is the
+experience of sensitive women whose husbands neglect them at this
+crisis of the maternal gethsemane. Doctor Smalley, who soon appeared
+after receiving Andrew's message, was not sufficiently finely strung
+to fully estimate the evil effect of Rooney-Molyneux's behaviour at
+this juncture; but not so the fine old woman of the ranks, with her
+quick perceptions and high and sensitive sentiment regarding the
+bed-rock relations of life. Calling the doctor out during an interval
+she discussed the matter within my hearing.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor little thing, she's just heart-broke with the way her husband's
+carryin' on. I wish I could deliver him up to Mrs Bray to scald; he's
+one of 'em deserves it, pure an' simple! If Jim Clay had forsook me
+an' demeaned me like this I would have died, but he was always
+tenderer than a mother. Somethink will have to be done. I'll send
+Andrew to Jimmeny's with the sulky to get him; he can get Danby to
+help him if he can't manage him hisself, and take the old varmint down
+to my place and keep him there secure. Tell Jake there it's got to be
+done, an' I'll make up a yarn to pacify the poor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span> thing;" and
+returning to her patient, to the old dame's credit, truthful though
+she was, I heard her say&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Your husband's been fidgeting me, an' I never can stand any one but
+the doctor about at these times, so I bundled him off down to stay
+with Jake, and gave him strict instructions not to poke his nose back
+here till he's sent for."</p>
+
+<p>What diplomat could have made it more kindly tactful than that?</p>
+
+<p>"Quite right too," said the doctor, upholding her. "When I see it's
+going to be a good case like this, I always banish the man too."</p>
+
+<p>"But I could have seen him, and the poor fellow I'm sure is
+overwhelmed with anxiety," said the hapless little martyr in the brave
+make-believe that is a compulsory science with most women.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, <i>we</i> ain't so anxious about him as we are about you," said the
+valiant old woman. "You're the chief person now. He ain't no
+consideration at all, an' can go an' bag his head for all we care,
+while we get you out of this fix."</p>
+
+<p>I sat upon the verandah until Andrew passed, taking home with him the
+noble Rooney-Molyneux, lordly scion of an ancient and doubtless effete
+house, and then the doctor banished Dawn from the house, giving her
+into my charge, with instructions to take her home and calm her down.</p>
+
+<p>Had she been the heroine of a romance she would have been a born
+nurse. Without any training or experience she could have surpassed
+Florence Nightingale, but, alas! she was merely an everyday girl in
+real life, and this being her first actual experience of the tragedy
+of birth, and the terror of it being intensified and aggravated by the
+pitiable surrounding circumstances, she was beside<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span> herself. She clung
+to me, choked with a flood of tears, and palpitating in an unbearable
+tumult of emotion.</p>
+
+<p>This case, so pathetically ordinary that most of us are debased by
+acquaintance with similar, to this girl was fresh, and striking her in
+all its inexcusable barbarity without any extenuating gloze, made her
+furious with pained and righteous indignation.</p>
+
+<p>I led her about by devious ways that her heart might cool ere we
+reached Clay's.</p>
+
+<p>The cloudless, breezeless night, though not yet severely cold, was
+crisp with the purity of frost and sweet with the exquisite scent of
+flowering loquats. The only sounds breaking its stillness were the
+trains passing across the long viaduct approaching the bridge, and the
+rumble of the vehicles as they ground their homeward way along the
+stony road, their lights flashing as they passed, and snatches of the
+occupants' conversation reaching us where we walked on a path beside
+the main thoroughfare. The heavens were a spangled glory, and the dark
+sleeping lands gave forth a fresh, pleasant odour. Man provided the
+only discordant note; but for the jarring of his misdoings there would
+have been perfect peace.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, the hot young heart that raged by my side! I too had forded the
+cruel torrent of facts that was torturing her mind; I knew; I
+understood. By-and-by she would arrive at my phase and have somewhat
+of my calmness, but to tell her so would merely have been the
+preaching so deservedly and naturally abhorred by the young, and
+except for holding her hand in a tight clasp, I was apparently
+unresponsive.</p>
+
+<p>As she grew quieter I steered for home, and eventually we arrived at
+the door of the kitchen and found there Jake, Andrew, and the
+Rooney-Molyneux&mdash;a small man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span> with a large beard and the type of
+aristocratic face furnished with a long protruding nose and a narrow
+retreating forehead. Carry, up aloft like the angels, could be heard
+practising on my piano, and the soiled utensils scattered on the table
+illustrated that the gentlemen had had refreshments.</p>
+
+<p>It being Dawn's week in the kitchen, she set about collecting the cups
+in the wash-up dish, and presently some maudlin expression of
+sentiment on the part of the Rooney-Molyneux reopened the vials of her
+indignation.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm naturally anxious that it may be a son," he drivelled, "as there
+are so few male representatives of the old name now."</p>
+
+<p>"And the sooner there's none the better. There is no excuse for the
+likes of you being alive. I'd like to assist in the extermination of
+your family by putting you in the boiling copper on washing day. That
+would give you a taste of your deserts," raged the girl.</p>
+
+<p>She was speaking without restraint in the light of the high demands of
+crude, impetuous, merciless youth. I had once felt as she did, but now
+I could see the cruel train of conditions behind certain characters
+forcing them into different positions, and in place of Dawn's
+wholesome, justifiable, hot-headed rage against the likes of
+Rooney-hyphen, I felt for him a contempt so immeasurable that it
+almost toppled over and became pity.</p>
+
+<p>Seeing the little sense of responsibility that is inculcated regarding
+the laws of being, instead of being shocked at the familiarity of the
+Rooney-Molyneux type of husband and father, I gave myself up to
+agreeable surprise owing to the large number of noble and worthy
+parents I had discovered.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The world does soil our minds and we soil it&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Time brings the tolerance that hides the truth,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>but Dawn had not yet sunk to the apathy engendered by experience and
+familiarity. She adjudged the case on its merits, as it would be
+handled by an administrator of the law&mdash;the common law we all must
+keep. She did not imagine a network of exculpatory conditions or go
+squinting round corners to draw it into line as an act for which
+circumstances rather than the culprit were responsible; she gazed
+straight and honestly and saw a crime.</p>
+
+<p>"Dawn, you shameless hussy, you ought to be ashamed of yourself," said
+her uncle.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, I'm well aware that any girl who says the straight truth
+about the things that concern them most in life, <i>ought</i> to be ashamed
+of herself. They should hold their tongues except to flatter the men
+who trample them in the dust,&mdash;that's the proper and <i>womanly</i>
+attitude for a girl, I know," she said desperately.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure this is uncalled for," simpered the hero of the act, rising
+and showing signs of looking for his hat.</p>
+
+<p>"You'd better run and tell your wife you've been insulted, poor little
+dear!" said Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"Look!" said Andrew to me uneasily, "tell Dawn to dry up, will you;
+she'll take no notice of me, an' if that feller goes home actin' the
+goat I'll get the blame, an' he ain't drunk enough to be shut up. Blow
+him, I say!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure," said Mr Rooney-Molyneux, who apparently had various things
+mixed with politics, "that some men, though the women have taken the
+votes and their manhood, still have some rights; bless me, it <i>must</i>
+be acknowledged they have some rights in creation!"</p>
+
+<p>Here he made an ineffectual grab for his hat and a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span> sprawling plunge
+in the direction of the door, saying, "I've never been so insulted!"</p>
+
+<p>"Blow you! Sit down, Mr Mooney-Rollyno, or whatever you are," said
+Andrew, "you've got to stay here; and Dawn, hold your mag! You'd give
+any one the pip with your infernal gab."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure it must be conceded that men have some rights?" Mr
+Rooney-Molyneux appealed to me. I was the most responsible person
+present, Uncle Jake did not count, the other three were children, and
+so it behoved me to take a grip of the situation.</p>
+
+<p>"Rights in creation! I should rather think so! In creation men have
+the rights, or perhaps duties, of gods&mdash;to protect, to nurture, to
+guard and to love, and when as a majority men rise to them we shall be
+a great people, but for the present the only rights many of them wrest
+and assert by mere superior brute force are those of bullies and
+selfish cowards. Sit down immediately!"</p>
+
+<p>He sat without delay.</p>
+
+<p>"All that Dawn says of you is deserved. The least you can do now to
+repair matters is to swallow your pill noiselessly and give no further
+trouble until you are called upon to obstruct the way again in
+semblance of discharging responsibilities of which a cat would be
+twice as capable."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Dawn, "if you dare to talk of going home to worry your
+wife I'll throw this dish of water right on you, and when I come to
+think of things, I feel like throwing a hot one on every man."</p>
+
+<p>As she said this she swirled her dishcloth to clean the bowl, and
+turning to toss the water into the drain outside the door, confronted
+Ernest Breslaw.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Quite two hours had elapsed since he had parted from us to conduct
+Miss Grosvenor to her home, where he had been long delayed in argument
+concerning whether he could or could not address a public meeting. I
+discovered later that an opportunity to gracefully take his leave from
+Grosvenor's had not occurred earlier, and that he had quite
+relinquished hope of calling at Clay's that night, but to his
+surprise, seeing the place lighted as he was passing, he came towards
+the kitchen door.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn was doubtless piqued that he should have spent so much time with
+Miss Grosvenor, which, considering his previous attentions to her, and
+the rules of the game as observed in this stratum of society, gave him
+the semblance of flirting&mdash;perfidious action, worthy of the miscreant
+man in the beginning of a career which at a maturer stage should cover
+cruelty and cowardice equalling that of Rooney-Molyneux! Dawn lacked
+restraint in her emotional outbursts; the poor girl's state of
+nervousness bordered on hysteria; the water was nearly out of her hand
+in any case, and with a smack of that irritated divergence from lawful
+and decorous conduct of which the sanest of us are at times the
+victim, she pitched the dish of greasy, warm water fairly on the
+immaculate young athlete, accompanying the action with the
+ejaculation&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"That's what you deserve, too!"</p>
+
+<p>"I demand&mdash;" he exclaimed, but further utterance was drowned by a
+hearty guffaw from Andrew which fully confirmed the outrageous insult.</p>
+
+<p>"Just what I should expect of you," sneered Uncle Jake, while Mr
+Rooney-Molyneux, his attention thus diverted from his own affairs,
+gazed in watery-eyed surprise at a second victim of the retributive
+Dawn.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well, that's about what you'd expect from a <i>thing earning her
+living</i>, but never of a young lady in a <i>good</i> home of her own and
+living with <i>the mother of a family</i>," said Carry, appearing in time
+to witness the accident.</p>
+
+<p>I said nothing to the white-faced girl, for there was more urgent work
+to be done in repairing the damage. Hurrying through the house, and
+reefing my skirts on the naked rose-bushes under Miss Flipp's window,
+where the dead girl's skirts had caught as she went out to die, I
+gained a point intercepting Ernest as he strode along the path leading
+to the bridge.</p>
+
+<p>"Ernest!"</p>
+
+<p>"You must excuse me to-night," he said, showing that my intervention
+was most unwelcome.</p>
+
+<p>"Ernest, if you have any friendship for me, stop. I must speak to you,
+and I'm not feeling able for much more to-night."</p>
+
+<p>Thus did I make a lever of my invalidism, and in the gentleness of his
+strength he submitted to be detained.</p>
+
+<p>Some men would have covered their annoyance with humorous satire, but
+Ernest was not furnished with this weapon. He only had physical
+strength, and that could not avail him in such an instance. I placed
+my hand on his arm, ostensibly for support, but in reality to be sure
+of his detention, and found that he was saturated. Not a pleasant
+experience on a frosty night, but there was no danger of it proving
+deleterious to one in his present state of excitement. Being one of
+those natures whose emotions, though not subtle, make up for this
+deficiency in wholesome thoroughness, he was furious with the rage of
+heated youth not given to spending itself on every adventitious excuse
+for annoyance, and debarred by condi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span>tions from any sort of
+retaliation. In addition to being bitterly wounded, his sporting
+instinct was bruised, and he chafed under the unfairness of the blow.</p>
+
+<p>The beauty of the cloudless, breezeless night had been supplemented by
+a lop-sided moon, risen sufficiently to show the exquisite mists
+hanging like great swathes of white gossamer in the hollows, and to
+cast the shadows of the buildings and trees in the silent river, at
+this time of the year looking so cold and treacherous in its
+rippleless flow. The wet grass was stiffening with frost, and the only
+sounds disturbing the chillier purity of advancing night were the
+erratic bell at the bridge and the far-off rumble of a train on the
+mountain-side. Man still afforded the discordant note, and the only
+heat in the surroundings was that in the burning young heart that
+raged by my side.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, youth! youth! You must each look back and see for yourselves, in
+the aft-light cast by later experience, the mountains and fiery
+ordeals you made for yourselves out of mole-hills in the matter of
+heart-break. We, whose hair is white, cannot help you, though we have
+gone before and know so well the cruel stretches on the road you
+travel.</p>
+
+<p>Ernest waited for me to take the initiative, and as everything that
+rose to my lips seemed banal, we stood awkwardly silent till he was
+forced into saying&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid you are overdoing yourself. Can I not help you to your
+room? You will be ill."</p>
+
+<p>"The only thing that would overdo me is that you should be upset about
+this. It must not make any difference."</p>
+
+<p>"Difference between you and me?&mdash;nothing short of an earthquake could
+do that," he replied.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I mean with Dawn. It must not make any difference with her. It was
+only a freak."</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly; I would be a long time retaliating upon a <i>lady</i>, no
+matter what she did to me; but when&mdash;when&mdash;" (he could not bring
+himself to name it, it struck him as so disgraceful)&mdash;"she intimates
+to me, as plainly as was done to-night, that she disapproves of my
+presence in her house, well, a fellow would want pole-axing if he
+hadn't pride to take a hint like that."</p>
+
+<p>"She did not mean anything. She will be more hurt than you are."</p>
+
+<p>"Mean anything! Had it been a joke I could have managed to endure it,
+or an accident about which she would have worried, I would have been
+amused, but it was deliberate; and if it had been <i>clean</i> water&mdash;but
+ugh! it was greasy slop-water, to make it as bad as it could be; and
+if a man had done it&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The muscles of his arm expanded under my interested touch as he made a
+fist of the strong brown hand.</p>
+
+<p>"But being a girl I can only put up with it," he said with the
+helplessness of the athlete in dealing with such a delinquent.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you hear what she said too? Great Scott! it is not as though I
+had done her any harm! I merely came here to see a friend, and made
+myself agreeable because you said she was good to you; and, dear me!"
+His voice broke with the fervour of his perturbation. He had been
+wounded to the core of his manly <i>amour propre</i>; and to state that he
+was not more than twenty-five, gives a better idea of his state of
+mind than could any amount of laborious diagnosis.</p>
+
+<p>"What can I have done?" he further ejaculated. "Can some one have told
+her falsely that I'm a cad<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span> in any way? She might have waited until
+she proved it. <i>I</i> would not have believed bad any one spoken badly of
+<i>her</i>." (Here an inadvertent confession of the growing affection he
+felt for her.) "Even if I were deserving of such ignominy, it was none
+of her business. I only came to see you,&mdash;she had nothing to do with
+me."</p>
+
+<p>Then I took hold of this splendidly muscular young creature wounded to
+the quick. I determinedly usurped a mother's privilege in regard to
+the situation, and glancing back over my barren life I would that I
+had been mother of just such a son. What a kingdom 'twould have been;
+and, in the order of things, being forced to surrender him to
+another's keeping, I could not have chosen a better or more suitable
+than Dawn. Entering his principality to reign as queen, while his
+manhood was yet an unsacked stronghold, she was of the character and
+determination to steer him in the way of uprightness to the end.</p>
+
+<p>Wistfulness upsprung as I reviewed my empty life, but rude reality
+suddenly uprose and obliterated ideality. It put on the scroll a
+picture of motherhood, and mother-love wantonly squandered, trodden in
+the mire, and, instead of being recognised as a kingdom, treated only
+as a weakness, and traded upon to enslave women. I turned with a sigh,
+and we walked round a corner of the garden where, in one recent
+instance, appallingly common, a poor frail woman had crept out in the
+dead of night to pay alone the penalty of a crime incurred by two&mdash;one
+foolish and weak, the other murderously selfishly a coward.</p>
+
+<p>I addressed Ernest Breslaw regarding the painful effect this tragedy
+had produced on the mind of Dawn, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span> how it had been further
+overstrung by the later one, and concluded&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Had I expressed my inward feelings in outward actions at Dawn's age,
+and being armed with a dish of water, to have thrown it on the nearest
+individual would have been a very mild ebullition; but I set my teeth
+against outward expression and let it fester in my heart, while the
+beauty of Dawn's disposition is that her feelings all come out. She
+has disgraced herself by making outward demonstration of what many
+inwardly feel; but understanding what I have put before you, you must
+not hold the girl responsible for her action."</p>
+
+<p>With masculine simplicity he was unable to comprehend the complexity
+of feminine emotions engendered by the exigencies of the more
+artificial and suppressed conditions of life as forced upon women.</p>
+
+<p>"I understand about old Rooney; I feel as disgusted with him as any
+one does, but <i>I</i> am not going to emulate him. I'd jolly well cut my
+throat first; and if I could lay my hand on the snake at the root of
+the drowning case, I'd make one to roast him alive! What made Miss
+Dawn confound me with that sort?"</p>
+
+<p>"She doesn't for an instant do so. On the contrary, she would be the
+first to repudiate such a suggestion."</p>
+
+<p>"Good Lord! then why did she throw that stuff on me? It was only fit
+for a criminal."</p>
+
+<p>"Can you not grasp that she was irritated beyond endurance with the
+unwholesomeness of the whole system of life in relation to women, and
+that for the moment you appeared as one of the army of oppressors?"</p>
+
+<p>"But that isn't fair! <i>I</i> know enough of women&mdash;some women&mdash;to make
+one shudder with repulsion; but there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span> would be no sense or justice in
+venting my disgust on you or the other good ones," he contended.</p>
+
+<p>"Quite so; but our moral laws are such that some issues are more
+repulsive to a woman than a man, and you must admit there are heavy
+arguments could be brought in extenuation of Dawn's attitude of mind
+when the water slipped out of her hand."</p>
+
+<p>"There's no doubt women do have to swallow a lot," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't feel so angry on account of the impetuous Dawn's act now,
+do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"It doesn't look so bad in the teeth of your argument, and if she
+would only say something to explain, I won't mind; but otherwise I'll
+have sense to make myself scarce in this neighbourhood."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid her vanity will be too wounded for her to give in."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll make it as easy for her as I can; but, good Lord! I can't go to
+her and apologise because she threw dirty water on me."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'll bid you good-night. I must run in to Dawn. I expect she is
+sobbing her heart out by this, and biting her pretty curled lips to
+relieve her feelings,&mdash;her lips that were meant for kisses, not cruel
+usage."</p>
+
+<p>"Good heavens! Do you really think she'll feel like that?" he asked in
+astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm certain."</p>
+
+<p>"But I can't see why&mdash;she might have had reason had I been the
+aggressor."</p>
+
+<p>"If you had hurt her she would not feel half so bad. You would be a
+hopeless booby if you could not understand that."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Really, now, if I thought she would take it that way, it would make
+all the difference in the world. But had she desired to despatch me,
+half that energy of insult would do," he said, drawing up, while
+hardness crept into his voice, but it softened again as he concluded&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't like her to be upset about it, though, if she didn't quite
+mean it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you can be sure that in regard to you she was very far from
+meaning it, and that she will be dreadfully upset about it; so think
+of what I've said, and come and see me in the morning."</p>
+
+<p>Now that he had grown calm, he was shivering with the cold, so I bade
+him run home.</p>
+
+<p>On returning to the house I found Andrew the solitary watcher of his
+charge, who, covered by an old cloak, was snoring on the kitchen sofa.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear me, where are they all?"</p>
+
+<p>"In bed; and look at his nibbs there. I reckon I took a wrinkle from
+Dawn as how to manage him. Soon as every one's back was turned he
+began actin' the goat again an' makin' for home, an' I thought here
+goes, I don't care a hang if all the others roused on me like blazes,
+so long as grandma don't,&mdash;she's the only one makes me sit up,&mdash;so I
+flung water on him, not warm water but real cold. It took seven years'
+growth out of him, an' then I gave him a drink of hot coffee, an'
+undressed him, an' he was jolly glad to lay down there."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you'll give the man a cold!"</p>
+
+<p>"No jolly fear. I took his clothes off. I've got 'em dryin' here. I
+couldn't find any of my gear, an' wasn't game to ask Uncle Jake, so I
+clapped him into a night-dress of grandma's. Look! he's got his hand
+out. I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span> reckon the frill looks all so gay, don't you? I bet grandma
+will rouse, but I'll have a little peace with him now an' chance the
+ducks," said the resourceful warder, whose charge really looked so
+absurd that I was provoked to laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"How did you manage him? Was he tractable?"</p>
+
+<p>"He soon dropped that there was no good in bein' nothing else. He
+spluttered something about me disgracin' him, because something on his
+crest said he was brave or something; but I told him I didn't care a
+hang if he had a crest the size of a cockatoo or was as bald as Uncle
+Jake, that I was full of him actin' the goat, an' that finished him."</p>
+
+<p>"Enough too," I laughed, as I bade the Australian lad, with the very
+Australian estimate of the unimportance of some things sacred to
+English minds, the Australian parting salute&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"So long!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="TWENTY" id="TWENTY"></a>TWENTY.</h2>
+
+<h3>"ALAS! HOW EASILY THINGS GO WRONG!"</h3>
+
+
+<p>On ascending to my room I did not, as expected, find Dawn sobbing, but
+she had her face so determinedly turned away that I refrained from
+remark. I was none the worse for the diverting incidents of the
+evening, because the excitement of them had come from without instead
+of within. The rush of the trains soon became a far-away sound, and
+the light that flashed from their engine-doors as they climbed the
+first zig of the mountain, and which could be seen from my bed, had
+been shut from my sight by the fogs of approaching sleep, when I was
+aroused by heart-broken sobbing from the bed by the opposite wall.</p>
+
+<p>After a while I got out of bed, bent on an attempt to comfort.</p>
+
+<p>"Dawn, what is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry I waked you, I thought you were sound asleep," she said,
+pulling in with a violent effort but speedily breaking into renewed
+sobs.</p>
+
+<p>"I was thinking of poor little Mrs Rooney-Molyneux, and how my mother
+died," said the girl, rolling over and burying her lovely head in her
+tear-drenched pillow. "I can't help thinking about the sadness and
+cruelty of life to women."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I felt certain that a matter less deep and lying farther from the core
+of being was perturbing her more, but as she chose to ignore it, I did
+likewise.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we must not dwell too sadly on that for which we are not
+responsible, and women are privileged in being able to repay the cost
+of their being."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I always remember that, and often shudder to think I might have
+been a man, with their greater possibilities of cowardliness and
+selfish cruelty, as illustrated by old Rooney and Miss Flipp's
+destroyer."</p>
+
+<p>Not a word concerning her action to Ernest. Thought of it stung too
+much for mention, so there was nothing to do but comfort her till she
+fell asleep and await from Ernest the next turn of events bearing on
+the situation.</p>
+
+<p>The next turn of events in the Clay household bore down upon us next
+morning after breakfast when grandma came home, having left the
+first-born of Rooney-Molyneux comfortably asleep in the swaddling
+clothes which had contained Dawn at the date when she had been "a
+little winjin' thing," with whom everything had disagreed, and which
+garments were lent to the new-born babe until grandma could provide
+him with others. The hale old dame was not too fatigued to be in a
+state of lively ire, and opened fire upon her circle with&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I met old Hollis on the way home, an' do you believe, he says to me,
+'Well, Mrs Clay, so I believe you've took to rabbit ketchin' in your
+old days.' It was like his cheek, the same as w'en he said the monkeys
+would be havin' a vote next. <i>Rabbit ketchin'</i> indeed! No wonder women
+has got sense at last to make the birth-rate decline, when you see
+cases like that, and even the people that go to help them out of the
+fix&mdash;an' that out of kindness, not for no reward nor pleasure&mdash;is
+demeaned to their face an' called<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span> <i>rabbit ketchers</i>, if you please! I
+reckon all women ought to be compelled to be <i>rabbit ketchers</i> for a
+time, an' it would be such a eye-opener to them that if there wasn't
+some alterations made in the tone of the whole business they would all
+strike so there'd be no need of <i>rabbit ketchin'</i>, as some call it, to
+make things more disagreeabler; and that's what has been goin' on
+lately in a underhand way, but <i>some people</i>," concluded the
+intelligent old lady with her customary choler, coming to a full stop
+ere recapitulating the misdoings of these unmentionable members of
+society.</p>
+
+<p>"Rabbit ketching," as midwifery is contemptuously termed in the
+vernacular, does require a status, and those who have need of it merit
+some consideration. Civilisation, stretching up to recognise that
+every child is a portion of State wealth, may presently make some
+movement to recognise maternity as a business or office needing time
+and strength, not as a mere passing detail thrown in among mountains
+of other slavery.</p>
+
+<p>During the whole forenoon I busied myself with the construction of
+garments for the new arrival in this vale of woe, and at the same time
+was on the alert for the commanded appearance of Ernest Breslaw.
+Instead of himself he sent as messenger a well-spoken lad, who
+presented Mr Ernest's compliments, and hoped that I was not feeling
+any ill effects from my unusual exertion during the previous evening.</p>
+
+<p>I sent a request, per return, that he should call upon me during the
+afternoon, but he did not regard it. The next being Dawn's day for
+Sydney, I waited for this event to hatch some progress in the case,
+but upon her return she had no favours to share with me or merry tale
+to tell of being taken to afternoon tea by Ernest.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Eweword figured in this account, and so prominently as to suggest that
+her talk of the fun she had had with him was a little forced, so on
+the following morning I took it upon myself to call upon the backward
+knight in his own castle. Unmooring one of the boats, I rowed with
+great caution obliquely across the stream till, reaching the desired
+pier, I tethered my craft and ascended among an orange-grove laden
+with its golden fruit, and between the rattling canes of the vineyard
+dismantled by winter, till I reached the house where at present my
+young friend sojourned, and I was thankful that bleached as well as
+unfaded locks having their own peculiar privileges, I was able to make
+this call with propriety.</p>
+
+<p>The young gentleman was in, and without delay appeared to the
+beautiful lady's self-directed and appointed ambassadress.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose I may pay you a visit," I said with a smile as he seated me
+in the drawing-room which we had to ourselves. "As you didn't seem to
+care whether I were dead or alive I have come over to practically
+illustrate that I'm still above ground. Why did you not come to see
+me?"</p>
+
+<p>Ernest reddened and fidgeted, and said haltingly&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You know if you had been ill I would have been the first to go to
+you, but I knew you were quite well, and I've been so busy," he
+finished lamely.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, you know that I know that you have been idle&mdash;quite unendurably
+idle," I retorted, a remark he received in embarrassed silence, which
+endured till I broke it with&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I suppose you are waiting for me to divulge the real object of
+my pilgrimage, and that is to know why you haven't kept your agreement
+about making that little mis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span>take as easy as you could for Miss Dawn.
+She's fretting herself pale about it."</p>
+
+<p>Ernest stood up, his colour flaming into his tanned cheeks till they
+were as bright as his locks, while he made as though to speak once or
+twice, but hesitated, and at length exclaimed&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"This is not fair&mdash;you must, you have no reason to bother&mdash;you," and
+there he foundered. Ernest could neither lie, snub, nor evade. He was
+totally devoid of all the attributes of a smart politician.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you not sufficient faith in my regard for you to trust my motive
+in thus apparently seeking to pry into your private life?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"You know I think more of you than any one, and I'll tell you the
+whole thing," he replied, taking a seat beside me.</p>
+
+<p>"You have made a mistake in assuming that Miss Clay, or whatever her
+real name might be (his indifference was well assumed), did not fully
+mean her action, and I was a fool to believe you when I had more than
+sufficient proof to the contrary. Yesterday morning I happened to go
+to Sydney in the same train as she did, and as I happened&mdash;entirely by
+chance and quite unexpectedly&mdash;to meet her on the platform, I lifted
+my hat as usual to make it easy for her, and a nice fool I made of
+myself. She didn't merely pretend not to see me, but hurried by me in
+contempt and came back with that Eweword, who glared at me as though I
+were a tramp who had attempted to molest her. I am sure you could not
+expect me to go any farther than that, and I only did that because you
+call her a friend of yours. Perhaps Eweword doesn't do things that
+necessitate the throwing of dirty water on him. It was rather an
+uncalled-for thing to do to any one. Perhaps<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span> the old dame doesn't
+allow her boarders to have visitors, and that is the polite way they
+have of informing one to the contrary."</p>
+
+<p>The sky looked rather murky. I said nothing, having nothing ready to
+say.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, by the way, I'm leaving here to-morrow for Adelaide, where I am
+to play in some inter-colonial football matches against the New
+Zealanders. Is there anything I could do for you over there?" he said,
+as though having dismissed the other unworthy trifle from his mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Going to run away because a girl, half accidentally and half out of
+nervous irritation, threw a little water on you!"</p>
+
+<p>There I had said what I really thought, and half expected the snub
+which, according to the rules of tact, I deserved for my divergence
+therefrom, but it did not come; he was a man of the field, and in this
+type of encounter had not a chance against one of my perceptions.</p>
+
+<p>He laughed forcedly. "That would be something to turn tail for,
+wouldn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"But are you not doing so? If a beautiful girl did such a thing to me
+it would only make me the more set to woo her to graciousness," I
+said.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps so, if she were some girl you specially considered, but in
+the case of a passing stranger that I may never meet again, it would
+not be worth wasting time, especially as her action was so uncalled
+for and unwomanly."</p>
+
+<p>"But you are sure to meet her again if you continue our friendship, as
+I hope to have her with me, and that is why I'm taking the trouble to
+thus interfere in what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span> does not apparently concern either you or me
+very much. <i>I</i> don't consider Dawn as a passing stranger. I think her
+especially honest and especially beautiful, and it worries me to think
+she has thus erred. Her action was <i>unwomanly</i>, if you like, but
+peculiarly feminine, with the unavoidable hysterical femininity
+engendered in women by their subjected environment. Are you quite sure
+you consider Dawn merely a passing stranger not worth consideration?"
+I asked, looking him fair in the eyes; and the quick lowering of them
+and the tightening of his mouth satisfied me that he could not
+truthfully answer in the affirmative.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a matter of what she considers me," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well," I said indifferently, now that I had gained my point, "it
+doesn't matter to me, but I'll be sorry to lose your company, and I
+thought you were taking an interest in Leslie's candidature, and we
+could have enjoyed it together."</p>
+
+<p>"So I do."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, come back as soon as you get these matches played, and we'll
+have some good times together again, and I'll keep the reprehensible
+Dawn out of the way; and anyhow, remember she didn't throw <i>cold</i>
+water on you, and that's something."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, I'll be back in about three weeks' time to see how Les.
+gets on. Polling-day hasn't been fixed yet. I'd like to see it through
+now I've started."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," said I, considering it a good move that he should
+disappear for a short time, and after this he rowed me on the Noonoon
+till Clay's dinner-bell sounded and I went up to eat.</p>
+
+<p>That evening "Dora" Eweword came in to tea and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span> remained afterwards.
+He informed us that the red-headed chap who had been loafing around
+Kelman's had gone to Europe.</p>
+
+<p>"Has he? Did he tell you?" interestedly inquired Andrew.</p>
+
+<p>"He mentioned that he would leave for South Australia by the express
+this evening," I replied, but did not add that his going to Europe was
+a little stretched.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn was quiet. Her merry impudence did not enliven the company that
+night, and after tea, when Eweword caught her alone for a few moments
+as I was leaving the room, he said&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"So you cleared the red-headed mug out after all. Andrew says it was
+alright. You won't listen to me, but you haven't chucked the wash-up
+water on me yet, that's one thing." His complacence was very
+pronounced. To his surprise Dawn made no reply, but biting her lip to
+keep back her tears, walked out of the room, and in the dark of the
+passage smote her dimpled palms together, exclaiming&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Would to heaven I had thrown the water over this galoot instead of
+<i>him</i>," and the thermometer of "Dora's" self-satisfaction fell
+considerably when she did not appear again that evening.</p>
+
+<p>That night, when the waning moon got far enough on her westward way to
+surmount the old house on the knoll beside the Noonoon and cast its
+shadow in the deep clear water, the silver beams strayed through a
+little window facing the great ranges, and found the features of a
+beautiful sleeper disfigured by weeping; but youth's rest was sound
+despite the tear-stains, and the old moon smiled at such ephemeral
+sorrow. The night wind coming down the gorges with the river sighed
+along the valley<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span> as the moon remembered all the faces which, though
+tearless under her nocturnal inspection, yet were pale from the inward
+sobs, only giving outward evidence in bleaching locks and shadowy
+eyes. Even within sound of the engines roaring down the spur, many of
+the little night-wrapped houses, hard set upon the plain, had inmates
+kept from sleep by deeper sorrows than Dawn had ever known.</p>
+
+<p>The first fortnight of Ernest's absence, believed by his doubting
+young lady to be final, was a stirring time in Noonoon, and
+particularly full at Clay's. Jam-making was the star item on the
+latter's domestic bill. Baskets and baskets of golden oranges and
+paler lemons and shaddocks were converted into jam and marmalade, and
+ranged on the shelves of the already replete storehouse, in readiness
+to tempt the summer palate of the week-end boarders which should
+appear when the days stretched out again. We were occupied in this
+business to such an extent that the sight of oranges became a
+weariness, and Andrew averred that the very name of marmalade gave him
+the pip.</p>
+
+<p>At night we enjoyed the diversion of the meetings, and talk and gossip
+of them made conversation for the days. The previously mentioned
+political addresses were but mild fanfares by comparison with the
+flamboyance of the gasconading now in progress, and in its reports of
+these bursts of oratory the 'Noonoon Advertiser' gave further evidence
+of its broad-minded liberality.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs Gas Ranter," it reported, "addressed a packed meeting in the
+Citizens' Hall last night, and proved herself the best public speaker
+who has been heard in Noonoon during the present campaign," &amp;c. It
+recognised worth, and gamely gave the palm to the deserving,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span>
+irrespective of party or sex,&mdash;did not so much as insert the narrow
+quibble that she was the best for a woman.</p>
+
+<p>Among other incidents, the lady canvassers called at Clay's and
+received a piece of grandma's mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks; I don't want no one to tell me how to vote. I've rared two or
+three families and gave a hand with more, and have intelligence the
+same as others, and at my time of my life don't want no one to tell me
+my business. I reckon I could tell a good many others how to vote."</p>
+
+<p>The pity of it was that it was immaterial how any electors cast their
+vote. Neither party had a sensible grip of affairs, and besides, love
+of country in a patriotic way is not a trait engendered in
+Australians. In politics, as in private life, all is selfishness. The
+city people thought only of building a greater Sydney, the residents
+of Noonoon and other little towns had mind for nothing but their own
+small centre,&mdash;all seeing no farther than their noses, or that what
+directly benefited their little want might not be good for the country
+at large, and that legislature must, to be successful, better the
+living conditions of the masses, not merely of one class or section.
+Then city men, unacquainted with the practical working of the land,
+could not possibly handle the land question effectively, and,
+moreover, a man might understand how to manage the coastal district
+and remain at sea regarding the great areas west of the watershed.</p>
+
+<p>Another big mistake lay in over representation of the city and the
+under representation of the man on the land. The producer should be
+the first care, and while he is woefully disregarded and
+ill-considered a country cannot thrive. The reason of this state of
+affairs was the division of electorates on a population basis. This
+meant that a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span> city electorate covered a very small area, and that
+practically all its wants were attended by the municipality, so that
+the city member had leisure to ply the trade of merchant, doctor, or
+barrister within a few minutes of the house of parliament; whereas the
+country member, to become acquainted with the vast area he represented
+and the requirements of its inhabitants and attend parliamentary
+sittings, had no time left to be anything but a member of parliament,
+precariously depending upon re-election for a livelihood.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn threw herself into the contest with great enthusiasm, and also
+industriously pursued her vocal studies, but for her was exceptionally
+subdued and inclined to be cross on the smallest provocation. She had
+become so engrossed in political meetings that "Dora" Eweword, who was
+continually at Clay's since the retreat of Ernest, one day
+remonstrated with her. She had made a political meeting the excuse for
+declining to go rowing with him, whereupon he remarked&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, leave 'em to the old maids, Dawn. You'll grow into a scarecrow
+that would frighten any man away if you hang on to politics much
+more."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if it would frighten <i>some</i> men away, I'd go in for them twice
+as much," snapped the girl. "I suppose you admire the style of girls
+who are going around now saying, after some straightforward women have
+said what we all feel and got the vote, 'Oh, I don't care for the
+vote. Let men rule; they are the stronger vessel. Politics don't
+belong to women,' and so on. You'd think me a sweet little womanly
+dear if I croaked like that; but you keep your brightest eye on that
+sort of a squarker, and for all her noise about being content with her
+rights, you'll see that she takes more than her share<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span> of the good of
+the reforms that other women have worked for."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh Lord!" good-temperedly giggled "Dora," for home truths that would
+be considered sheer spleen from a plain girl are taken as fine fun
+when uttered by a girl as physically attractive as Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>During the second week of the footballer's absence, who should appear
+to lend a hand on the side of Leslie Walker but Mr Pornsch, <i>uncle</i> of
+the late Miss Flipp. He arrived with the callousness worthy of a
+certain department of man's character, and addressed a meeting with as
+much pomp and self-confidence and talk of bettering the morals of the
+people, as though he had been an Ellice Hopkins. He had the further
+effrontery to visit Clay's and feign crocodile grief for the
+deplorable fate of his niece. He protested his shame and horror,
+together with a desire for revenge, so loudly that I resolved that he
+should not be disappointed, that the dead girl should be in a slight
+measure avenged, and he should not only know but feel it.</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't got me voting paper. Me an' Carry will go up for 'em
+to-morrer," said grandma one evening from her arm-chair near the
+fireplace.</p>
+
+<p>There had been the usual meeting, and Ada Grosvenor and others had
+called in to discuss it.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, didn't the police deliver yours?" inquired Miss Grosvenor.</p>
+
+<p>"No, we was missed somehow."</p>
+
+<p>"Easy to see Danby wasn't on the racket of deliverin' electors'
+rights, or you would have had two or three apiece," Andrew chipped in.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going for Walker straight," announced grandma. "He's temperance
+at all events, and that is some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span>think w'en there ain't any
+common-sense in any of them."</p>
+
+<p>"If I had twenty votes I wouldn't give one to that Walker," said
+Andrew. "All the women are after him because they think he's
+good-lookin', an' he's got bandy legs. They clap him like fury, and
+look round like as they'd eat any one that goes to ask him a question.
+They seem to reckon he's an angel that oughtn't to be asked nothink he
+can't answer. I believe they'd all kiss him an' marry him if they
+could. I hate him. Vote for Henderson, he wouldn't give the women a
+vote, and only men are workin' on his committee."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh my, what's this!" exclaimed Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you know, the women <i>are</i> making fools of themselves about this
+Walker," said Ada Grosvenor, with her intelligently humorous laugh. "I
+don't think much of him myself. In spite of his choice phrasing of the
+usual hustings' bellowing, if women had not already the franchise he
+would be slow to admit them on a footing of equality with men as
+regards being. There are two extremes of men, you know. One thinks
+that woman's position in life is to act squaw to her lord and master.
+The other regards her as a toy&mdash;an article to be handed in and out of
+carriages like choice china&mdash;a drawing-room ornament, to be decked in
+wonderful gowns, and whose whole philosophy of existence should be to
+add to the material delight of men. Walker is a representative of the
+latter type, and old Hollis, who thinks that monkeys have as good a
+right to vote as women, belongs to the other. At a surface glance
+their views regarding women seem to be diametrically opposed, but to
+me it has always appeared that they equally serve the purpose of
+degrading the position of women. You should have seen how cruel<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span>
+Walker looked to-night when an old man asked if he approved of women
+entering the senate. He said <i>no</i> like a clap of thunder."</p>
+
+<p>It was probably this perspicacity on the part of Ada Grosvenor,
+coupled with a sense of humour, that earned for her the reputation of
+"trying to ape the swells."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, good-night everybody, and, Mrs Clay, don't forget to apply for
+your right in time, or you won't be able to vote," she said in
+parting.</p>
+
+<p>"No fear," responded grandma. "I've not been counted among mad people
+an' criminals, an' done out of me simple rights till this time of life
+without appreciatin' 'em w'en I've got 'em at last."</p>
+
+<p>Next day, true to intention, the old dame and Carry went up town for
+their "voting papers," and to repeat the former's words, "was
+downright insulted, so to speak."</p>
+
+<p>The civil servant whose duty it was to give rights to those electors
+who were not already in possession of such, was carrying affairs with
+a high hand, and had the brazen effrontery to tell Grandma Clay that
+it was a disgrace to see a woman of her years "running after a vote,"
+as he elegantly expressed it; and he also suggested to Carry that it
+would suit her better to be at home doing her housework, and to put
+the cap on his gross misconduct, he persuaded them that they had left
+it too late to obtain the coveted document, the first outward and
+visible proof that men considered their women complete rational
+beings.</p>
+
+<p>Carry had retorted that it would suit him better to do the work he was
+paid for than to exhibit his ignorance in meddling with the private
+affairs of others, and that if he could discharge his duties as well
+as she did her housework, he wouldn't make an ass of himself by
+showing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span> his fangs about women having the vote in the way he did.</p>
+
+<p>The two electresses thus bluffed came down the street and told their
+grievance to Mr Oscar Lawyer, for the nonce head of the Opposition
+League, and at ordinary seasons a father of his people, to whom all
+the town made in times of necessity,&mdash;whether it was an old beldame
+requiring assistance from the Benevolent Society or a lad seeking a
+situation and requiring a testimonial of character.</p>
+
+<p>With Mr Oscar Lawyer they also ran upon Mr Pornsch; and it was
+discovered that the churlish clerk's statement was utterly false, and
+made because he was on the side of Henderson and these two women were
+not. There was more talk than there is space for here, but the upshot
+of it was the clerk was routed, and grandma and Carry came home
+triumphantly, each in possession of one of the magic sheets of blue
+paper, which they spread out on the table for us all to see.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, well!" said grandma, "I seen the convicts flogged in days w'en
+this was nothink but a colony to ship them to, and I drove coaches
+w'en the line was only as far out of Sydney as here; and to think I
+should have lived to see the last of the convicts gone, coaches nearly
+become a novelty of the past, us callin' ourselves a nation, an' here
+a paper in me hand to show I can vote a man into this parliament and
+the other that the king's son hisself come out to open. I'm glad to
+see us lived that we can have our say in the laws now same as the men,
+and not have to swaller anythink they liked to put upon us to soot
+theirselves," and the old dame, with a splendid light in her eye,
+rubbed the creases out of the paper and spread it out again.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Pooh, it's the same as we've had all along. You didn't think a
+elector's right was anythink to be grinnin' at w'en the men had it. I
+never seen you gapin' at mine; you'd think it was somethink wonderful
+now when you've got one of your own," said Uncle Jake, coming in.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I never! Jake Sorrel! Of course we don't think much of other
+people's things! What is the good of another woman's baby or husband
+or <i>frying-pan</i>, that is, if it was equally a thing you couldn't
+borrer? And if you was blind, what pleasure would you get out of some
+one else seein' the blue sky, or warnin' that there was a snake there
+to be trod on, an' that's what it's been like with the elector's
+rights."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, but what difference does that bit of paper make to you now? You
+won't live no longer nor find your appetite no better, an' it won't
+pay the taxes for you," contended uncle.</p>
+
+<p>"Then if it is of so little account, why does it gruel you so much to
+see me with it? An' little as it is, there ain't that paper's reason
+why we shouldn't have always voted; and little though it is, that's
+all the difference has stood all these years between men voting and
+women not; and little as you think it is for a woman to have done
+without, it's what men would shed their blood for if <i>they</i> was done
+out of it. It ain't what things actually are, it's all they stand
+for," and grandma gathered up her <i>right</i> and went to take off her
+bonnet and change the bristling black dress which she donned for
+public appearance.</p>
+
+<p>I sat musing while she was away. "It ain't what things actually are,
+it's all they stand for," as the old dame had said; and her delight in
+being a freed citizen, no longer ranked with criminals and lunatics,
+had touched<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span> my higher self more profoundly than anything had had
+power to do for years.</p>
+
+<p>Though taking a vivid interest in the electioneering, owing to the
+large distillation of the essence of human nature it afforded, as
+neither of the candidates had a practical grip of public business, I
+cared not which should poll highest; but now I resolved to procure my
+right and go to the ballot, and, if nothing more, make an informal
+vote <i>for the sake of all that it stood for</i>.</p>
+
+<p>At back of the simple paper were arrayed the spirits of countless
+noble and fearless men and women who had so loved justice and their
+fellows that they had spent their lives in working for this betterment
+of the conditions of living, and the little paper further stood for an
+improvement in the position of women, and consequently of all
+humanity, inconceivable to cursory observation.</p>
+
+<p>As for a woman going to the poll and voting for Jones or Smith, that
+was harmless in either case, and would not help her live or die or pay
+her debts, as Uncle Jake expressed it; but excepting the female vote
+for the House of Keys in the Isle of Man, the enfranchisement of
+women, spreading from one to the other of the Australian States,
+represented the first time that woman, even in our vauntedly great and
+highly civilised British Empire, was constitutionally, statutably
+recognised as a human being,&mdash;equal with her brothers. That women
+shall compete equally with men in the utilitarian industrialism of
+every walk of life is not the ultimate ideal of universal adult
+franchise. Such emancipation is sought as the most condensed and
+direct method of abolishing the female sex disability which in time
+shall bring the human intelligence, regardless of sex, to an
+understanding of the superiority of the mother sex as it concerns the
+race&mdash;as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span> it is the race, the whole race, and consequently worthy of a
+status in life where it shall neither have to battle at the polls for
+its rights nor be sold in the market-place for bread.</p>
+
+<p>The empty-headed cannot be expected to perceive the magnitude of this
+upward step in the evolution of man, and its machinery may not run
+smoothly for a span; we nor our children's children may not know much
+benefit from what it symbolises, but shall we who are comfortable in
+rights wrested from ignorance and prejudice but never enjoyed by past
+generations, be too selfish and small to rejoice in the possibility of
+bettered conditions those ahead may live under as the fruits of the
+self-sacrificing labour of those now fighting for their ideals?</p>
+
+<p>NO!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="TWENTY-ONE" id="TWENTY-ONE"></a>TWENTY-ONE.</h2>
+
+<h3>THINGS GO MORE WRONG.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Grandma could think of nothing but the clerk's insult when she had
+gone for her electoral right.</p>
+
+<p>"Him! that thing! What's he employed for but to do this work, and if
+he ain't prepared to do it decent, why don't he give up an' let a
+better man in his place? They're easy to be got. 'Runnin' after a
+vote,' indeed! But that's where I made me big mistake. I should have
+stayed at home and writ to him, an' he'd have been compelled to send
+the police with it. That's what I ought to have done, an' let me
+servants that I'm taxed to keep do the work they're dying for want of,
+instead of doin' it meself; but at any rate I got me right safe an'
+sure," she said with satisfaction. "A long time we'd be getting them
+if all men was like him, which, thank God, they ain't. But that's the
+way with all these fellers in a Government job; they think they're
+Lord Muck, and too good to speak to the folk that's keeping them
+there, and only for which they wouldn't be there at all. Only for
+Oscar Lawyer and Mr Pornsch&mdash;and Dawn, where are you? Mr Pornsch was
+very nice to me, an' I asked him to tea, an' to come down for some of
+them little things belongin' to his niece. He's very cut up about
+her."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes, about as cut up about her as Uncle Jake would be over me."</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Dawn, how do you know?" severely inquired the old dame.</p>
+
+<p>"I know very well that old men with his delightful slenderness of
+figure, and men who have drunk all the champagne and other poison it
+must have taken to colour his nose that way, haven't got much true
+feeling left, except for a bottle of wine, and a feed of something
+high and well seasoned."</p>
+
+<p>However, Mr Pornsch presently arrived, and illustrated by his
+smickering at Dawn that notwithstanding his grief for a dead girl he
+yet retained an eye for the charms of a living one. It also transpired
+that he would not have waited for an invitation to call upon us.</p>
+
+<p>This sweet bachelor champion of Women's Protection Bills, who had so
+long deprived some woman of the felicity of being his wife, had
+apparently determined to hastily repair the omission, and it soon
+became evident that he meant to honour no less a person than Dawn in
+this connection&mdash;Dawn! a princess in her own right, by reason of her
+health, her beauty, her youth, and her honest maidenhood!</p>
+
+<p>He took Ernest's place in going to Sydney with her, thrust costly
+trifles upon her; he was fifty-five if he were a day, and a repulsive
+debauchee at that. Dawn, so healthy and wholesome, loathed him. She
+sat on her bed at night with her dainty toes on the floor, and raved
+while she combed her fine-spun brown hair. I let her rave, believing
+this a good antidote for the worry of that dish of water that was
+rarely out of her thoughts. I knew that she never omitted to scan the
+football news in hopes of seeing the doings of a certain red-headed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span>
+player recorded there, and I also knew that she was doomed to
+disappointment, unless she could connect R. E. Breslaw with R. Ernest
+of the wash-up water incident.</p>
+
+<p>A man of Pornsch's calibre is hard to abash, or Dawn would have
+abashed him, but failing to do so, at last she came to me requesting
+that I should assist her to get rid of him.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to complain to grandma," said she. "It might get abroad
+if she took it in hand, so I'd like to choke him off myself if I
+could. I have enough to suffer already;" and I knew she was again
+thinking of that fatal dish of water, and how "Dora" Eweword twitted
+her concerning it.</p>
+
+<p>Then I took Dawn on my knee as it were, and told her a story. It was
+such a painful story that I first extracted from her a solemn promise
+that she would not make a fuss of any sort, for this young woman
+lacked restraint&mdash;that command over her emotions which, if carefully
+adjusted and gauged, will make the work of a talented artist pass for
+genius, and that of a genius pass for the work of a god.</p>
+
+<p>When his connection with the ill-fated young girl, who had slipped out
+in the dead of night to throw herself in the gently gliding Noonoon,
+became known to Dawn, I was afraid her horror would so betray her that
+any subsequent plans for the punishment of the miscreant might fall
+through.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll knock him down with the poker next time he comes. I'll throw a
+kettle of boiling water on him as sure as eggs are eggs. Fancy the
+reptile leering around me: I felt nearly poisoned as it was, but I
+didn't know he was a murderer as well! Oh, the hide of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span> him to come
+here! I really will throw boiling water on him!"</p>
+
+<p>Dawn continued in this strain for some time, but as she quieted down
+became possessed of a notion to tar and feather him in the manner
+mentioned by her grandmother in one of her anecdotes. Carry and I were
+to be called upon to assist in this ceremony, which was to take place
+upon the return of Mr Pornsch. For the present he had disappeared to
+attend to some business.</p>
+
+<p>In the interim, the meetings continued without a break, and Dawn
+unremittingly looked for the football news, now with the war crowded
+into a far corner, by the special complexion that each daily chose to
+put on political affairs.</p>
+
+<p>"Just look up the football news," I said one day, "and see how my
+friend Ernest is doing."</p>
+
+<p>"He made a lot of goals as 'forward' in the last match. See!" she
+coolly replied, putting her tapering forefinger on the name of R. E.
+Breslaw, as she handed me the paper.</p>
+
+<p>"Did he tell you he wanted to disguise his identity while here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; he told me all about it one day when we went to Sydney," she
+replied, leaving me wondering what else they might have confided
+during these jaunts.</p>
+
+<p>Now that we required his presence Mr Pornsch was not in evidence, and
+neither was anything to be heard of the red-headed footballer's
+reappearance, though he had been absent four weeks, and this brought
+us towards the end of June. At this date there appeared a paragraph
+stating that Breslaw and several other amateur sportsmen were
+contemplating a tour of America, to include the St Louis Exposition.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>That night some one besides myself heard the roar of the passing
+locomotives, but she did not confess the cause of her sleeplessness.
+It was one of those irritations one cannot tell, so she let off her
+irritation in other channels.</p>
+
+<p>Matters did not brighten as the days went on. Two nights after
+Ernest's reported departure for the States, "Dora" Eweword brought
+Dawn home from Walker's committee meeting, and remained talking to her
+in the otherwise deserted dining-room till a late hour. As soon as he
+left Dawn came upstairs, and throwing herself face downwards on her
+bed burst into violent weeping.</p>
+
+<p>"What has come to you lately, Dawn?" I inquired. "Tell me what sort of
+a twist you have put in your affairs so that I may be able to help
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"No one can help me," she crossly replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think that I was once young, and have suffered all these
+worries too? It is not so long since I was your age that I have
+forgotten what may torment a girl's heart."</p>
+
+<p>Thus abjured she presently made me her father-confessor.</p>
+
+<p>Eweword it appeared had grown very pressing, and her grandma had urged
+her to accept him as the best of her admirers. The old dame had not
+observed the trend of matters with Ernest. In a house where week-end
+boarders came and went, and the landlady had a pretty granddaughter,
+there were strings of ardent admirers who came and went like the
+weeks, and in all probability transferred their week-end affections as
+frequently and with as great pleasure as they did their person, and
+the old lady was too sensible to place any reliance in their
+earnestness, while Dawn too was very level-headed in the matter. Thus
+Ernest, if considered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span> anything more than my friend, would have merely
+been placed in the week-end category. The old lady, not feeling so
+vigorous as usual, was anxious to have Dawn settled, and had tried to
+put a spoke in "Dora" Eweword's wheel by threatening Dawn with
+deprivation of her coveted singing lessons did she not receive him
+favourably. Dawn in a fit of the blues, probably brought on by seeing
+the announcement of Ernest's departure, had accepted Eweword
+conditionally. The conditions were that he should wait two years and
+keep the engagement entirely secret, and she had promised her grandma
+that she would think of marriage with him at the end of that time,
+provided her vocal studies should be continued till then.</p>
+
+<p>"That's the way I'll keep grandma agreeable to pay for the lessons,
+and in that time, do you think, I'll be able to go on the stage and do
+what I like and be somebody?" asked the girl from out the depths of
+her inexperience.</p>
+
+<p>"And what of '<i>Dora</i>'?"</p>
+
+<p>"He can go back to Dora Cowper then. I'll tell him I was only 'pulling
+his leg,' like he said about her. It will do him good."</p>
+
+<p>"You might break his heart," I said with mock compassion.</p>
+
+<p>"Break his heart! <i>His</i> heart! He's got the sort of heart to be
+compensated by a good plate of roast-beef and plum-pudding&mdash;like a
+good many more!"</p>
+
+<p>"Will he consent to this?"</p>
+
+<p>"He'll have to or do the other thing; he can please himself which. I
+don't care a hang. He said that if I would marry him soon he would let
+me continue the singing lessons and get me a lovely piano,&mdash;all the
+soft<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span>-soap men always give a girl beforehand. I wonder did he think me
+one of the folks who would swallow it? Couldn't I see as soon as I was
+married all the privileges I would get would be to settle down and
+drudge all the time till I was broken down and telling the same
+hair-lifting tales against marriage as aired by every other married
+woman one meets;" and Dawn, her cheeks flushed and her white teeth
+gleaming between her pretty lips, looked the personification of
+furious irritation.</p>
+
+<p>"All I care for now is to get the singing lessons, as long as I don't
+have to do anything too bad to get them."</p>
+
+<p>I suddenly turned on her and asked&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Honestly, why did you throw that dish of water on Ernest Breslaw?"
+Thus unexpectedly attacked, her answer slipped out before she had time
+to prevaricate.</p>
+
+<p>"Because I was a mad-headed silly fool&mdash;the biggest idiot that ever
+walked. That's why I did it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know that it hurt him very, very keenly?"</p>
+
+<p>No answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know that he cared more for you than he understood himself?"</p>
+
+<p>No answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Dawn, do <i>you</i> care?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not in that way; but oh, I care terribly that I made such a fool of
+myself. Had it been any one else it wouldn't have mattered, but he
+will think I did it because I was an ignorant commoner who knew no
+better. That's what stings; but I'm not going to think any more of it.
+I'm going to give my life up to singing, and it doesn't matter. I
+suppose I'll never see him again, and he'll never know but that I did
+it out of ignorance."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I smiled at the despondence in her tone as I extinguished the kerosene
+lamp-light.</p>
+
+<p>There is a stage in the course of most love affairs when the knight is
+despised and rejected by the lady, when the sun and the salt of life
+depart, and he finds no more pleasure in it; when he is seized with an
+irresistible desire to go forth in the world and by his prowess dazzle
+all mankind for the purpose of attracting one pair of eyes. The same
+occurs to the lady, and she determines to make all men fall at her
+feet by way of illustrating to one adamantine heart that he was a
+dullard to have passed over her charms. And this young lady of the
+rose and lily complexion, and knight of the bright-hued locks and
+herculean muscles, being young&mdash;sufficiently young to be downcast by
+imaginary stumbling-blocks&mdash;had reached it. Goosey-gander knight!
+Gander-goosey lady!</p>
+
+<p>I smiled again, for in my pocket was a letter that morning received
+from the former himself, stating that he had been booked for a trip to
+the St Louis Exposition, but had flung it up at the last moment in
+favour of seeing how Les. got on at the election, and that he would be
+back in Noonoon before polling-day. Considering he could have seen how
+the election progressed equally as well in Sydney as Noonoon, and that
+to see how his step-brother polled, when he took little interest in
+politics, had grown preferable to a trip to America, quite contented
+me regarding the probable termination of affairs.</p>
+
+<p>However, I did not show this letter, as in matchmaking, like in good
+cooking, things have to be done to the turn, and this was not the
+opportune turn.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well," I said, "so long as you don't let your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span> little arrangement
+get abroad, I don't expect it will harm Eweword."</p>
+
+<p>"No fear of it getting abroad. I've threatened him if it does that a
+contradiction that will be true will also get abroad by being put in
+the 'Noonoon Advertiser.'"</p>
+
+<p>Next night, however, I found Dawn stamping on something glittering
+that spread about the floor, and by inquiry elicited&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"That infernal 'Dora' Eweword has had the cheek to give me a ring, and
+that's what I've done with it, and that's all the hope he has of ever
+marrying me," she exclaimed, bringing the heel of her high-arched foot
+another thump on the fragments.</p>
+
+<p>"He's a bit too quick with his signs and badges of slavery. He's so
+complacent with himself, and thinks he's ousted the 'red-headed mug'
+as he calls him, that I hate him."</p>
+
+<p>"He has a right to be complacent. You have given him reason to be. He
+has won you, so you have told him, and he believes you."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know, and it makes me all the madder to think of it."</p>
+
+<p>I suppressed a chuckle; even before attaining my teens I had never
+been so splendidly, autocratically <i>young</i> as this beautiful
+high-spirited creature!</p>
+
+<p>"Let things settle awhile, and then we'll pour them off the dregs," I
+advised.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="TWENTY-TWO" id="TWENTY-TWO"></a>TWENTY-TWO.</h2>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"O Spirit, and the Nine Angels who watch us,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Thy Son, and Mary Virgin,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Heal us of the wrong of man."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p>Outside politics the next item of interest on the Clay programme was
+the reappearance of Mr Pornsch, who came for afternoon tea, during
+which he invited himself to evening tea later on, and before it took
+Dawn's time in the drawing-room trying some late songs. Dawn averred
+that it was with difficulty she had restrained from setting fire to
+him or attacking him with the piano-stool.</p>
+
+<p>He got so far with his "love-making" on this occasion that he had
+asked Dawn to take a little walk with him, which she had readily
+consented to do, as it would enable her to entrap him for the
+tarring-and-feathering upon which she had determined.</p>
+
+<p>"He is going to meet me over among the grapes in the shade of the
+osage breakwind. Do you think we will be able to manage him? Let us be
+sure to have everything well arranged," whispered Dawn to me as we
+came to evening tea.</p>
+
+<p>Near the appointed time of tryst, when the first division of the
+Western mail was roaring by&mdash;the warm red lights<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span> from its windows
+shedding a glow by the viaduct&mdash;she and I betook ourselves to the far
+end of Grandma Clay's vineyard, where we were securely screened by the
+osage orange hedge on one side and the grape-canes and their stakes on
+the other. Dawn carried a two-pound treacle-tin filled with tar, and
+which had been sitting on the end of the stove during the afternoon to
+melt into working order. Carry, who had entered into the affair with
+vim, had her share of the arrangements in readiness, and was secreted
+nearer the house to act as sentinel, and to run to our assistance if
+summoned by a prearranged whistle.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn placed me and the superannuated hair broom, with which she had
+armed me, behind a grape-vine, and herself took up a position before
+it and beside a hole about eighteen inches deep and two feet square
+which she had excavated.</p>
+
+<p>Mr Pornsch was soon to be heard tripping and blundering along, while
+the starlight, to which our eyes had grown accustomed, showed the
+river where the dead girl whom we were there to avenge had ended her
+miserable existence.</p>
+
+<p>"Dawn, my pet, where are you? Curse the grape-vines," he gasped.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm here, <i>uncle darling</i>," she responded, the two last words under
+her breath.</p>
+
+<p>Directed by her voice, he neared till we could discern his bulk.</p>
+
+<p>"My little queen," he exclaimed, the tone of his voice betraying that
+which defiled the crisp glory of the night for as far as it carried.</p>
+
+<p>"Just wait a minute till I see where we are," said<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span> Dawn, "or we will
+be getting all tangled up in these canes."</p>
+
+<p>With this she started back, causing him to do likewise, and drawing a
+swab on a stick from the pot in her hand, she brought a consignment of
+the black sticky tar a resounding smack on his face, and following it
+with others thick and fast, exclaimed&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"There! There! That's all for you!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr Pornsch naturally stepped backwards into the excavation, as
+designed, and sat down as completely and largely helplessly as one of
+his figure could be counted upon to do, and coming to Dawn's
+assistance I planted the broom on his chest, and bore with my feeble
+strength upon him. It was quite sufficient to detain him, seeing he
+was now stretched on the broad of his back with his amidship
+departments foundered in two feet of indentation.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn thoroughly plastered his face and head, and in spitting to keep
+his mouth clear he lost his false teeth. He attempted to bellow, but
+jabbing his mouth full Dawn soon cowed him into quietude.</p>
+
+<p>"Shut up, you old fool; if you make a noise we have six more girls
+waiting in a boat to fling you in the river and drag you up and down
+for a while tied on to a rope like a porpoise. Do you think you'll
+float?"</p>
+
+<p>This had the desired effect, though he spluttered a little.</p>
+
+<p>"What is the meaning of this? Have you all gone mad? I met you here at
+your own request to speak about helping you with your singing, and
+you've evidently put a wicked construction on my action. I demand a
+full explanation and an abject apology."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Dawn, punctuating her remarks with little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span> dabs of the
+tar, "the explanation is that we're doing this to show what we think
+of a murderer. Even if Miss Flipp had not drowned herself, but had
+lived to be an outcast, you would be still a murderer of her soul."</p>
+
+<p>"What's this?" he blustered.</p>
+
+<p>"We have several witnesses ready to give evidence regarding all that
+passed between you and the unfortunate girl supposed to be your niece
+during your midnight calls upon her," I interposed, speaking for the
+first time, "so bluff or pretence of any kind on your part is
+unavailing. Remain silent and hear what we intend to say."</p>
+
+<p>"We're dealing with this case privately," continued Dawn, "because the
+laws are not fixed up yet to deal with it publicly. Old
+alligators&mdash;one couldn't call you men, and it's enough to make decent
+men squirm that you should be at large and be called by the same
+name&mdash;can act like you and yet be considered respectable, but this is
+to show you what <i>decent</i> women think of your likes, and their spirits
+are with us in armies to-night in what we are doing. They'd all like
+to be giving your sort a wipe from the tar-pot, and then if you were
+set alight it would not be half sufficient punishment for your crimes.
+We haven't a law to squash you yet, but soon as we can we'll make one
+that the likes of you shall be publicly tarred and feathered by those
+made outcasts by the system of morality you patronise," vehemently
+said this ardent and practical young social reformer, who was more
+rabid than a veteran temperance advocate in fighting for her ideal of
+social purity.</p>
+
+<p>There was silence a moment while we listened to ascertain was there
+any likelihood of our being disturbed, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span> the only man-made sounds
+breaking the noisy crickets' chorus were the rumble of vehicles along
+the highroad and the shunting of the engines at the station, so I
+chimed in with promised support.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, good women have to continually suffer the degradation of your
+type in all life's most sacred relations. They have to endure you at
+their board and in their homes, and leering at their sweet young
+daughters; and, alack! many in shame and humiliation own your stamp as
+their father or the father of their sons and daughters. They have had
+to endure it with a smile and hear it bolstered up as right, but those
+whose moral illumination has taken place would be with us in armies
+to-night if they could."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm dying to give him a piece of my mind," said Carry, coming up.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you like our little illustration of what we think of you?
+We've done it out of a long smouldering resentment against your reign,
+and this is a species of jubilation to find that the majority of
+Australian men are with us, because in the vote they have furnished us
+with a means of redress," and Carry finished her previously prepared
+speech by throwing a clod of dirt on him.</p>
+
+<p>"My grey hairs should have protected me," he muttered.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean they should have protected Miss Flipp," said Dawn, "and when
+a man with grey hairs carries on like this the crime is twice as
+deadly. There was nothing about grey hairs when you used a lead comb
+and got yourself up to kill. I thought you didn't want to make an
+especial feature of them, and that's why I'm dyeing them this
+beautiful treacley black. They'll look bosker when I'm done."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Get up out of that, lest I'm tempted to do you a permanent injury," I
+said, taking the broom off him.</p>
+
+<p>"You can go to the stable," said Dawn, "and I hope you won't
+contaminate it. Carry has a lantern and some grease and hot water, so
+you can clean yourself there and put on your overcoat. Never let us
+hear of you on a platform spouting about moral bills again unless you
+say it is on account of the practical experience you've had of the
+need of them to save weak and foolish young women from the clutches of
+such as you."</p>
+
+<p>Mr Pornsch arose with difficulty while Dawn struck matches to see what
+he was like, and a more deplorably ludicrous spectacle never could be
+seen in a pantomime. The only pity of it was that it was not a
+punishment more frequently meted out to the sinners of his degree. He
+raved and stuttered how he would move in the matter, but Dawn, who had
+a commendable fearlessness in carrying out her undertakings, only
+laughed merry little peals, and told him the best way for him to move
+in the tar was towards the stable, and the best way to move out of it
+was by the aid of grease, soap, hot water, and soda. The expression of
+his eyes rolling and glaring amid the black was quite eerie, but
+eventually we reached the stable, where Carry instructed him how to
+clean himself, while Dawn jeered at him during the operation.</p>
+
+<p>Having cleaned his face somewhat, he hid his neck and clothes in his
+overcoat which Carry handed, put on his hat, muffled his face in his
+handkerchief, and went away, Dawn administering a parting shot.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Uncle Pornsch, dear, next time you go ogling and leering round a
+<i>decent</i> girl, remember, though she may be so situated that she has to
+endure you, yet she feels<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span> just as we do, that is, if she is a decent
+girl, whose eyes have been opened to the facts of life."</p>
+
+<p>"I feel better than I have done for a long time," she concluded, as
+bearing the implements used in the adventure we three, who had agreed
+upon secrecy, made towards the house.</p>
+
+<p>"So do I," said Carry. "If we could only do it to all who deserve the
+like, it would be grand!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="TWENTY-THREE" id="TWENTY-THREE"></a>TWENTY-THREE.</h2>
+
+<h3>UNIVERSAL ADULT SUFFRAGE.</h3>
+
+
+<h3>I.</h3>
+<p>Electioneering matters ripened, and so did Carry's love affair with
+Larry Witcom. In fact it got so far that she gave grandma notice, and
+announced her intention of going to a married sister's home for that
+process known as "getting her things ready," while Larry, in keeping
+up his end of the stick, bought a neat cottage and began furnishing it
+in the style approved by his circle, with bright linoleum on the
+floors, plush chairs in the "parler," and china ornaments on the
+overmantels.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs Bray, one of those very everyday folk whose god was mammon, and
+who naturally hung on every word issuing from a person of means while
+she would ignore the most inimitable witticism from an impecunious
+individual, began to regard the lady-help from a new point of view.</p>
+
+<p>"She mightn't have done so bad for herself after all. Some of these
+girls knockin' about the world not havin' nothink to their name, don't
+baulk at things the same as you an' me would who's been used to plenty
+and like to pick our goods, so to speak. The way things is, Larry is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span>
+as likely as most to be in a good position yet," was a sample of the
+modified sentiments falling from her full red lips.</p>
+
+<p>Carry was to remain at Clay's until after the election day, so that
+she could cast her vote for Leslie Walker.</p>
+
+<p>The political candidate thus favoured scarcely allowed three days to
+pass without personally or by proxy stumping the Noonoon end of the
+electorate. His last meeting in the Citizens' Hall was jam-pack an
+hour before the advertised time of speaking.</p>
+
+<p>The candidate on this occasion made no fresh utterances to entertain,
+he merely repeated the catch cries of his party; but the air was
+heavily charged with human electricity, and the questions and
+"barracking" of the crowd were supremely diverting.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you in favour of the Chows going to South Africa?" bawled one
+elector.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear fellow, we are going to govern New South Wales&mdash;not South
+Africa."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but when we sent contingents out to fight for the Empire in the
+Transvaal, do you think it fair that white men should be passed over
+in favour of Chows in the South African labour market?"</p>
+
+<p>This question being ignored another was interjected.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you in favour of the newspapers running New South Wales?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not!"</p>
+
+<p>This being a satisfactory answer, the old favourite question, "Are you
+in favour of black gins wearing white stockings?" was put; and the
+candidate having assured us that, provided they could manage the
+laundry bill, he certainly was in favour of these ladies wearing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span> any
+hosiery they preferred; and the loud guffaw which greeted this
+information having subsided, he continued&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Now, don't vote for <i>me</i> or for <i>Henderson</i>,&mdash;vote for the best
+measures for the country. (Henderson was driving the personal ticket
+of having lived among them,&mdash;hence this warning.) I think it an
+unparalleled impertinence for a man to ask an intelligent body of
+electors to vote for <i>him</i>&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"When there's a swell bloke like you in the field."</p>
+
+<p>"Pip! pip! Hooray! Cock-a-doodle-do!" came the chorus. The "Pip! pip!"
+was a new sound to them, having been introduced to represent the noise
+made by the propulsion of a motor-car, in which set the candidate
+shone.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you in favour of gas and water running up the one pipe?" inquired
+another, when the din had once more fallen to comparative silence.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think that ladies ought to wear big boots now that they've
+got the vote?"</p>
+
+<p>All such important questions having been put, the chairman called for
+three cheers for Mr Walker.</p>
+
+<p>"Three cheers for Henderson," yelled the rabble at the back, which
+were given deafeningly, and the candidate, with the lively tact which
+bade fair to develop into his most prominent characteristic, joined in
+the cheers for his opponent, till some one had the grace to call
+"Three cheers for Mr Walker now"; and in the most delightfully
+uproarious, holiday-spirited clamour thus ended the last meeting but
+one before the election.</p>
+
+<p>This was fixed for the 6th of August, and, notwithstanding there being
+several other towns in the electorate equally as important as Noonoon,
+on polling eve both<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span> candidates were to make their final speech there
+at the same hour.</p>
+
+<p>During the week intervening, Leslie Walker's "Ladies' Committee" were
+very busy in the construction of dainty rosettes of pink and blue
+ribbon to be worn by his followers; and not to be outdone, Henderson's
+committee of "mere men" armed themselves with little squares of
+hatband ribbon of red, white, and blue&mdash;the Ministerial colours.</p>
+
+<p>These were not such dainty badges as the rosettes, but they served the
+purpose equally well; and the sterner sex, in our present stage of
+evolution ever to be trusted to make up in downright usefulness what
+they lack in mere prettiness, had attached a safety-pin to each piece
+of ribbon for its masculinely substantial affixing.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II.</h3>
+<p>Polling eve arrived, and the Ministerialists having secured the hall,
+the Oppositionists had perforce to hold an open-air meeting. We
+attended the hall first, intending to move on to the street
+entertainment later, and Dawn was attacked by an old dame in the
+opposing camp because she was displaying Walker's colours.</p>
+
+<p>"If I liked him I'd go an' stand in the street an' listen to him, not
+take up the room of them as has a hall hired for 'em by the <i>best</i>
+man, who has lived among us, and not some city lah-de-dah married to a
+hussy off the stage, an' who had women who might be any character
+goin' round speakin' for him," she tiraded, and turning to me
+aggressively demanded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Where are <i>your</i> colours?"</p>
+
+<p>"Could you supply me with some?" I replied; and only too pleased, she
+squalled to an urchin who was distributing the squares plus a
+safety-pin. I was such a well-poised "rail-sitter" that I was entitled
+to wear both colours; and as this one was being ostentatiously
+fastened to the lapel of my over-jacket, I remembered the injunction
+to live at peace with all.</p>
+
+<p>A brass band played the people in, and a trio of youngsters unfurled
+red, white, and blue parachutes,&mdash;alias gamps, alias ginghams, alias
+umberellers,&mdash;which were a popular feature of the "turn."</p>
+
+<p>The committee appeared on the platform one by one, each received with
+noisy approval, and one facetiously wearing a rosette the size of a
+large cabbage was tendered a particularly deafening ovation.</p>
+
+<p>After these crept Henderson, who, though not a particularly inspiring
+individual, was wildly and vociferously cheered for everything and
+nothing, and after listening awhile to his catch cries,&mdash;which
+differed from those of Walker only in the irritatingly halting and
+unimpressive way they were delivered,&mdash;we rose and scrambled our way
+out, jeered by the old dame as we went, and our departure was further
+commented upon from the platform by the speaker himself, in the
+words&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Getting too hot for some of the ladies," which, if correct, could not
+by any means have been attributed to the winter air or the dull and
+weakly maudlin speech he was trying to deliver.</p>
+
+<p>Walker spoke from a balcony crowded by devotees&mdash;mostly women&mdash;to an
+audience in the street, which was further enlivened by the fighting of
+the numerous dogs I have previously mentioned as addicted to holding
+muni<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span>cipal meetings. Their loud differences of opinion occasionally
+drowned the speakers, and the main street being also the public
+thoroughfare,&mdash;in fact, no less a place than the great Western
+Road,&mdash;there was no by-law or political etiquette to prevent the
+Ministerial band from strolling that way at intervals; so, much to the
+delight of all who were out for fun and the annoyance of those who
+were sensibly interested in the practical welfare of their country,
+and who imagined that the policy of this party would materially better
+matters, the cut-and-dried denouncement of the Ministry was at times
+drowned by the strains of "Molly Riley," "He's a Jolly Good Fellow,"
+and "See the Conquering Hero Comes!"</p>
+
+<p>The followers of Walker contended that Henderson was the worst of
+scorpions to thus come to Noonoon on the last night; but considering
+that he had only addressed Noonoon once to Walker's thrice, as an
+impartial wiggle-waggle I could not help seeing that the
+Ministerialists had most cause for complaint.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn pinned the badge I had acquired to the coat-tail of a local bank
+manager who, though on her side, had lately distinguished himself by a
+public denouncement of "Women's Rights," so savagely virulent and
+idiotically tyrannous in principle as to suggest that his household
+contained representatives of the "shrieking sisterhood," who had been
+one too many for him. The boys who saw the joke enjoyed it very much
+indeed, as he strolled along with the self-importance befitting so
+prominent a citizen.</p>
+
+<p>The beautiful voice of the candidate rose and fell, occasionally
+halting till the usual cheers or guffaws died away, and the meeting
+ended in the customary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[283]</a></span> way. What good to the country was likely to
+accrue from it? On the other hand&mdash;what harm?</p>
+
+<p>To be abroad in the open air with comfort at that time of the year,
+and at that hour of the night, illustrated the beautiful climate of
+that latitude if nothing more, and every one was harmlessly
+entertained, for good-humour characterised the whole affair.</p>
+
+<p>Tea, coffee, and cheese abounded for all comers at the committee rooms
+of Leslie Walker&mdash;the candidate supported by the temperance societies;
+and on behalf of Olliver Henderson there was an "open night" at
+Jimmeny's "pub.," with the result&mdash;as published by the
+Oppositionists&mdash;that boys of fourteen and sixteen were lying drunk in
+the gutters.</p>
+
+<p>The next day, however, was the culmination of the whole thing.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn almost wept that she was not of age to vote, and as I was so
+comfortably indifferent as to which man won, I offered to cast my vote
+for the one she favoured, but she declined.</p>
+
+<p>"That would only be the same as men having the vote and thinking they
+know how to represent us," she said.</p>
+
+<p>But though she couldn't vote she worked hard for her side, and with a
+big rosette of pink and blue decorating her dimpling bosom, and
+streamers of the same flying from her whip and her pony's headstall,
+she was out all day driving voters to the booth, where for the first
+time in that town women produced an electoral right. The Federal
+election had been conducted without them.</p>
+
+<p>In the forenoon Larry Witcom drove Carry to vote in state&mdash;otherwise a
+brand-new sulky he had recently<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[284]</a></span> purchased; and such is human nature
+that we were all sufficiently malicious to be secretly pleased that
+poor old Uncle Jake could not vote at all, because he had only an
+obsolete red elector's right, and he should have procured an
+up-to-date blue one.</p>
+
+<p>It was a genial sunshiny day, and the lucerne and rape fields and the
+Chinese gardens on either hand were beautifully green, as grandma
+noticed when during the afternoon she and I drove in the old sulky to
+cast our vote.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor Jake! I'm sorry he can't vote, though he ain't goin' for my
+man," she remarked. "But don't it seem like a judgment on him for
+bein' so narked about the women bein' set free? That's always the way
+in life. If you are spiteful about anythink it always comes back on
+yourself."</p>
+
+<p>The street opposite the court-house&mdash;for the time converted into a
+polling-booth&mdash;was thronged like a show-day with an orderly crowd of
+citizens of both sexes. The voting had become so congested that
+vehicle loads of voters were being conveyed over to Kangaroo, and each
+contingent set out amid the cheers of small boys, who were most ardent
+politicians.</p>
+
+<p>Laughing and banter were exchanged between people of all ages and
+classes, one as important as the other for the time being.</p>
+
+<p>As we crowded round the door, a jovial-looking man with a twinkle in
+his eyes, as he was unceremoniously shoved against a pillar, announced
+that women should not have been allowed the vote, for its disastrous
+results were already evident in this crush; while the equally
+pleasant-faced policeman, who, as soon as intimation came from within
+that there was a vacancy, wheeled us in like so many bales of wool,
+replied<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Women jolly well have as much right to vote as men, and more, because
+they can do it without getting drunk or breaking their heads."</p>
+
+<p>Many displayed colours and some did not. There was the truculent woman
+who voted as she thought fit, and who loudly advertised this fact; the
+man who voted for Henderson because he lived in the district; and the
+woman who supported Leslie Walker because he was rich and would be
+able to subscribe liberally to all local institutions. A shallow-pated
+Miss favoured Walker because his colours were the prettier; and an
+addle-pated old man balanced this by voting for Henderson because he
+"shouted,"<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> and Walker was temperance. There was a silly little
+flaxen-haired woman who also supported the Opposition to spite her
+husband,&mdash;a Henderson man, and the prototype of Mr Pornsch,&mdash;because,
+being over-grogful, he had made tracks for the polling-booth alone,
+leaving his wife to go as best she could. Alas! there was a poor
+little woman at home who could not vote at all because she had
+succumbed to the gentlemanliness of Leslie Walker, and her husband
+being against him had tyrannously taken her right from her; and there
+was also the woman who <i>would</i> not vote at all, because she considered
+men were superior to women, and boisterously proclaimed this to all
+who would listen, in hopes of currying favour with the men; but
+fortunately this, in the case of the best men, is becoming an obsolete
+bid for popularity. There was the woman who voted for the man her
+father named, and those electors of each sex who voted to the best of
+their discernment great or small. Quite a crop of Uncle Jakes were
+disfranchised through their rights being back numbers, and the
+nobodies who <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[286]</a></span>imagined themselves something altogether too lofty to
+consider anything so mundane as law-making at all, were also rather
+numerous. Ada Grosvenor's bright happy face shone like a star amid her
+companions, and she discharged this duty honestly and thoughtfully as
+she did all others, recognising it as the practical way of working for
+the brave, bright ideals guiding her life.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> To treat to free drinks.</p></div>
+
+<p>Among the electresses were all the same types of vote as cast by men,
+except that those sold for a glass of beer were not so frequent; and
+as civilisation climbs higher, universal suffrage, and the better
+methods of administration to which it will give birth, will be
+exercised for the adjustment of the great human question now so
+trivially divided into squabbles of sex and class.</p>
+
+<p>The bright Australian sun shone with genial approval on all, and in
+the air was a hint of the scent of the jonquils and violets, so early
+in that temperate region. Grandma Clay must not be forgotten, for in
+her immaculate silk-cloth dress and cape, her bonnet of the best
+material, and her "lastings," with her spectacles in one hand and her
+properly-prized electoral right in the other, and her irreproachable
+respectability oozing from her every action, she could not be
+overlooked. As she neared the door the gentlemen and younger ladies
+crowding there politely stood back and cancelled their turn in her
+favour; and Mrs Martha Clay, a flush on her cheeks, a flash in her
+eyes, and with her splendidly active, upright figure carried
+valiantly, at the age of seventy-five, disappeared within the
+polling-booth to cast her first vote for the State Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>What a girl she must have been in those far-off teens when she had
+handled a team of five in Cobb &amp; Co.'s lumbering coaches, when her
+curls, blowing in the rain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[287]</a></span> and wind, had been bronze, when with a
+feather-weight bound she could spring from the high box-seat to the
+ground! Lucky Jim Clay, to have held such vigorous love and splendid
+personality all his own. All his own to this late day, for the old
+dame returning said to me, "This is a great day to me, and I only wish
+that Jim Clay had lived to see me vote;" and there was a pathetic
+quiver in the old voice inexpressibly sweet to the ear of one
+believing in true love.</p>
+
+<p>After Grandma Clay there was myself&mdash;a widely different type of voter.
+In one way it did not matter whether I voted or not. Neither candidate
+had a clear-cut policy to rescue public affairs from their chaotic
+state. The electors themselves had no definite idea what they
+required, but this was in no way alarming&mdash;all the materials for
+national prosperity were at hand, presently matters would evolve, and
+the demand for able statesmen would be filled when the demand grew
+clearly defined.</p>
+
+<p>Which man would do most for women and children was also immaterial;
+the mere fact of women no longer being redressless creatures, but
+invested with rights of full citizenship, was even at that early stage
+having its effect. Politicians were trimming their sails to catch the
+great female vote by announcing their readiness to make issues of
+questions relative to the peculiar welfare of the big bulk of the
+human race represented by women and children. Inspired by women's
+newly-granted power of electing a real representative of their
+demands, would-be M.P.'s were hastening in one session to insert in
+their platform planks which much-vaunted "womanly influence" had been
+unable to get there during generations of masculine chivalry and
+feminine disenfranchisement.</p>
+
+<p>Let the women vote!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As Grandma Clay expressed it, "It ain't what things actually are, it's
+all they stand for." For this reason I meant to exercise my right.</p>
+
+<p>A sovereign in itself may not be much, but to a starving man within
+reach of shops see what it means in twenty shillings' worth of food.
+Similarly the right to vote in a self-governed country meant many a
+mile in the upward evolution of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Countless brave women and good men had sacrificed all that for which
+the human heart hankers, that women should be raised to this estate,
+and what a coward and insolent ignoramus would I be to lightly
+consider what had been so dearly bought and hard fought! And so
+thinking I presented my right, received my ballot-paper, and though
+not bothering to meddle with either candidate's name, I folded it
+correctly, and for the sake of all that stood behind and ahead of the
+right to perform this simple action, dropped it in the ballot-box.</p>
+
+<p>It closed at six o'clock, and then came a lull till the first returns
+should have time to come in. The candidates were not in Noonoon but
+Townend, where the head polling-booth was situated, though nothing
+could have exceeded the excitement in Noonoon.</p>
+
+<p>Grandma said she would wait quietly at home till next day to hear the
+result, but at nine o'clock the strains of a band, the glow of the
+town-lights like a red jewel through the night, and the sound of
+distant cheering proved too enticing to us two left alone in the
+house, so we locked it up, put the pony in the sulky, and sallied
+forth into the winter night, which in this genial climate was pleasant
+in an over-jacket added to one's ordinary indoor attire.</p>
+
+<p>We had the road to ourselves, for the strings of vehicles from which
+it was seldom free were all ahead of us.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[289]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The candidates had tiny globes of electric light representing their
+colours hung across the street from their respective committee rooms,
+and the proprietor of 'The Noonoon Advertiser' had a splendid placard
+erected on his office balcony and well lighted by electricity, on
+which the names of members were pasted as they were elected, and in
+view of this had gathered one of the most good-humoured crowds
+imaginable. Irrespective of party, the hoisting of each name was
+wildly cheered by the embryo electors who, being at that time of life
+when to yell is a joy, took the opportunity of doing so in full.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving grandma in charge of the vehicle I got out to reconnoitre, and
+slipped in among the crowd desiring to be unobserved, but that was
+impossible; a good-tempered man invariably discovered me behind him,
+and insisted upon putting me forward where there was a better view of
+the numbers and names.</p>
+
+<p>"Let the women have a show. This is their first election and it ought
+to be their night," and similarly good-natured remarks in conjunction
+with a little "chyacking" from either party as the numbers fluctuated,
+were to be heard on all sides.</p>
+
+<p>Where were all the insults and ignominy that opponents of women
+franchise had been fearfully anticipating for women if they should
+consent to lower themselves by going to the polling-booth? If one
+excepted the discomfort that non-smokers have to suffer in any crowd
+owing to the indulgence of this selfish, disgusting, and absolutely
+idiotic vice, it was one of the best-mannered crowds I have been
+among.</p>
+
+<p>I espied Larry and Carry carefully among the shades of the trees on
+the outskirts of the gathering, and even in the teeth of a political
+crisis not so thoroughly "up-to-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[290]</a></span>date" that they could forego a
+revival of the old, old story that will outlive voting and many other
+customs of many other times.</p>
+
+<p>Among the crowd of mercurial and lustily cheering boys was my friend
+Andrew, and a little farther on, lo! the knight himself. A motor cap
+was jammed on his warm curls, and a football guernsey displayed the
+proportions of his broad chest as his Chesterfield fell open, while
+with a gaiety and freedom he lacked when addressing girls he exchanged
+comments with some other young fellows, evidently fellow-motorists.</p>
+
+<p>My feeble pulse quickened out of sympathy with Dawn as I caught sight
+of him. It was easy to understand the hastened throb of her heart upon
+first becoming aware of his presence. Who has not known what it is to
+unexpectedly recognise the turn of a certain profile or the
+characteristic carriage of a pair of shoulders, meaning more to the
+inner heart than had a meteor flashed across the sky? Most of us have
+known some one whose smile could make heaven or whose indifference
+could spell hell to us, and those who by some fortuitous circumstances
+have spent their life without encountering either one or both these
+experiences, are still sufficiently human to regret having missed
+them, and to understand how much it could have meant.</p>
+
+<p>Had Dawn's blue eyes yet discovered the goodly sight?</p>
+
+<p>When I presently found her the light in them betrayed that they had.</p>
+
+<p>Her face shone with the inward gladness of a princess when she has
+come into view of a desired kingdom&mdash;whether it shall endure or be
+destroyed and replaced by the greyness of disappointment, depends upon
+the prince reciprocating and making her queen of his heart.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Dora" Eweword was in attendance, so I despatched him to ascertain if
+grandma were all right, and took advantage of his absence to say&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I see Ernest has returned to see the result of Leslie Walker's
+candidature."</p>
+
+<p>"Then it's a wonder he didn't stay in Townend. They'll know the
+results there sooner," she replied with studied indifference.</p>
+
+<p>Our pony fell sound asleep where she stood and in spite of the
+cheering, as though she were well acquainted with women taking a live
+interest in an election. We let her sleep till twelve, when to
+grandma's disappointment Leslie Walker was more than a hundred votes
+behind. There were yet other returns to come in, but these were not
+large enough to alter present results.</p>
+
+<p>When we left the street was still crowded and the cheering unabatedly
+vigorous.</p>
+
+<p>On our way home grandma remarked with satisfaction that Dawn seemed to
+be regarding Eweword sensibly at last, and I seized the opening to
+inquire if she were really anxious that the girl should marry him.</p>
+
+<p>"I am if she couldn't get no one better," replied the old lady, and I
+considered that this condition saved the situation.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III.</h3>
+<p>The poll had been taken on a Saturday, and on Monday both the elected
+and defeated candidates appeared in Noonoon to return thanks.</p>
+
+<p>The former came into town at the head of a long cort&eacute;ge of vehicles,
+and with the red, white, and blue parasols very prominently in
+evidence. The streets were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span> hung with bunting, and at night the newly
+elected M.P. was lifted into a buggy in which he was drawn through the
+streets by youths, at the head of a glorified procession led by a
+brass band; and there were not only little boys covered with
+electioneering tickets from top to toe and yelling as they marched and
+waved flags, but also little girls, now equally with their brothers,
+electors to be. More power to them and their emancipation!</p>
+
+<p>It came on to rain, so black umbrellas, big and business-like, went up
+by dozens around the three special ones, and became an amusing feature
+of the train of miscellaneous people who came to a halt within earshot
+of a balcony in the main street. Henderson was carried upstairs on
+some enthusiasts' shoulders, and when landed there followed the usual
+"gassating" and flattery&mdash;the re-elected member being presented with a
+gorgeous bouquet of red, white, and blue flowers.</p>
+
+<p>A little farther up the street the Walkerites also held a
+"corroboree," where graceful thanks were returned by the Opposition
+candidate, who was overloaded with offerings of blue and white violets
+and narcissi, and amid great enthusiasm dragged in a buggy to the
+railway station.</p>
+
+<p>As they came down the street, though they had the intention of giving
+three cheers for the victors as they passed, the rabble could not be
+expected to anticipate such nicety of feeling, and some young
+irresponsibles attempted to form a barricade across the route.</p>
+
+<p>"Charge!" was then called out by some braw young Walkerites in the
+lead, and mild confusion followed.</p>
+
+<p>I was knocked on to the wheel of Leslie Walker's buggy, from whence I
+was rescued by an old gentleman, himself minus his pipe and cap, but
+good-humouredly laughing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"My word! aren't the other side dying hard?"</p>
+
+<p>"Take care you and I do not also die hard," I replied, stepping out of
+the way of an idiot lad, who, dressed as a jester in Walker's colours,
+was sitting on a horse whose progress was blocked by the crowd, which
+began jibing at the rider.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn, indignant at this, dashed forward like a beauteous and
+infuriated Queen Boadicea, her cheeks red from excitement and the
+winter air, and with her grandmother's flash in her eyes, exclaimed as
+she took the bridle rein&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Cowards, to torment a poor fellow!"</p>
+
+<p>She attempted to lead the animal through, but the torches of the band
+were put before it and the indispensable red, white, and blue parasols
+swirled in its face, till it reared and plunged frantically, catching
+the excited girl a blow on the shoulder with its chest. She must
+inevitably have been knocked down in the street and been trampled upon
+but for the intervention of a hand so timely that it seemed it must
+have been on guard.</p>
+
+<p>Noonoon was by no means an architectural town, and the ugliness of its
+always dirty, uneven streets was now accentuated by the mud and rain,
+but the picture under the dripping flags shown up by the torches of
+the band was very pretty.</p>
+
+<p>The sturdy young athlete thus triumphantly in the right place at a
+necessitous moment, held his precious burden with ease and delight,
+and though she was not in any way hurt she did not seem in a hurry to
+relinquish the arm so willingly and proudly protecting her. The
+expression on the young man's face as he bent over the beautiful girl
+was a revelation to some interested observers but not to me.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, lucky young lady! to be thus opportunely and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[294]</a></span> romantically saved
+from a painful and humiliating if not serious accident!</p>
+
+<p>Oh, happy knight! to be thus at hand at the psychologic moment!</p>
+
+<p>And where was "Dora" Eweword then?</p>
+
+<p>And where was <i>my</i> rescuer? Apparently he had forgotten that he had
+rescued me, or that to have done so was of moment.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, neither of us were in the heyday of youth, and 'tis only during
+that roseate period that we extract the full enchantment of being
+alive, and only by looking back from paler days that we understand how
+intense were the joys gone by.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[295]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="TWENTY-FOUR" id="TWENTY-FOUR"></a>TWENTY-FOUR.</h2>
+
+<h3>LITTLE ODDS AND ENDS OF LIFE.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The electioneering over, the town fell to a dulness inconceivable, and
+from which it seemed nothing short of an earthquake could resuscitate
+it. So great was the lack of entertainment that the doings of the
+famous Mrs Dr Tinker regained prominence, and the old complaints
+against the inability of the council to better the roads awoke and
+cried again.</p>
+
+<p>Two days following Dawn's rescue from the accident, Ernest called upon
+me, and occupying one of the stiff chairs before the fireplace under
+the Gorgonean representations of Jim Clay, looked hopelessly
+self-conscious and inclined to blush like a schoolboy every time the
+door opened, but Dawn did not make her appearance. I knew he had come
+hoping that in averting the accident he had been able to illustrate
+his friendliness towards her, and that she would now meet him as of
+old, so that the little incident of the wash-up water could be
+explained and buried. At last, taking pity on the very natural young
+hope that was being deferred, I excused myself and went in quest of
+Dawn, and found her in her room sewing with ostentatious industry.</p>
+
+<p>"Dawn, won't you come down and speak to Ernest, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[296]</a></span> has called to see
+how you are after your adventure," I said with perfect truth, though
+as a matter of fact he had studiously refrained from mentioning her.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, please don't ask me to go down," she implored excitedly; "you
+seem to have forgotten!"</p>
+
+<p>"Forgotten what?"</p>
+
+<p>"That dish of water," she faltered with changing colour, "and then he
+saved me so cleverly from being trampled on! If he had ridden over me
+I wouldn't have cared, as it would have made things square; but as it
+is, can't you understand that I'd rather <i>die</i> than see him?" said she
+in the exaggerated language of the day, and burying her face in her
+hands.</p>
+
+<p>"I can better understand that you are <i>dying</i> to see him," I returned,
+pulling her head on to my shoulder; "but never mind, you'll see him
+some other day, and it will all come straight in time."</p>
+
+<p>I forbore to press her farther, but that Ernest might not be too
+discouraged I gave him some splendid oranges Andrew had picked for me,
+and said&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Dawn kept these for you, but as she is not visible this
+afternoon I am going to make the presentation."</p>
+
+<p>His face perceptibly brightened, and also noticeable was the brisk way
+he terminated his call upon learning that there was no prospect of
+seeing Dawn that day. I watched him bounding along the path to the
+bridge carrying the oranges in his handkerchief, and watched also by
+another pair of eyes from an upstairs window.</p>
+
+<p>Carry left us during that week, and as she had now fixed her
+wedding-day the tax of wedding presents had to be met. Grandma, in
+bidding her good-bye, presented her with a generous cheque, and paid
+her a fine compliment.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[297]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I wish you well wherever you go, for I never saw another young
+woman&mdash;unless it was meself when I was young&mdash;who could lick you at
+anythink."</p>
+
+<p>Carry's departure put the cap on our quietude at Clay's, but soon a
+movement transpired to stir the stagnation.</p>
+
+<p>The out-voted electors of Noonoon were so galled by their defeat that
+they ignored the British law under which it was their boast to live,
+and refused to acknowledge that the man who had been voted in by the
+majority was constitutionally their representative in parliament. They
+also failed to see that he would serve the purpose quite as well as
+the other man, and to publish their sentiments more fully, determined
+to tender Leslie Walker a complimentary entertainment of some kind,
+and present him with a piece of plate, not as the other side had it,
+in token of his defeat, but owing to the fact that he was actually the
+representative of Noonoon town, having in that place polled higher
+than his opponent. The presentation took the shape of a silver
+epergne. This to a man who probably did not know what to do with those
+he already possessed, a wealthy stranger who had contested the
+electorate for his own glory! Had he been a struggling townsman, who,
+at a loss to his business, had put up in hopes of benefiting his
+country, to have paid his expenses might have shown a commendable
+spirit, but this was such a pure and simple example of greasing the
+fatted sow, that even those who had supported him openly rebelled,
+Grandma Clay among them.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that's the way women crawl to a man because he's got a smooth
+tongue and a little polish," sneered Uncle Jake.</p>
+
+<p>"And some of the men hadn't gumption to get the proper right to vote
+for their man who flew the publican's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[298]</a></span> flag and truckled to the
+tag-rag," chuckled grandma, who was delighted to prove that this
+illustration of crawl had originated with the men.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless it was decided to present the epergne at a select concert
+or musical evening, with Mr and Mrs Leslie Walker sitting on the
+platform, where the audience could gloat upon them. Dawn was asked to
+contribute to the programme, and relieved her feelings to me
+forthwith.</p>
+
+<p>"The silly, crawling, ignorant fools!" she exclaimed. "The first item
+on the programme is a solo by Miss Clay!!!" says the chairman, "and
+I'll come forward and squark. 'Next item, a recitation by Mrs
+Thing-amebob.' Can't you just imagine it?" she said in inimitable and
+exasperated caricature from the folds of her silk kimono. "Good
+heavens! to give a man like that an amateur concert like ours! Do you
+know, they say he is the best amateur tenor in Australia, and his wife
+was a comic opera singer before she married&mdash;so a girl was telling me
+where I get my singing lessons. You'd think even the galoots of
+Noonoon wouldn't be so leather-headed but they'd know their length
+well enough not to make fools of themselves in this way! <i>I</i> know; why
+can't they know too? They like these things themselves, and think
+others ought to like them too. What do they want to be licking
+Walker's boots at all for? We all voted and worked for him; that was
+enough! It will just show you the way people will crawl to a bit of
+money! Oh dear, how Walker must be grinning in his sleeve! I <i>won't</i>
+sing for them!"</p>
+
+<p>But she was not to escape so easily. A member of the committee asked
+grandma "Would she allow her granddaughter to contribute a solo?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course!" said the old lady. "Ain't I getting her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[299]</a></span> singing lessons
+to that end?" and down went the girl's name on the programme, and
+there was war in the Clay household on that account.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't sing yet," protested Dawn. "I can't sing in the old style,
+and can't manage the new style yet."</p>
+
+<p>"Rubbish!" said grandma, who could not be got to grasp the intricacies
+of voice production. "What am I payin' good money away for? It's near
+three months now, and nothing to show for it yet. If you can't sing
+now, you ought to give it best at once; and if you can't sing a song
+for Mr Walker, and show him you've got a better voice than some, I
+think it common-sense to stop your lessons at the end of the quarter."</p>
+
+<p>"My teacher wouldn't let me sing."</p>
+
+<p>"And who's the most to do with you, your teacher or me, pray? Who's
+<i>he</i> to say when you shan't sing or the other thing?" and thus she
+decided the point; but Dawn each night dwelt upon the trouble, while I
+sought to comfort her.</p>
+
+<p>"It is best to sing to the people who know all about singing. They
+will see you have a good voice and appreciate it far more than could
+the ignorant."</p>
+
+<p>A fortnight had to elapse before the date of the concert, and during
+that time Carry's successor arrived in the form of a stout "general,"
+as Dawn averred she had sufficient companion in me, and that a kitchen
+woman was preferable to a lady help.</p>
+
+<p>The pruning of a portion of the vineyard, which had been delayed by
+electioneering matters till now, also took place during this time, and
+Andrew and Uncle Jake, when working in the far corner, made the
+extraordinary discovery of an odontologic gold plate of the best
+quality and in perfect order. The find created quite a sensation.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[300]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As grandma said, it bore evidence that some one had been stealing
+grapes during the season, for any person legitimately in the vineyard
+would have instituted a search for such a valuable piece of property,
+and for a person who could afford such a first-class gold plate to
+steal grapes, showed what <i>some people</i> were. It did indeed, for this
+person had been wont to clandestinely enter her premises to perpetrate
+a far lower grade of crime than pilfering her grapes or destroying her
+vineyard. The incident trickled into the columns of 'The Noonoon
+Advertiser,' in conjunction with the facetious remark that the invader
+would have had to take a lot of grapes to compensate him for what he
+had lost; and it was further stated that the article being useless
+except to him&mdash;its size bespoke it a man's&mdash;for whom it had been
+modelled, he could have it upon giving satisfactory proof that he was
+the owner.</p>
+
+<p>Needless to say, Mr Pornsch did not claim his property, and this
+souvenir was the last we heard of him. Andrew took it to Mr S. Messre,
+dentist, the man who had seemed to consider it unprofessional that to
+fill my teeth should take time, and with him the lad bargained that in
+return for the plate he was to tinker up those teeth whose aching I
+had allayed with the carbolic acid prescribed for me by the other
+dentist.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn and I chuckled in secret, sent a copy of 'The Noonoon Advertiser'
+to Carry, and remarked that it was an ill wind that blew no one any
+good.</p>
+
+<p>During the fortnight preceding the concert, Ernest Breslaw called at
+Clay's several times to see me, and saw me unattended by any extras in
+the form of a beautiful young girl, for Dawn blushingly avoided him.
+He had to fall back on such outside skirmishing as row<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[301]</a></span>ing me on the
+river, and though there was no longer an impending election to furnish
+him with excuse for loitering in Noonoon, he did not speak of
+deserting it in a hurry. He had reached that degree of amorous
+collapse when he could manage to shadow the haunts of his desired
+young lady regardless of circumstances, and grandma began to suspect
+that his attentions had a little more staying power than those of the
+week-end admirer.</p>
+
+<p>Seeing that the "red-headed mug" had reappeared, in the hope of
+permanently extirpating him "Dora" Eweword was anxious to announce his
+engagement, but with threats of immediate extermination if he should
+so much as give a hint of it, Dawn kept him in abeyance, and
+altogether behaved so erratically that Andrew candidly published his
+belief that she had gone "ratty."</p>
+
+<p>Ernest proffered himself as our escort to the Walker presentation, but
+Eweword having previously secured Dawn, Breslaw had to be satisfied
+with my company. I had already presented Andrew with a ticket, and as
+I could not now discard him, I resolved to ignore the injunctions to
+be found in etiquette books, and accept attentions from two gentlemen
+at once. Thus it happened that I, at the despised grey-haired stage,
+sat in state with a most attentive cavalier on either hand, while
+handsome young ladies sat all alone.</p>
+
+<p>We had entered September, and the early flowers had lifted their heads
+on every hand in this valley, where they grew in profusion, and that
+evening were in evidence at women's throats, in men's coats, and in
+young girls' hair. The stage was a bower of heavenly scented bloom,
+and many among the audience held bouquets the size of a broccoli in
+readiness for presentation to the guests of the evening.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[302]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Ernest was holding the pony, which was restive, while Andrew buckled
+her to the sulky, when Dawn came upon the scene after the concert and
+presented me with a huge bunch of flowers, and Eweword also got his
+nag ready for home-going. Dawn had not met Ernest since the night in
+the street, and even now affected not to notice him, so thinking it
+time to take the situation by the horns, I said&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Here is Mr Ernest; you didn't see him because he was standing in the
+shade."</p>
+
+<p>Thus encouraged, he came forward and sturdily put out his hand, and
+Dawn could not very well fail to observe that, as it was of
+substantial build and held where the light shone full on it, so she
+was constrained to meet it with her own, and received, as she
+afterwards confessed, a lingering and affectionate pressure.</p>
+
+<p>It was not of Ernest, however, but of Mrs Walker that she talked that
+night as we prepared for rest, with our washhand basins full of
+violets that had been crowded out of the quantity given to the
+defeated candidate's wife.</p>
+
+<p>"Fancy being lovely like she is! After looking at her I've given up
+all hope. I suppose all I'm fit for is Mrs Eweword&mdash;Mrs 'Dora'
+Eweword; do my housework in the morning and take one of these sulkies
+full of youngsters for a drive in the afternoon like all the other
+humdrum, tame-hen, <i>respectable</i> married women! It's a sweet prospect,
+isn't it?" she said vexedly, throwing herself on the bed.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be absolutely absurd! Look in the glass and you will see a far
+more beautiful face, and one possessed of other qualities that make
+for success."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, nonsense, you only say that to put me in a good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[303]</a></span> humour. But how
+do women find such good matches as Leslie Walker?&mdash;that's what I want
+to know," she continued.</p>
+
+<p>"Either by being beautiful or using strategic ability in the great
+lottery. Mrs Walker probably used both these accomplishments. You can
+achieve similar results by means of the first without the necessity of
+developing the second. Silly girl, marry Leslie Walker's step-brother,
+Ernest Breslaw, and if you do not live happily ever after it will not
+be because you have not been furnished with a better opportunity than
+most people."</p>
+
+<p>She did not remark the relationship I thus divulged, showing that
+Ernest's confidences must have included it.</p>
+
+<p>"A girl can't <i>make</i> a man marry her," was all she said. "I don't know
+how to use strategy, and wouldn't crawl to do such a thing if I
+could."</p>
+
+<p>"Neither would I, but if I loved a man and saw that he loved me, I'd
+secretly hoist a little flag of encouragement in some place where he
+could see it," I made reply.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[304]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="TWENTY-FIVE" id="TWENTY-FIVE"></a>TWENTY-FIVE.</h2>
+
+<h3>"LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM."</h3>
+
+
+<p>Next morning was gloriously spring-like; the violets raised their
+heads in thick mats of blue and white in every available cranny of the
+garden and other enclosures where they were allowed to assert
+themselves, while other plants were opening their garlands to replace
+them, and the air breathed such a note of balminess that Ernest came
+to invite me to a boat-ride.</p>
+
+<p>To the practised eye there were certain indications that he hoped for
+Dawn's company too, but this was out of the question, as under
+ordinary circumstances it is rarely that girls in Dawn's walk of life
+can go pleasuring in the forenoon without previous warning, or what
+would become of the half-cooked midday dinner? So we set out by
+ourselves, and as the boat shot out to the middle of the stream
+between the peach orchards, just giving a hint of their coming glory,
+and past the erstwhile naked grape-canes, not cut away and replaced by
+a vivid green, the rower made a studiedly casual remark, "Your friend
+Miss Dawn spoke to me again at last. I wonder why on earth she threw
+that dish of water on me; did she ever say that she had anything
+against me?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. If you could be a girl for half an hour you'd<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[305]</a></span> know that the man
+to whom she shows most favour is frequently the one she most despises,
+while he whom she ignores or ill-treats is the one she most warmly
+regards."</p>
+
+<p>"How on earth is that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, a species of shyness like your own, which makes you talk freely
+of Dawn and Ada Grosvenor, because you have no particular interest in
+them, whereas there is some name you guard jealously from me," I
+cunningly replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it true that Miss Dawn is engaged to Eweword? If she is let me
+know in time to send her a wedding present. I'd like to, because she's
+your friend," he said with such elaborate unconcern that I had
+difficulty in suppressing a smile. His step-brother, the dilettante,
+would never have been so clumsily transparent in a similar case.</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense; she's as much engaged to you as to him," I said
+reassuringly, and that was all that passed between us on that subject.
+He energetically confined our conversation to the lovely odour from
+the lucerne fields we were passing on the river-bank, but I was not
+surprised that the afternoon's post brought Dawn a letter that
+smothered her in blushes, and plunged her in a gay abstraction too
+complete for either Uncle Jake or Andrew to penetrate.</p>
+
+<p>When we were once more in our big room, commanding a view of the
+Western mail with its cosy lights twinkling across the valley, she
+extended me the privilege of perusing one of the simplest and most
+straightforward avowals of love from a young man to a maiden it has
+been my delight to encounter.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[306]</a></span></p><div class="blockquot"><p>"<span class="smcap">Dear Miss Dawn</span>,&mdash;You will be very surprised at receiving
+such a letter from me, but I hope you will not be offended.
+I have loved you since the first day I saw you, but have
+kept it so well to myself that no one has suspected it,
+perhaps not even yourself. Will you be my wife? I love you
+better than life, and am willing to wait any number of years
+up to ten, if you can only give me hope of eventually
+winning you. I do not expect you to care for me at once, but
+if you can give me hope that you do not dislike me I shall
+be content to wait. You are so beautiful and good, I am
+afraid to ask you to marry me, but I would try hard to make
+you happy, and being in a position to live comfortably, you
+could continue any studies you like." Here followed a most
+business-like and lucid statement of his affairs, and the
+ending&mdash;"Please do not keep me waiting long for a reply, and
+let me know if I am to interview your grandmother. I am sure
+I can satisfy her in regard to my position and
+antecedents.&mdash;Yours devotedly,</p></div>
+
+<p class="sig">"<span class="smcap">R. Ernest Breslaw</span>."</p>
+
+<p>He was honest. Not fearing that his income might tempt a girl of
+Dawn's or indeed any other's station, he had in no way attempted to
+test her affection ere mentioning it. After the manner of his
+type&mdash;one of the best&mdash;he would place complete reliance where he
+loved, and feel sure of the same in return.</p>
+
+<p>"Good heavens! has he really all that money?" she exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"So I believe."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd be able to live the life I want, then. Learn to sing, have lovely
+dresses, and travel about. I'm not thinking only of his money, but
+don't you think people<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[307]</a></span> who marry on nothing are fools and selfish? A
+woman who marries a man who is only able to keep her and her children
+in starvation is a fool, and a man who wants a woman to suffer what
+wives have to, and drudge in poverty, is a selfish brute&mdash;that's what
+I've always thought. As for gassing about love when there's no comfort
+to keep it alive, that's about as foundationless as we, always being
+supposed to think men our superiors, even the ones a blind idiot could
+see are inferior."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you going to marry him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I want to, but what on earth am I to do with 'Dora' Eweword?"</p>
+
+<p>"Break his heart to keep Ernest's together?"</p>
+
+<p>"Break <i>his</i> heart! It's the style to break, isn't it? He can have
+Dora Cowper or Ada Grosvenor, they both want him. If grandma got wind
+of the situation though, she'd put my pot on properly. She'd carry on
+like fury, and let me have neither of them&mdash;that would be the end of
+it. I can't make out why I fooled with that 'Dora' at all. I'll write
+and ask Ernest to give me a week;" and with her characteristic
+promptitude she sat down, and favoured a style as unadorned as that of
+the knight himself.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<span class="smcap">Dear Mr Ernest</span>,&mdash;Your letter received. I care for you, but
+cannot give you a definite answer at once. There may be
+obstacles in the way of accepting your kind offer; if you
+will give me a week to consider matters, I will answer you
+definitely then.&mdash;Yours with love,</p></div>
+
+<p class="sig"><span class="smcap">Dawn</span>."</p>
+
+<p>As she got into bed she said with a happy giggle, "He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[308]</a></span> says he loved
+me from the first day he saw me, and you thought he only came to see
+you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, my dear, you can't expect people whose hearts are broken from
+over-work, and whose hair is grey from want of love, to be as quick as
+beautiful young ladies whose affairs have come to a happy head with a
+splendid young knight;" and what I inwardly thought was, that at all
+events I had discovered the knight's symptoms long before he had done
+so.</p>
+
+<p>"Would you like Mr Ernest and me to marry?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't object," I laconically replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'll marry him as soon as ever he likes if I can get rid of
+'Dora.' I'll see 'Dora' and see if I can do it without a rumpus first,
+but if he hasn't got sense to be quiet, well, I won't give in without
+a fight. Ernest mightn't like it if he knew, but I bet he will have to
+keep dark about worse things on his part if I only knew,&mdash;he's
+different to ninety-nine per cent of men if he hasn't," she said as
+she opened the French lights wider to the crisp breath of scented
+night and blew out the lamp.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mind his hair being red now, do you?" I maliciously
+inquired in the darkness, and though she feigned sleep I knew that
+owing to a delightful wakefulness another beside myself heard the
+splendid music of the trains that night. The style of her breathing
+told that she was still awake some hours later when the old moon
+climbed high and came shining, shining down the valley, divided in two
+by its noble river, and laid out in orchard and agricultural squares.
+The great silver light outlined the glorious hills that walled the
+west away from the little towns and villages, and here and there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[309]</a></span> a
+gleaming white cluster of tombstones bespoke the graveyards where
+slept the early pioneers and the folk who had followed them, and which
+one by one, as opening buds or withered stalks, were settling their
+last earthly score. The little homesteads lay royally, peacefully free
+from danger of molestation amid their wealth of trees and vines.
+Cottages raised on piles, and vain in the distinction of small
+protruding gables, pretentiously called bay windows, and with keys
+rusting for want of use in the cheap patent door-locks, were quickly
+superseding the earlier dwellings. These squat old cots generally had
+thresholds higher than the floors; their home-made slab doors knew no
+fastening but a latch with a string unfailingly on the outside day and
+night, and with their beetling verandahs and tiny box skillions, were
+crouchingly hard set upon the genial plain.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[310]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="TWENTY-SIX" id="TWENTY-SIX"></a>TWENTY-SIX.</h2>
+
+<h3>"OFF WITH THE OLD."</h3>
+
+
+<p>Dawn was not a procrastinator, so she lost no time in sending Eweword
+a message to meet her next night at eight at the corner of the
+Gulagong Road for the purpose of a private talk.</p>
+
+<p>She was going to take something to Mrs Rooney-Molyneux and the baby as
+an excuse to be abroad at that hour of the night, and requested me to
+accompany her, so that she would not be saddled with Andrew as
+protector. We set out immediately after tea, and had time for a chat
+with Mrs Rooney-Molyneux about her son. Both were enjoying good
+health, thanks to the opportune arrival of a well-to-do sister, and
+the fact that, in honour of an heir to his name, the father had lately
+abstained from alcoholic drinks, and made an occasional pound by
+writing letters for people.</p>
+
+<p>We had some trouble to dissuade him from escorting us home, but
+emerged at last without him, and within a few minutes of eight
+o'clock.</p>
+
+<p>The cloudless, breezeless night, though a little chilly, was heavy
+with the odours of spring and free from the asperity of frost. The
+only sounds breaking its stillness were the trains passing across the
+long viaduct approach<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[311]</a></span>ing the bridge. The vehicles which met from the
+two roads&mdash;the Great Western, leading in from Kangaroo, and the
+Gulagong, coming from the thickly-populated valley down the
+river-banks&mdash;had gone into town earlier for the Saturday night
+promenade, and we practically had to ourselves the broad highway,
+showing white in the soft starlight.</p>
+
+<p>I walked behind Dawn, and she, having found Eweword, who had been
+first at the tryst, they came back towards the river a few hundred
+yards and stopped behind some shrubbery, while I took up a place on
+the other side of it, as directed beforehand by this very
+business-like young person, to act as witness in case of future
+trouble.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Dawn, what has turned up?" said the young man after a pause.</p>
+
+<p>"There's something that might explain the situation better than a lot
+of talk."</p>
+
+<p>Claude, alias "Dora" Eweword, struck a match, and upon discovering the
+fragments of his engagement-ring in the piece of paper she had handed
+him, was silent for a minute or two, and then said&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Dawn, so you want it to be all off. I knew that this long while, and
+have been mustering pluck to say so, but it seems you have got in
+before me."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you were going to say you were pulling my leg like you did
+with Dora Cowper?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I was not," and his tone was exceedingly manly. "I was going to
+say that, much as I care, I'd rather let you go free than hold you to
+your agreement when I saw you didn't care for me."</p>
+
+<p>"You were mighty smart!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I'm only a dunce, but even a dunce can liven up sufficiently when
+he's in love to see whether his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[312]</a></span> sweetheart cares for him or not, and
+you didn't take much pains to hide the state of affairs," he said with
+a rueful laugh. "I know enough about girls to know when they really
+care."</p>
+
+<p>"Practice, like," said Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"You can say that if you like," he gravely replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, things were rather mixed, but now I know what I want."</p>
+
+<p>"And that you don't want me?" he interposed.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you can marry Ada Grosvenor or Dora Cowper."</p>
+
+<p>"We can leave that to the future; it doesn't enter into this question
+at all," he said with a dignity that made the girl ashamed of herself.
+"There will be no difficulty about my marrying, the main thing is
+whether you are all right. It's easier for a man than a girl if he
+does make a hash of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Claude, don't be so good and generous, or you'll make me mad
+because I'm not going to have you after all."</p>
+
+<p>"Good and generous! Nonsense! I'm only doing what any decent fellow
+would do; you'd do as much and more for me if things were reversed,"
+he said, taking her hand. "Great Scott, what sort of a crawler did you
+take me for? Did you think I'd cut up nasty about it? Surely you knew
+I'd wish you well even if you were not for me; but won't you tell me
+who it is that has put my light out?"</p>
+
+<p>"Can't you guess?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I suppose it's&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The red-headed mug," put in Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I saw it all along, but that night in the street finished
+matters. I knew my chances were as dead as a door-nail after that. You
+only took me because something went out of gear between you, and
+that's why you made me keep it dark."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[313]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't want to say that, Claude."</p>
+
+<p>"No, but I'm saying it; and now, is there anything else I can do for
+you except wish you luck?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only promise not to let grandma or any one know."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you think it necessary to tell me that. I'd not be likely to howl
+about my set-back. You needn't fear. I'll act with common-sense, and
+pull through. I won't drown myself and haunt you, or any of that sort
+of business," he said cheerfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, thank you more than I can say," she exclaimed enthusiastically;
+"I hope you'll soon find some one better than I&mdash;some one as good as
+yourself. Good-bye!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Dawn, I wish you joy anyhow, and good luck to the fellow who
+has got the best of me. He seems an alright sort from what I can make
+out, and will be able to give you everything you want. Good-bye!" He
+drew her to him, and as she did not resist, kissed her warmly on the
+cheek, and let her go. He wanted to see her to her gate, but she
+dismissed him, and he walked away through the spring night whistling a
+cheery air. When he was safely gone I came out from hiding, and taking
+Dawn's arm moved homewards.</p>
+
+<p>The girl was weeping, but so softly that I was not aware of it till
+her warm tears fell on my hand.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, the never-ending fret and fume of being! When it is not discarded
+love or jealousy that is agitating the human bosom, it is unsatisfied
+ambition, the worry of parental responsibility, or loneliness and
+regret that one has never tasted them. The past&mdash;what has it been? The
+future&mdash;what will it be? The present&mdash;what does it matter? but a
+thousand curses on its pin-pricks, wounding like sword-thrusts, and
+which all must endure!</p>
+
+<p>"Oh dear, I wish he hadn't been so nice," sobbed the girl. "He has
+made me feel so ashamed that I don't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[314]</a></span> think I'm fit to marry Ernest! I
+wish he had been nasty to me, and then I wouldn't have cared. But you
+don't think he cares, do you? Listen to him whistling so merrily!"</p>
+
+<p>"It is not those who whine loudest who feel most."</p>
+
+<p>"But men don't really have any feelings in this sort of thing, do
+they?"</p>
+
+<p>"Feeling is not peculiar to any section or sex of the community, but
+to a percentage of all humanity. This is my belief, but I cannot
+attempt to judge which feel and which do not."</p>
+
+<p>"Who would have dreamt of him being so sweet-natured about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nobility of character and unselfishness are also traits we cannot
+find in any set place."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I hadn't been such a cat. I can't forgive myself."</p>
+
+<p>I smiled happily as Eweword's action bespoke a character more in
+keeping with his imposing physique than that betrayed when he had
+vulgarly spoken of pulling a girl's leg. That had been like seeing a
+beautiful house occupied by nothing but poachers, and I loved
+humanity, so that it always hurt to see even the meanest individual do
+less than their best.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, cheer up," I said. "Take care not to similarly transgress
+again. We all are constantly committing regrettable actions, but so
+long as we are careful not to repeat them we may hope to make some
+headway."</p>
+
+<p>So the knight received a favourable reply, and the man supplanted by
+him went another way.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[315]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="TWENTY-SEVEN" id="TWENTY-SEVEN"></a>TWENTY-SEVEN.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"One might think better of marriage if one's married friends
+would not confide in one so much."&mdash;<i>Reflections of a
+Bachelor Girl.</i></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Mrs Martha Clay proved a little obstreperous in regard to Ernest
+Breslaw filling the position of grandson-in-law.</p>
+
+<p>"You always get what you don't want," said she; "an' that's why one of
+the same class as treated me daughter so shocking is now to be
+pesterin' me for me grandchild in the same way. A girl of the decent
+class wants to look a long time before she leaps with one of them
+swells. They just take to a girl out of their own click out of the
+contrariness of human nature, and then by-and-by give 'em a dog's
+life. I know there's bad in all classes, but them upstarts have so
+much more licence to be up to bad capers,&mdash;that's where it comes in.
+And anyhow I ain't breakin' me neck to have Dawn married. None of my
+people ever had any trouble to get married, an' she can wait a bit an'
+look round an' see if this feller can stand the test of waitin',"
+concluded the old dame, with the light of conflict in her steel-blue
+eye.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately I was able to bring forward a seductive statement of the
+case. Walker&mdash;the man who had made the money for Breslaw and his
+step-brother&mdash;had been a grand level-headed old labourer, and though
+his sons had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[316]</a></span> been educated in the great English schools, they were
+not far removed from honest utilitarian folk, and owing to this, and
+in conjunction with Dawn, when her real name was divulged,&mdash;being a
+daughter of one of the "old families," to wit, the Mudeheepes of
+Menangle, the old dame consented to be reconciled.</p>
+
+<p>Now that the oppression of Carry had been removed, Mrs Bray came over
+and beamed upon us in her usual inspiriting way.</p>
+
+<p>The electioneering gossip having died out, she reopened the old budget
+concerning the misdoings of the Noonoon aristocracy, and once more the
+name of Mrs Tinker figured so largely on the bill that I deeply
+regretted my inability to encounter this much-discussed individual.</p>
+
+<p>However, when Dawn flung into the quiet pool the bomb of her
+approaching wedding with one of the best "catches" of New South Wales,
+all other topics faded into insignificance, and every woman who had
+the slightest acquaintance with the bride-elect called on her to warn
+her against the horrors to be discovered after she had irrevocably
+taken the contemplated step in the dark.</p>
+
+<p>As Dawn was going to take it speedily, they were very enthusiastic and
+unanimous in their evidence against the married state under present
+conditions, and the thoughtful student of life on listening to the
+testimony of these women of the respectable useful class, supposed to
+be comfortably and happily married, will know that notwithstanding the
+great epoch of female enfranchisement the workers for the cause of
+women have yet no time for rest.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn was so visibly worried by the revelations made to her in the most
+natural way, that grandma<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[317]</a></span> grew concerned and published her mind on
+the subject.</p>
+
+<p>"Women ought to hold their tongues and let young girls come to things
+gradual. To have it thrust upon them sudden is too much of a
+eye-opener for them. The way women tell how their husbands treat them
+nowadays is surprisin'. We all know that with the best of men marriage
+ain't a path of roses, but in my day women kep' it to theirselves.
+They suffered it in silence and thought it was the right thing, but
+they're getting too much sense now; and perhaps all this cryin' out
+against it will be a means to an end, for a grievance can't be
+remedied till it's aired, that's for certain," said she.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs Bray was in great form during those days, and though her
+assertions frequently lacked logic, and betrayed in her the very
+shortcomings which she railed against in men, nevertheless I liked
+her, for she blurted out that with which the little quiet woman rules
+by keeping it in the background, well hidden under seeming humility.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Dawn," said she on one of these occasions, "when you get a
+home of your own, take my advice and don't never let no other woman in
+it. You can't, seein' what men are. There's no trustin' none of them,
+and if you think you can you'll find yourself sold. And try soon as
+ever you're married to get something into your own hands, as a married
+woman is helpless to earn her livin'; and once you have any children
+you're right at the mercy of a man, and if he ain't pleased with you
+in every way you're in a pretty fix, because the law upholds men in
+every way. If you don't feel inclined to be their abject slave they
+can even take your children from you, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[318]</a></span> what do you think of that?
+It shows we ain't got the vote none too soon, I reckon! I'm not sayin'
+that you'll get that kind of a crawler; some of them is good,&mdash;a jolly
+sight better than some of the women,&mdash;but the most, when you come to
+live with them, is as hard as nails. They don't know how to be nothing
+else. They never know what it is to be quite helpless and dependent,
+so what do they care. They just glory and triumph over women bein'
+under them, because they know there's nothing to bring them down, and
+you want to set your wits to get some hold on a man,&mdash;he has plenty on
+you by law and everything else,&mdash;get some property or something in
+your name so that he can't make a dishcloth of you altogether. Bein'
+rich you'll have a somewhat easier time, but it's when you've got
+mountains of work, when you ain't feelin' as strong as Sandow for it,
+an' have one child at your skirts an' another in your arms, an' your
+husband to think women ain't intended for nothink better,&mdash;that this
+is God's design for 'em, like most men do,&mdash;it's then that married
+life ain't the heaven some young girls think it's goin' to be. This
+ain't a description of no uncommon case but among them all around you,
+and supposed to be the fortunate ones. I think girls want warnin', so
+they ain't goin' into it with their eyes shut."</p>
+
+<p>The picture painted by this lady was duplicated by sadder pictures of
+the small worn type, and some weeks of this brought us to advanced
+spring and a bride-to-be so worried and unhappy that she had lost her
+appetite and the roses from her cheeks, and grew visibly thinner.</p>
+
+<p>Ernest, who managed to snatch a little time from worshipping his
+bride-elect wherein to superintend the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[319]</a></span> furnishing of his house, was
+exceedingly sensitive that his affianced should look so perceptibly
+miserable.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think she doesn't care for me, and would like to be released?
+I'd rather die than marry her if she doesn't want me," he would say,
+sometimes with haughtiness and more often with anger. "Good gracious!
+I don't know why she thinks I'm going to belong to the criminal class.
+Goodness knows, if I were to judge her the same way there are plenty
+wives would scare even a Hottentot from matrimony, and if I were to
+express to Dawn any fears of her being similar, I bet you'd hear of
+our engagement coming to a sudden death. You seem to understand her
+better than I do, so say a good word for me if you can."</p>
+
+<p>My opinion of him being so high, saying a word in his favour gave me
+delight, and I took the first opportunity of saying a good many. At
+the end of one day, after Dawn had been subjected to a particularly
+gruesome account of what she might expect, I found her face downwards
+on her bed, weeping bitterly, and elicited&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going to tell Ernest to-morrow that I won't marry him. It's too
+terrible&mdash;they all tell you the same. I'd rather earn my living in
+some other way while I'm able. I'd rather throw up the thing now when
+most of my trousseau is ready than go on if one quarter of what they
+say is true. I'm not one of those fools who think life is going to
+turn out something special for me. Before these women were married I
+suppose they thought their husbands were going to be kings, but see
+how they have panned out, and why should I expect any better?"</p>
+
+<p>Time had arrived to take the subject in both hands, so I gripped it
+firmly.</p>
+
+<p>"You must be thankful to gain one point at a time," I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[320]</a></span> said, beginning
+with the lightest end of my argument. "A little while since you feared
+you were fated for the life of those around&mdash;household drudgery, with
+an occasional sulky drive in the afternoon; now that you have escaped
+that prospect you are haunted by worse possibilities. No doubt you
+hear some saddening and deplorable stories, for some of the laws
+relating to marriage are degrading, and the lot of the married woman
+in the working class where she is wife, mother, cook, laundress,
+needlewoman, charwoman, and often many other things combined, is the
+most heartbreakingly cruel and tortured slavery; but you are escaping
+the probability of such a purgatorial existence. Take comfort in
+knowing that a great percentage of men are infinitely superior to the
+laws under which they live, because law is determined by public
+opinion, and though it restrains and modifies public behaviour it will
+not mould private character. Law is shaped for the masses, but there
+is a small percentage of individuals in either sex who are superior to
+any workable law, and I think Ernest Breslaw is one of these."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you?" she said, sitting up eagerly. "Would you marry him without
+any fear if you were me?"</p>
+
+<p>"I would&mdash;right at once. In spite of all its shortcomings I have a
+profound belief that not woman, as the poet has it, but all humanity&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Holds something sacred, something undefiled,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some quenchless gleam of the celestial light.'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The rain that was temporarily washing the perfume from the flowers
+pattered against the window-panes and accentuated the silence, till I
+added&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I will tell you my history some day, so that you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[321]</a></span> may see that when I
+have belief in my fellows how little reason you have to fear. I have
+been an actress, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; Ernest told me."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'll tell you about it one day." I did not mention that I had
+expressly requested Ernest to keep my past a secret. However, I was
+not displeased that he had been unable to do so. If a man of his
+inexperience, and in the zenith of his first overwhelming passion, had
+been able to keep such a secret in the teeth of his love's wheedling,
+he would have proved himself of the stuff to make an ambassadorial
+diplomat, but not of the calibre to be the affectionate, domesticated
+husband, having no interests of which his wife might not be
+cognisant&mdash;the only character to whom I could without misgiving
+entrust the hot-headed Dawn.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[322]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="TWENTY-EIGHT" id="TWENTY-EIGHT"></a>TWENTY-EIGHT.</h2>
+
+<h3>LET THERE BE LOVE.</h3>
+
+
+<p>I so nearly "pegged out" with an attack that fell to my lot a little
+time after the election, that Dr Smalley considered it advisable to
+summon Dr Tinker to a consultation, but sad to say I was too comatose
+to have become acquainted with the husband of the famous Mrs Tinker,
+whose individuality afforded considerable interest, because it was
+very conspicuous when surrounded by the neutrality of life in Noonoon.
+However, with the aid of some "powltices" constructed by Grandma Clay
+and energetically applied by Mrs Bray, and because my hour had not yet
+come, against the time when we slid into a splendid October I was
+tottering about once more.</p>
+
+<p>During my time of confinement the old valley had put on its finishing
+touches of spring glory. Only a few golden oranges now remained on the
+trees, and amid the bright green leaves were thick clusters of waxy
+bloom. The perfume from them was heavenly, and sometimes almost too
+powerful after the sun had toppled behind the great level-browed range
+which, viewed from the plain, guarded the west of the valley of
+Noonoon like a mighty wall. Some of the land had been cultivated for a
+century without attention to artificial renewal of its fertility, but
+still<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[323]</a></span> it gave forth a wondrous variety and wealth of vegetation. The
+widespreading cedars hung out their scented bloom like heliotrope
+flags amid surrounding greenery of pine, plane, poplar, and loquat,
+and the peach and apricot orchards contributed banks of their delicate
+flowers, which in the glory of their massed bloom could have
+out-Japanned Japan. Along the lanes, where their stones had been
+thrown, they sprang up and bloomed and bore liberally; roses of many
+kinds and colours clambered up verandah posts and peeped over fences;
+the garden plots were like compressed bouquets; the brilliant,
+graceful, and exquisitely perfumed pink oleanders grew wild in the
+fields; and altogether the vale of melons had graduated to a valley of
+flowers.</p>
+
+<p>The days had stretched out so that the mail from the far West trundled
+down the mountains in time to cross the queer old bridge across the
+Noonoon at daybreak, and the first beams of morning turned its windows
+to gold as the waking flowers were lifting their dew-drenched heads
+and the soft white mists were dispersing themselves betimes from the
+plains dotted with ramshackle little homes and cut into squares by
+barbed-wire fences. The weather had warmed, so that the fashionables'
+week-end exit to the cool Blue Mountains had begun; and the youngsters
+near the railway line sometimes left their play and stood agape in the
+soft twilight to watch the governor's car, painted in a strikingly
+different colour to all the others and emblazoned with the British
+coat of arms, go by.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Jake, a hired man, and Andrew were very busy on the farm, and we
+none the less engaged in the house, where every article of furniture
+was made a receptacle for drapery and haberdashery, and where the
+wedding was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[324]</a></span> the only subject. It so often gave Andrew the "pip" that
+his constitution must have been seriously impaired by such frequent
+attacks of this complaint.</p>
+
+<p>In those days Dawn was too engrossed to take me for drives, and Ernest
+too occupied to pull me on the historic stretch of water running like
+the moats of old beside his lady's castle, so that Ada Grosvenor, in
+her office of doing good to all with whom she came in contact, stepped
+into the breach, and sought to aid my recovery by taking me for gentle
+exercise.</p>
+
+<p>It was one day when we had driven east from Noonoon that she
+remarked&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"It's a wonder that Mr Breslaw would care for Dawn's style when he
+moves in such a smart set. She is a handsome girl, which covers a
+multitude of sins in that respect, but still she is very downright,
+and&mdash;and, well, doesn't quite conform to the rules of refinement."</p>
+
+<p>I only smiled, and waited till the pony's head was turned for home,
+when I covered the necessity for reply by admiring the incomparable
+panorama before us. From the altitude we had reached on the Sydney
+road, we could see above the unbroken line of the horizon west from
+Noonoon town, and the Blue Australian Mountains stretched across the
+view in an endless succession of round-topped peaks painted in their
+matchless cerulean tints, which, near the end of day, were royal in
+their splendour. For a hundred miles they reigned supreme before the
+fringe of the endless plains was reached&mdash;peak after peak, gorge on
+gorge, tier upon tier of beetling walls of rock, disclosing dim
+shadowy gullies clothed with greenery and ferns where abounded
+cascades of water and dewy springs in romantic and unrivalled
+solitude. The sun, surrounded by a gorgeous pageant of flame and
+gold,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[325]</a></span> rested his chin on one of the peaks as though well pleased with
+the glowing snowless scene that his offices had in part created, and
+lingered a moment ere giving it up to the eager night. She sent her
+forerunners,&mdash;twilight, which paled the wondrous blues, and dusk, that
+left the mountains shadowy and indistinct, when the lady of darkness
+herself rubbed them right out of the great canvas, and left it no
+coloured beauty but the gleam of the far stars overhead and the tiny
+man-made lights below, which, showing from the windows of the little
+homesteads creeping up the mountain-sides, twinkled like points
+between earth and sky.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Grosvenor made no further comment regarding Dawn's probable
+inability to rise to the demands of smart society. Only inexperience
+had caused her to make any. Ernest fluttered in the smart set; he and
+I were familiar with it; Miss Grosvenor was not, therefore we were
+disillusioned and she was not.</p>
+
+<p>We knew that the acme of refinement and culture might possibly be
+found in the smart set, but that it was a very small island,
+surrounded by a very large sea of other styles which spoke nothing so
+much as squandered opportunities. We knew girls too superior to dress
+themselves without a maid, yet who rolled tipsy to bed after every
+champagne orgy; supercilious and much-paragraphed misses educated in
+England, finished in Paris, and presented at Court, but who used more
+slang than grooms; while an expensive education did not raise their
+brothers above ribaldry and other vulgar excesses. Ernest and I knew a
+beautiful, honest, intelligent girl when we had the good fortune to
+meet her, and had no fears that she could not hold her own in good
+sets, let alone in the smarter ones of colonial or any other
+fashion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[326]</a></span>able society, where the majority were animated by nothing
+higher than an insane and inane pursuit of something to kill time.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, it was wonderful how Dawn suddenly eschewed slang and
+conspicuous violation of syntax, as she could easily do, for she had
+been somewhat educated in a school patronised by the Australian <i>beau
+monde</i>. Had not her grandma told me of the magnitude of her education
+when I had first arrived? and did she not constantly repeat the story
+now? For having survived the fear of Ernest being too aristocratic,
+she took pride in his worldly possessions and position, and
+characterised him as "more likely than most, if he only turns out true
+to name, which in the case of husbands is as rare as bought seed
+potatoes turnin' out what they're supposed to be; but there ain't any
+good of meeting troubles half-way."</p>
+
+<p>As the wedding preparations made so much bother, grandma got in a
+woman to clean and another to sew, and determined to admit no summer
+boarders until after Christmas.</p>
+
+<p>"I can do without 'em, only I like to see money changin' hands quicker
+than happens with a farm," said she; while also, in consideration of
+the wedding, the doors, whose opening and shutting had been obstructed
+by the ravages of the white ants, were at last satisfactorily
+repaired.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn, after the manner of most youthful brides, was desirous of the
+full torture of "keeping up" her wedding, while Ernest, as usual with
+bridegrooms, so shrunk from display that he would have paid half a
+year's income to escape it; but it was only to me he made this
+confession, to Dawn he was manfully unselfish, allowing her full rein
+and agreeably falling in with her requirements.</p>
+
+<p>I did not think much of fussy weddings, but these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[327]</a></span> were such a
+splendid pair of young things that I was pleased to endure the
+preparations with a smile instead of a sigh, and contribute some old
+silks and laces towards the trousseau; while a few dainty and
+expensive trifles, sent to me from a traveller over the sea, found a
+place in the furnishing of the bride's boudoir.</p>
+
+<p>Like all strictly reared girls, a certain prudishness at first caused
+Dawn to shrink from her love as something that should be resisted, but
+as her wedding-day drew near her heart grew more at peace regarding
+her contemplated change of life, and unfolded to the enchanting
+influence of youth's master passion. The roseate mists it weaves
+before the vision of its happy and willing victims, blunted even this
+girl's exceptional and matter-of-fact perspicacity, and with her ears
+grown suddenly deaf to those who had at first alarmed her by the
+recapitulation of their unfortunate practical and disillusioning
+experiences, looked out towards a future beautified with as many
+shades of blue as the mountain ramparts beyond the river flowing by
+her door. There was no hitch to speak of. Grandma, being one of a
+bygone brigade, enforced the almost obsolete rule of a chaperon, and
+the two evils in this case being represented by Andrew and me, Dawn
+considered me the lesser, and installed me in the office known by the
+irreverent as "gooseberrying."</p>
+
+<p>Mostly it is a thankless and objectionable undertaking, but in this
+instance it was delightful, and we three spent a kind of antenuptial
+honeymoon that was an experience to be appreciated with a warm glow by
+one whom the world has all gone by.</p>
+
+<p>I suddenly developed a latent artistic ambition, and no subject would
+do for my brush but the exquisite scenes far up the quiet river, where
+its deep clear pools lay like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[328]</a></span> basins under the overhanging cliffs,
+and numerous species of beautiful flowering creepers clambered over
+the cool brown rocks shaded by the turpentine and gum-trees, ti-tree,
+wild cotton-bush, native hibiscus, and an endless variety of trees and
+shrubs getting a foothold in the crevices. These nooks, owing to the
+rugged and precipitous country, could only be reached by water, so
+Ernest rowed me up by boat and Dawn went with me for company, for thus
+do we live the best of our lives under pretence of trivial outside
+actions. The river was dotted with other boaters on these summer
+afternoons, and Grandma Clay's "Best Boats on the River" were seldom
+idle, while Uncle Jake was also occupied in collecting the tariff from
+those who hired them, and in seeing that the boats themselves were
+safely moored again after their jaunts.</p>
+
+<p>I fear that I may have been a better chaperon from Dawn's point of
+view than from grandma's, but even chaperons, however great their
+diplomacy, cannot well serve two mistresses. While I sketched, the
+young couple made horticultural expeditions up the river-banks where
+the cliffs were not too precipitous, and though they went beyond my
+sight and hearing, and after a couple of hours' absence returned with
+no better specimens of ferns and flowers than were to be plucked
+within a stone's-throw of the boat, I failed to remark it. They were
+equally lenient in the matter of my feeble sketches, which never
+progressed beyond a certain stage, and which could have been equally
+well perpetrated at home from memory, for all the justice they did the
+exquisite little gems of the picturesque river scenery. Grandma Clay,
+however, thought them fine, and as the demand for them was not likely
+to be greater than the supply, I generously pre<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[329]</a></span>sented her with one,
+unfinished and all though it was, and which she "hung on the line"
+with Jim Clay; and no doubt it was not so great a caricature of the
+beauty of the Noonoon as the "enlargements" were of the comeliness of
+their dead original in the days when he had told life's sweetest story
+to the dashing damsel who could handle her coaching team of five with
+as much complacence as her granddaughter drove her small fat pony in
+the little yellow sulky about the execrably rough but level roads of
+Noonoon municipality.</p>
+
+<p>This month of real orange blossoms was a time of moonlight, and
+regardless of the fact that the river scenes were at their best for
+reproduction on canvas, when the sun was high enough above the gorges
+to send great quivering shafts of sunlight between the tree-trunks
+deep into the heart of the pools, and to cast the shadow of the gum
+leaves in lace-like patterns on their surface, we sometimes delayed
+our setting out till close upon sundown, and took a billy<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> and
+provisions, intent upon having our tea on the rocks under the trees by
+Noonoon's banks.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> A tin pail.</p></div>
+
+<p>Ah! glorious summer hours on the happy Noonoon, amid-stream, bright in
+the hot afternoon sun, cool by the edges where the lilies and reeds
+abounded, and the beetling cliffs and the limitless eucalypti flung
+their shade.</p>
+
+<p>There was a joy in going abroad when the sun was nearly on the blue
+wall of mountain, and its oblique beams poured a golden mist over the
+blossoming orangeries, the milk-white spir&aelig;a in Clay's drive, and
+intensified the gorgeous red of the regal pomegranate blooms showing
+against the heliotrope on the lower limbs of the umbrageous cedars.
+Coming down the little pathway gained <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[330]</a></span>by the creaking garden gate, we
+shot out from among the drooping willows, the steerswoman turning her
+face up-stream where, in a southerly direction, the ranges were cut in
+a great V-shaped rift that let the waters through. Anxious to escape
+from the company and critical observation of the garden species of the
+local boater, we went a long way up-stream. Seven or eight miles were
+but a bagatelle to the amateur sculling champion of the State that
+held the world's championship, and he pulled his freight past the
+evidence of husbandmen, past the straight historic stretch where the
+Canadian champion had lost his laurels to New South Wales; on, on the
+strong arms took the craft till a wall of mountain loomed straight
+across our way, and the river had every appearance of coming to a
+sudden end, but round a sudden surprising elbow we went till a similar
+prospect confronted the navigator, and the river came round another of
+its many angles. On, on we steered till the warm rich scent from the
+flowering vineyards was left behind and the sound of the trains could
+not be heard. Far up the ravines beyond the pasture lands and men's
+habitations, we found the desired privacy, and the solitude was broken
+only by the dip of the oars, the flash of an occasional water-fowl,
+the cry of some night-bird, or the "plopping" of the fishes that
+Andrew could never catch as they fell back after rising to snatch some
+unwary insect. The gentle breezes sighing down the gullies, dim and
+lone in the eerie moonlight, were laden with the scent of wattle and
+other native flowers, and otherwise fresh and sweet with the
+inexpressible purity of summer night on the great unbroken bush-land.
+In such dryad-like resorts we were tempted to dawdle so long that the
+big hours of the evening frequently found us still on the breast of
+the river. I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[331]</a></span> was wont to recline on an impromptu couch of rugs in the
+bottom of the well-built craft identified with our excursions, where I
+could feign to be asleep. At first Dawn suspected me of only
+pretending, but I was so emphatic in declaring that the fresh air and
+motion of the boat induced the sleep I could not woo in bed, that they
+grew to believe me, and carefully covering me from mosquitoes, it
+became invariable that at a certain distance on our homeward way the
+rower relinquished rowing, the steerer stopped steering, and the boat
+drifted down-stream with the gentle flow, while two-thirds of its
+occupants tasted of the elixir&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"That burns beneath the beauty of the rose,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And in the hearts of youth and maiden glows,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And fills and thrills the world with life and light,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And is the soul of all that breathes and grows."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And what did the old moon see in that peaceful valley ere she sank
+behind the great primeval gum-tree forests on the mountain crests,
+across which zigzagged the noisy trains? There were heavy crops above
+ground, vineyards abloom, orchards forming fruit, hundreds of
+comfortable homes, and no doubt many pairs of lovers abroad, for
+lovers love their friend the gentle moon; but none were more fitted
+for love's consummation than the two drifting on the old river whose
+limpid waters never again "shall blacken below, spear and the shadow
+of spear, bow and the shadow of bow," and which, after rushing a
+tortuous way between its wild gorges, steadies by the old settlement
+on the plain, and saunters smooth and straight and deep a space
+between fertile banks gardened with lucerne fields, orchards of peach
+and apricot, and delightful orange groves. The air was intoxicatingly
+heavy with the ex<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[332]</a></span>quisite perfume of these bridal blooms, and the
+soft-scented breezes laughed as they too kissed the close-pressed lips
+of the fair young pair who&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Gathered the blossom that rebloom'd, and drank<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The magic cup that filled itself anew."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Ah! Love's idyllic hours on the breast of a grandly gliding river,
+when the dews were on the flowers, and all was enchantingly sweet and
+fair under the sleep-time silver of a southern summer moon!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[333]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="TWENTY-NINE" id="TWENTY-NINE"></a>TWENTY-NINE.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The savage sells or exchanges his daughter, but in
+civilisation the man gives his away, and is thankful for the
+opportunity."&mdash;<i>Reflections of a Bachelor Girl.</i></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Dawn took a great deal of her own way, Ernest and I were privileged to
+make suggestions so long as we were careful to remember our
+insignificance, and grandma saw to it that her lawful rights were not
+altogether usurped.</p>
+
+<p>Occasionally it fell to my lot to act in a slightly mediatorial
+capacity, owing to the divergence of the swell wishes of the
+bridegroom-elect, and the plebeian determination of his
+grandmother-in-law to be, regarding the wedding celebrations, but
+Ernest was exceptionally unselfish and therefore very long-suffering.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn being under age, her grandmother came forward with a project that
+her father should be apprised of what was transpiring, requested to
+give his daughter away, and to bring some of his side of the house to
+the wedding. Dawn raised vigorous opposition.</p>
+
+<p>"It would be like my father's presumption to interfere in any way,
+considering his career with my mother. I hate him for a mean coward.
+He's the very style of man I'd be ashamed to acknowledge as an
+acquaintance yet alone own as a <i>father</i>! I'd like to see him dare to
+give me away,&mdash;he'd have to own me first!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[334]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well, Jake, there, will have to give you away then," said grandma.</p>
+
+<p>"I'd give <i>him</i> away with pleasure," replied Dawn. "If I <i>must</i> be
+<i>given</i> away like a slave or animal, you'll give me away grandma, or
+I'll stay where I am. 'Who giveth this woman to be married to this
+man?' the old parson will ask; why won't he also ask, 'Who giveth this
+man?' as if he too were only a chattel belonging to some one?"</p>
+
+<p>That she would be disposed of by no one but her grandmother rather
+pleased the old lady than otherwise; so she invested in yet another
+black silk gown, over which she was to wear a seldom seen cape of
+point lace worked by Dawn's mother; and she also purchased a wonderful
+bonnet, and armed herself with a new pair of "lastings." Thus Dawn was
+to have her way in this particular, but the old dame adhered to her
+original intention in the matter of the Mudeheepes.</p>
+
+<p>"I've kep' 'em at bay long enough now. I'll just acknowledge 'em this
+once, or it will seem as if you was a 'illegitimate,'" said she in the
+plenitude of her worldly wisdom, and thereupon "writ" a stiff though
+not discourteous letter to Dawn's father, inviting any number of the
+bride's relatives up to six, to come and spend a week before the
+wedding in her home, for the purpose of making Dawn's acquaintance.</p>
+
+<p>"There, I have done me duty, and they can suit theirselves whether
+they come or go to Halifax," she remarked as she despatched the
+communication.</p>
+
+<p>They came. Dawn's father, his second wife, and his youngest sister,
+Miss Mudeheepe, arrived three days before the wedding and remained to
+grace the ceremony.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn, being a mere girl, perhaps it was Ernest's wealth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[335]</a></span> and position
+induced them to meet Mrs Martha Clay's overture, for they were
+thorough snobs, but if they had come prepared to patronise, their
+intention was killed ere it bore fruit.</p>
+
+<p>The hostess hired the town 'bus to convey them from the station, and
+despatched Andrew, with many injunctions to "conduct hisself with
+reason," to meet them there, while she and Dawn waited to receive them
+on one of the old porches. It was a bower of roses and pot-plants, and
+further shaded by a graceful pepper-tree, and made a beautiful frame
+for the grandmother and the maiden,&mdash;the old dame so straight and
+vigorous, the girl as roseate and fresh as her name, but each equally
+haughty and bent upon maintaining their iron independence of the
+people who had discarded the girl and her mother ere the former had
+been born.</p>
+
+<p>Personal appearance was much in their favour, and no practised belle
+of thirty could have held her own better than the inexperienced girl
+of nineteen, whose native wit and downright honesty of purpose were
+more than equal to all the diplomacy of thrust and parry to be gained
+by living in society. Her stepmother, who was apparently as
+good-natured as she seemed brainless, was prepared to be gushing, but
+that was nipped in the bud by the way Dawn extended her pretty, firm
+hand with the dimpling wrist and knuckles and exquisitely tapering
+fingers.</p>
+
+<p>Her father and aunt, who were tall and angular, with thin faces of
+dull expression, met a similar reception, and she presented them to me
+herself, explaining that I was a very dear friend with her for the
+wedding.</p>
+
+<p>I had long since risen from a boarder to be a guest and friend of the
+house, and it had devolved upon me to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[336]</a></span> exhibit the presents and
+interview the endless callers at this time of nine days' wonder.</p>
+
+<p>It being hot, the ladies retired to doff their hats ere partaking of
+afternoon tea, and Dawn took her father's hat while he trumpeted in
+his handkerchief and attempted a few commonplace platitudes from the
+biggest and stiffest arm-chair in the "parler," into which he had
+subsided. I left the room, but could hear him from where I stood
+awaiting the ladies' reappearance, one from the room that had been
+Miss Flipp's and the other from the one I had at first occupied, and
+Mr George Mudeheepe was to occupy the third one of these apartments,
+which had been empty since the tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>"Dawn, my dear, you are your mother once again," he said with a sigh;
+"I have never seen you, and now you are sufficiently grown to be
+married."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said the girl.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you give me a kiss?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'd rather not. You see you are only a stranger to me. I have never
+heard of you only as the man who was a monster to my mother. I never
+saw her, but I remember to love her for what she did for me, whereas
+you, what did you do for her and me? I would like you to understand
+how I feel on this subject, so that there can be no mistake," said the
+girl honestly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, I didn't come here to be told that, but to give consent to
+your marriage."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" said the girl, rearing the pretty head with its wealth of bright
+hair, "as for that, I'm going to marry. If you like to exercise your
+authority I'll run away and you can't unmarry me. It is at grandma's
+wish you are here; she said to let old bitterness sleep for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[337]</a></span> time
+you are here, and so I will now that I have explained that I utterly
+refuse to recognise that a father is anything but a stranger unless he
+discharges the responsibilities of the office. For the sake of the
+race I maintain this ground," she concluded in words that had been put
+into her mouth by one of the speakers at Ada Grosvenor's election
+league, and the appearance of the ladies put an end to further
+contention.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn's judgments were remorseless, as becoming clean-souled, fearless
+youth as yet unacquainted with the great gulf 'twixt the ideal and
+real, and untainted by that charity and complaisance which, like
+senility, come with advancing years.</p>
+
+<p>The aunt was elderly and unprepossessing, and the stepmother of the
+type bespeaking champagne and too much eating for the exercise taken,
+for her head was partly sunk in a huge mass of adipose substance that
+had once been bosom, and the other proportions of her figure were in
+keeping.</p>
+
+<p>The cups were spread in the dining-room, so thither we repaired to eat
+and drink while representations of Jim Clay and Jake Sorrel, senior,
+who had wept for the sufferings of the convicts, glowered down upon
+the gathering of plebeians who were half swells and the swells who
+were wholly plebeian.</p>
+
+<p>Presently grandma and I excused ourselves and left Dawn with her
+relations.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you think of 'em? Are they any better than Dawn an' me?" said
+the old dame as we got out of hearing. "How do I compare with that old
+sack of charcoal?"</p>
+
+<p>Ay, how did she compare? As a slight, active, hand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[338]</a></span>some woman, still
+vigorous at seventy-six, with one who, though thirty years her junior,
+was already almost helpless from obesity and natural
+clumsiness,&mdash;that's how she compared!</p>
+
+<p>"Them's some of the swells for you&mdash;one of the 'old families,' who
+think they're made of different stuff to you an' me. What do you think
+of Dawn, Jim Clay's granddaughter, who drove the coach, when placed
+beside her aunt, the granddaughter of an admiral in the army?"</p>
+
+<p>"She looks as though Jim Clay had been a general in the navy and she
+had done justice to her heredity," I gravely replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Andrew, come here an' tell me how you managed 'em, an' what you think
+of the great bugs now you've seen 'em," commanded the old lady of that
+individual, as he emerged from the kitchen with both hands full of
+cake.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you walk up to 'em an' say, 'Are you Mr and Mrs Mudeheepe, I'm
+Mrs Clay's grandson?' like I told you."</p>
+
+<p>"No; I seen it on their luggage without arskin' them, an' one look at
+'em was enough for me. I didn't bother tellin' 'em who I was. I didn't
+care if they had fell down an' broke their necks&mdash;the bloomin'
+long-nosed old goats! I just took hold of their things an' flung 'em
+in the 'bus, and the old fat one she says, 'Are you Mrs Clay's groom?'
+an' I says, 'Mrs Clay is my grandma,' an' she says, 'Oh'!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you might have introduced yourself a bit better to make things
+more agreeabler, but they really are the untakin'est people I've seen
+for a long time. Ain't I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[339]</a></span> delighted that Dawn took after my side! An'
+now, though she's me own, do you think I'm over conceited to think her
+fit for the king's son?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not," I replied; for it would have taken a very estimable
+son of a king to be meet for this Princess of the Break-of-Day,
+appropriately christened Dawn!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[340]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THIRTY" id="THIRTY"></a>THIRTY.</h2>
+
+<h3>FOR FURTHER PARTICULARS CONSULT 'THE NOONOON <br />
+ADVERTISER' OF THAT DATE.</h3>
+
+
+<p>That was a grand wedding celebrated in Noonoon ere the orange blossoms
+had turned into oranges, but for details it would be better to refer
+to that most reliable little journal, 'The Noonoon Advertiser.' Only a
+few particulars remain in my mind, but the paper published a full
+account, including a minute description of the bride's gown and a
+careful list of the presents. It was much to the horror of Ernest that
+the latter was inserted, but it would have been much more horrible to
+Grandma Clay had the mention of so much as a jam-spoon been omitted,
+so he consoled himself with the reflection that it was only in 'The
+Noonoon Advertiser,' and took care to keep the list out of the account
+which appeared in the Sydney dailies. The curious, by consulting a
+back number of the little country sheet, may learn that Mrs L. Witcom
+(<i>n&eacute;e</i> Carry, the ex-lady help) gave the bride one of many pairs of
+shadow-work pillow shams, and that Miss Grosvenor contributed one of
+the equally numerous drawn-thread table centres. Mrs Bray presented a
+ribbon-work cushion; Dr Smalley, some of the jam-spoons; Andrew, a
+bread-fork; and Mr J. Sorrel, great-uncle of the bride, a silver<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[341]</a></span>
+cream-jug; while Mr Claude (alias "Dora") Eweword kept himself in mind
+by an afternoon tea-set. The complete list took a column, and included
+dozens of magnificent articles from sporting associations and chums of
+the bridegroom.</p>
+
+<p>The bride&mdash;a glorious vision in Duchesse satin and accessories in
+keeping, and with real orange blossoms in hair, corsage, and train;
+the proud shyness of the gentle and stalwart groom standing beside
+her, and the brave old grandmother drawn up a little in the rear,
+formed a picture I shall never forget. The old lady performed her
+office with flashing eyes, a steady voice, and an individuality which
+none could despise or overlook.</p>
+
+<p>Excepting her grandmother, Dawn was unattended, and as the young
+couple came down the aisle, by previous request of the bride, I had
+the honour of accompanying the old lady from the church, and she said,
+as we drove away over the scattered rose petals to be in readiness to
+receive the guests&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I've done it&mdash;give me little girl away, an' without misgivin's, for
+if she's as happy as I was she'll do. When the time was here there was
+some patches of me life wasn't too soft, but lookin' back, I would
+marry Jim Clay over again if I could."</p>
+
+<p>The caterpillars that had been eating the grape-vines and giving
+Andrew exercise as destroyer, had turned into millions of white
+butterflies that flecked the golden sunlight like a vast flotilla of
+miniature aerial yachts, and enhanced the splendour of that balmy
+wedding-day. It was the month of roses, and, intertwined with jasmine
+and mignonette, they formed the chief decorations in the roomy marquee
+erected for the breakfast under the big old cedars overlooking the
+river. All Noonoonites of any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[342]</a></span> importance sat down to the repast, and
+their names, from that of Mrs Bray to Mrs Dr Tinker, are recorded in
+'The Noonoon Advertiser.' The last-mentioned lady did not exhibit any
+of her famous characteristics at the function further than to use a
+gorgeous fan she carried in rapping her husband over the knuckles
+every time his attention wandered from her remarks. The toasts were
+many and long, and it fell to "Dora" Eweword to respond to that of the
+"ladies." Since the announcement of Dawn's engagement to Ernest,
+"Dora" had been frequently seen out driving with Ada Grosvenor, and he
+paid her marked attention at the wedding; but this was private, not
+public, information.</p>
+
+<p>After I had helped Dawn into her travelling dress I had a few words
+apart with Ernest while Grandma Clay bade a private good-bye to his
+wife.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said, with self-contained and pardonable triumph, "I've won
+her in spite of that dish of water."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, we three have accomplished our desire."</p>
+
+<p>"What three?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mr and Mrs R. E. Breslaw and myself!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, was it your desire too?" he said with a happy laugh.</p>
+
+<p>The bride now appeared, and wringing my hand as he said&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You'll come to us when we return," he stepped forward to place her in
+the carriage that took them to the railway.</p>
+
+<p>The paper had better be again consulted for accurate account of the
+confetti pelting and other customary happenings that took place at the
+station. These details, and the real greatness of Dawn's match, and
+her aristocratic relatives, who, as often suspected, had not proved to
+be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[343]</a></span> only a myth, were the chief theme of conversation for many days.</p>
+
+<p>All the engines in the sheds at the time, and whose music had lulled
+me to sleep o' nights, blew the bride a royal fanfare as she entered
+her first, <i>engaged</i>, and further cock-a-doodled "good luck" as the
+train steamed out.</p>
+
+<p>Most keenly of all I remember that it was piteously lonely, and as
+dreary as though the sun had lost its power, when the panting engine
+had climbed the hill from the sleepy little town, and dropped out of
+hearing on the down grade from the old valley of ripening peach and
+apricot, bearing the girl for ever away from the slow, meandering
+grooves of life of which her vigorous young soul was weary.</p>
+
+<p>A meeting of the municipal council claimed Uncle Jake that night,
+Andrew went over to discuss the situation with Jack Bray, and the
+loneliness of the old dining-room was insupportable to grandma and me.
+Joy and beauty seemed to have fled from the scented nights beside the
+river,&mdash;even the whistle and rush of the trains breathed a forlorn
+note to my bereaved fancy, and there was a tear in grandma's eye as
+she said&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she's really gone for altogether&mdash;she that I helped into the
+world and rared with my own hand, and named after the Dawn in which
+she came. That's the order of life. It's always the same&mdash;you can't
+keep any one for always. I couldn't abear it here now&mdash;it seems as if
+everything in life was done, and there's no need for me to stay if
+Ernest puts Andrew in the way of this electrical engineerin' he's so
+mad for. Jake can board somewhere. He don't care about things so much.
+I'll go to Dawn: thank God she wants me, an' I've got plenty to take
+me away if she gets tired of me, as young folks<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[344]</a></span> often do of the old,
+and which is only natural after all. I can let or sell the place, an'
+w'en I'm gone it will be enough for Dawn if ever she's threw on the
+world like I was. Everythink seems fair with her now, but this is a
+life of ups an' downs, and there's no tellin' what may happen."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[345]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="LENVOI" id="LENVOI"></a>L'ENVOI.</h2>
+
+
+<p>What interest can there be in the play after the knight has settled
+affairs with the lady, or in the story-book when the heroine and hero
+have gone on a honeymoon preparatory to living happily ever
+after?&mdash;and that is what befell my tale in Noonoon.</p>
+
+<p>I listen no more to the splendid music of the locomotives as they roar
+across the queer old bridge, nor watch the red light flashing from
+their coaling doors as they climb the Blue Mountain ascent and fire as
+they go. Their far-carrying rumble has been succeeded by the more
+thunderous voice of the sea on the rock-walled coast of my native
+land.</p>
+
+<p>Four months have elapsed since the wedding in Noonoon, yet Ernest is
+still content to let his athletic ambitions remain in abeyance while
+he squanders his time in the sweet dalliance of love. Squander, I say;
+but on reviewing the expired years, how sanely sweet the youthful
+hours we dallied shine from amid the years we toiled, fumed, cursed,
+sweated, and strove to step past our brother in the bootless race for
+pleasure, opulence, or popularity!</p>
+
+<p>Being able to indulge in the insignia of wealth, even without being
+the good fellow he is, Ernest finds it is of little significance that
+his hair is "what fond mothers term auburn," while Dawn's triumphs
+were assured from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[346]</a></span> the outset. As mistress of a fine town mansion,
+with good looks, with smart ideas of dress, and smarter ability to
+verbally hold her own in any set, it goes without saying that her
+grandmother having "kep' a accommodation" is not remembered against
+her to any harmful extent in everyday life, where a large percentage
+of folks in all cliques have to survive the knowledge of their
+progenitors having been worse things than irreproachable proprietors
+and conductors of most exemplary accommodation houses for those who
+travel.</p>
+
+<p>As Ada Grosvenor is not a girl in a book but in everyday life, I
+cannot record that she has married a man worthy of her. Such an one
+would have to be a leader of men&mdash;a prime minister, reformer, or other
+prominent worker in the cause of humanity&mdash;and as these do not abound
+in the quiet whirlpools of existence, I can only hope that she does
+not drop in for a too impossible noodle, as is frequently the fate of
+noble women. "Dora" Eweword would have done very well to discharge the
+clodhopping work of her earthly journey&mdash;could have made her
+bread-and-butter and carried her parcels, but if I can depend on
+Andrew's letters, which breathe more heavily of generosity than of
+grammar and gracefulness, this eligible and strapping young member of
+Noonoon society has been rejected a second time, so that Mrs Bray's
+fears that he would be made over conceited by adulation from
+marriageable girls seems to have been unnecessary.</p>
+
+<p>Noonoon is enshrined in my heart as one of the pleasantest valleys on
+earth, so during enforcedly idle hours it has given me delight to
+paint its beauty, however feebly, and to put some of the doings of
+some of its folk in a story, that others might possibly enjoy them
+too. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[347]</a></span> I put the MSS. aside till, as the good country doctor so
+much esteemed in his circle expresses it, I shall have "pegged out,"
+and the heroine and hero of the plot shall then judge whether it is
+fit or not for publication. It has interested me to write, but</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"My life has crept so long on a broken wing<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">. . . . . . . .<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and those whose lives are strong, fruitful, and successful may have no
+patience with the sentimental meanderings of an old woman who has
+outlived joy and usefulness.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>And now, may the Lady of my tale, as her life progresses from dawn to
+noon, high noon to afternoon, dusk, evening, and night, have the
+Knight of her choice and peace always beside her, till new dawns break
+in other worlds beyond this place of fears and phantoms.</p>
+
+
+<h3>THE END.</h3>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, by Miles Franklin
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, by Miles Franklin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Some Everyday Folk and Dawn
+
+Author: Miles Franklin
+
+Release Date: June 1, 2007 [EBook #21659]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME EVERYDAY FOLK AND DAWN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                         Transcriber's Note:
+
+       The Table of Contents is not part of the original book.
+
+
+
+
+                                 SOME
+
+                               EVERYDAY
+
+                                 FOLK
+
+                               AND DAWN
+
+
+
+
+                            MILES FRANKLIN
+
+
+
+                 First published in Great Britain by
+
+                       William Blackwood & Sons
+
+                                 1909
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+_TO THE
+
+ENGLISH MEN WHO BELIEVE IN VOTES FOR WOMEN
+
+THIS STORY IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED,
+BECAUSE THE WOMEN HEREIN CHARACTERISED WERE
+NEVER FORCED TO BE
+
+"SUFFRAGETTES,"
+
+THEIR COUNTRYMEN
+HAVING GRANTED THEM THEIR RIGHTS AS
+
+SUFFRAGISTS
+
+IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1902.
+
+M. F._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+ONE.            CLAY'S.
+
+TWO.            AT CLAY'S.
+
+THREE.          BECOMING ACQUAINTED WITH GRANDMA CLAY.
+
+FOUR.           DAWN'S AMBITION.
+
+FIVE.           MISS FLIPP'S UNCLE.
+
+SIX.            GRANDMA CLAY'S LOVE-STORY.
+
+SEVEN.          THE LITTLE TOWN OF NOONOON.
+
+EIGHT.          GRANDMA TURNS NURSE.
+
+NINE.           THE KNIGHT HAS A STOLEN VIEW OF THE LADY.
+
+TEN.            PROVINCIAL POLITICS AND SEMI-SUBURBAN DENTISTS.
+
+ELEVEN.         ANDREW DISGRACES HIS "RARIN'."
+
+TWELVE.         SOME SIDE-PLAY.
+
+THIRTEEN.       VARIOUS EVENTS.
+
+FOURTEEN.       THE PASSING OF THE TRAINS.
+
+FIFTEEN.        ALAS! MISS FLIPP!
+
+SIXTEEN.        ADVANCE, AUSTRALIA!
+
+SEVENTEEN.      MRS BRAY AND CARRY COME TO ISSUES.
+
+EIGHTEEN.       THE FOUNDATION OF THE POULTRY INDUSTRY.
+
+NINETEEN.       AN OPPORTUNELY INOPPORTUNE DOUCHE.
+
+TWENTY.         "ALAS! HOW EASILY THINGS GO WRONG!"
+
+TWENTY-ONE.     THINGS GO MORE WRONG.
+
+TWENTY-TWO.     "O SPIRIT, AND THE NINE ANGELS WHO WATCH US ..."
+
+TWENTY-THREE.   UNIVERSAL ADULT SUFFRAGE.
+
+TWENTY-FOUR.    LITTLE ODDS AND ENDS OF LIFE.
+
+TWENTY-FIVE.    "LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM."
+
+TWENTY-SIX.     "OFF WITH THE OLD."
+
+TWENTY-SEVEN.   "ONE MIGHT THINK BETTER OF MARRIAGE IF ONE'S MARRIED
+                    FRIENDS ..."
+
+TWENTY-EIGHT.   LET THERE BE LOVE.
+
+TWENTY-NINE.    "THE SAVAGE SELLS OR EXCHANGES HIS DAUGHTER, BUT IN ..."
+
+THIRTY.         FOR FURTHER PARTICULARS CONSULT 'THE NOONOON ADVERTISER' OF
+                    THAT DATE.
+
+                L'ENVOI.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+GLOSSARY OF COLLOQUIALISMS AND SLANG TERMS.
+
+
+AUSTRALIAN.         AMERICAN EQUIVALENTS.    ENGLISH INTERPRETATION.
+
+Billy               A tin pail               A camp-kettle.
+Blokes              Guys                     Chaps--fellows.
+Bosker              Dandy or "dandy          Something meeting with
+                     fine"                     unqualified approval.
+Galoot              A rube                   A yokel--a heavy country
+                                                 fellow.
+Larrikin                                     A hoodlum.
+Moke                                         A common knockabout horse.
+Narked              Sore                     Vexed--to have lost the
+                                                 temper.
+Gin                 Squaw                    An aboriginal woman.
+Quod                                         Jail.
+Sollicker           Somewhat equivalent      Something excessive.
+                      to "corker"
+Toff                A "sport" or "swell      A well-dressed
+                      guy"                     individual--sometimes of
+                                               the upper ten.
+Two "bob"           Fifty cents              Two shillings.
+To graft            To "dig in"              To work hard and steadily.
+To scoot            To vamoose or skidoo     To leave hastily and
+                                                 unceremoniously.
+To smoodge          To be a "sucker"         To curry favour at the expense
+                                                 of independence.
+"Gives me the pip"  "Makes me tired"         Bores.
+"On a string"    }                           Trifling with him.
+"Pulling his leg"}
+Kookaburra          A giant kingfisher with grey plumage and a
+                     merry, mocking, inconceivably human laugh--a
+                     killer of snakes, and a great favourite with
+                     Australians.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Some Everyday Folk and Dawn.
+
+ONE.
+
+CLAY'S.
+
+
+The summer sun streamed meltingly down on the asphalted siding of the
+country railway station and occasioned the usual grumbling from the
+passengers alighting from the afternoon express.
+
+There were only three who effect this narrative--a huge, red-faced,
+barrel-like figure that might have served to erect as a monument to
+the over-feeding in vogue in this era; a tall, spare, old fellow with
+a grizzled beard, who looked as though he had never known a succession
+of square feeds; and myself, whose physique does not concern this
+narrative.
+
+Having surrendered our tickets and come through a down-hill passage to
+the dusty, dirty, stony, open space where vehicles awaited travellers,
+the usual corner "pub."--in this instance a particularly dilapidated
+one--and three tin kangaroos fixed as weather-cocks on a dwelling
+over the way, and turning hither and thither in the hot gusts of wind,
+were the first objects to arrest my attention in the town of Noonoon,
+near the river Noonoon, whereaway it does not particularly matter. The
+next were the men competing for our favour in the matter of vehicular
+conveyance.
+
+The big man, by reason of his high complexion, abnormal waist
+measurement, expensive clothes, and domineering manner, which
+proclaimed him really a lord of creation, naturally commanded the
+first and most obsequious attention, and giving his address as
+"Clay's," engaged the nearest man, who then turned to me.
+
+"Where might you be going?"
+
+"To Jimmeny's Hotel."
+
+"Right O! I can just drop you on the way to Clay's," said he; and the
+big swell grunted up to a box seat, while I took a position in the
+body of the vehicle commanding a clear view of the grossness of the
+highly coloured neck rolling over his collar.
+
+The journey through the town unearthed the fact that it resembled many
+of its compeers. The oven-hot iron roofs were coated with red dust; a
+few lackadaisical larrikins upheld occasional corner posts; dogs
+conducted municipal meetings here and there; the ugliness of the
+horses tied to the street posts, where they baked in the sun while
+their riders guzzled in the prolific "pubs.," bespoke a farming rather
+than a grazing district; and the streets had the distinction of being
+the most deplorably dirty and untended I have seen.
+
+The same could be said of a cook, or some such individual of whom I
+caught a glimpse when landed at a corner hotel, where I sat inside the
+door of a parlour awaiting the appearance of the landlady or the
+publican, while for diversion I watched the third arrival wending his
+way from the station on foot and shouting something concerning melons
+to a man in a dray in the middle of the roadway.
+
+Evidently it was the land of melons and other fruits and vegetables.
+
+Over at the railway, loaded waggons, drays, and carts were backed
+against a line of trucks drawn up to convey such produce to the city
+and other parts of the country, while strings of vehicles similarly
+burdened were thundering up the street. Some carts were piled with
+cases of peaches, grapes, tomatoes, and rock-melons--the rich aromatic
+scent of the last mentioned strongly asserting their presence as they
+passed. On some waggons the water-melons were packed in straw and had
+the grower's initials chipped in the rind, others were not so
+distinguished, and at intervals the roughness of the thoroughfare
+bumped one off. If the fall did not break it quite in two, a stray
+loafer pulled it so and tore out a little of the sweet and luscious
+heart, leaving the remainder to the ants and fowls. The latter were
+running about on friendly terms with the dogs, which they equalled in
+variety and number. Droves of small boys haunted the railway premises
+at that time of the year and eagerly assisted the farmers to truck
+their melons in return for one, and came away with their spoils under
+their arms. Never before had I seen so many melons or so large. Some
+weighed sixty and eighty pounds or more, while those from sixteen to
+twenty-five pounds, in all varieties,--Cuban Queens, Dixies, Halbert's
+Honey, and Cannon Balls,--were procurable at one shilling the dozen,
+and nearly as much produce as sent away wasted in the fields for want
+of a market.
+
+An hour after arrival, having refused the offer of refreshments, which
+in such places are not always refreshing, I betook myself to a
+comparatively cool back verandah to further investigate my temporary
+surroundings.
+
+A yellow-haired girl with rings on her fingers sprawled in a hammock
+reading a much-thumbed circulating-library novel and eating peaches.
+This was the landlord's daughter, and a very superior young lady
+indeed from her own point of view.
+
+I learnt that at present there would only be one other boarder besides
+myself. He came up for the week-end, and had just gone down to Clay's
+to see some one there. If he could get a berth at Clay's he would not
+come back; but the only hope of being taken in there during the summer
+weather was to bespeak room a long way ahead, as there was a great run
+on the place. It was built right beside the river, and they kept boats
+for hire, which attracted a number of desirable young men from the
+city to engage in week-end fishing, picnicing, swimming, &c.; and the
+young gentlemen attracted young ladies, who found it difficult to be
+taken in at all, because old Mrs Clay allowed her granddaughter, Dawn,
+to boss the place, and _she_ favoured men-boarders.
+
+The tone of Yellow-hair suggested that perhaps the men-boarders
+favoured Dawn; at all events, it was an attractive name and aroused
+interested inquiry from me.
+
+"Oh yes, some thought her a beauty! There were great arguments as to
+whether she or Dora Cowper--another great big fat thing in a hay and
+corn store over the way--was the belle of Noonoon;" but for her part,
+Yellow-hair thought her too coarse and vulgar and high-coloured (Miss
+Jimmeny was sallow and thin), and she was always making herself seen
+and known everywhere. One would think she owned Noonoon!
+
+"There she is now," exclaimed the girl, pointing out another who was
+driving a fat pony in a yellow sulky. "Talk of the devil."
+
+"Perhaps it is an angel in this case," I responded, for though she was
+thickly veiled she suggested youth and a style that pleased the eye.
+
+Whether she and the boats were sufficient to make Clay's an attractive
+place of residence I did not know, but already was painfully aware of
+conditions that would make Jimmeny's Hotel an uncomfortable location.
+I retired to my room to escape some of them--the foul language of the
+tipplers under the front verandah, and the winds from two streets that
+also met there in a whirlwind of dust and refuse.
+
+There was nothing for me to do but kill time, and no way of killing it
+but by simple endurance. I had been ordered to some country resort for
+the good of my health. But do not fear, reader; this is not to be a
+compilation of ills and pulses, for no one more than the unfortunate
+victim of such is so painfully aware of their lack of interest to the
+community at large. There are, I admit, some invalids who find a
+certain amount of entertainment in inflicting a list of their aches
+upon people, blissfully unconscious of how wearisome they can be, but
+my temperament is of the sensitive order, knowing its length too well
+to similarly transgress.
+
+How I had struck upon Noonoon I don't know or care, except that it was
+within easy access of the metropolis, and I have no predilection for
+being isolated from the crowded haunts of my fellows. I had descended
+upon Jimmeny's Hotel because in an advertisement sheet it was put
+down as the leading house of accommodation in Noonoon. Now I had come
+to hear of Clay's and Dawn, and determined to shift myself there as
+soon as possible. This did not seem imminent, for presently the
+"bloated aristocrat" came back to Jimmeny's pub. for the evening meal,
+as he had been unable to get so much as a shake-down at Clay's. This
+so aroused my desire to be a boarder at Clay's that I straightway
+wrote a letter to its chatelaine inquiring what style of accommodation
+she provided, and could she accommodate me; and strolling up the
+broken street, while a few larrikins at corners, by way of
+entertaining themselves and me, made remarks upon my appearance, I
+dropped it in the post-office, but had to endure a week's inattention
+at Jimmeny's, and no end of yarns from outside folk I encountered as
+to how Mrs Jimmeny robbed the "swipes" who took their poison at her
+bar, before I was honoured by a reply from Mrs Clay.
+
+     "The accommodation provided by me for people is clean and
+     wholesome and the best as suits me. If it don't suit them
+     there are other places near that makes more efforts to
+     gather custom than I do. I can't take you in at present as
+     I'm too full for my taste as it is.--Yours respectfully,
+
+"Martha Clay."
+
+This interesting rebuff inspired me to further effort, and sitting on
+the back verandah, under a giant fig-tree shedding its delicious and
+wholesome fruit also to the fowls and ants, I wrote:--
+
+     "Dear Madam,--Would you kindly apprise me when it would be
+     convenient to accommodate me, as I'm anxious to be near the
+     river, where I could indulge in boating?"
+
+To this I received reply:--
+
+     "There isn't any chance of me accommodating you till the
+     cool weather, and then I don't take boarders at all. I like
+     to have them all in the summer, and then have a little peace
+     to ourselves in the winter without strangers, for the best
+     of them have their noses poked everywhere they are not
+     wanted. If you want to go near the river there are heaps of
+     houses where there isn't no such rush of people as at my
+     place."
+
+This firmly determined me to reside at Mrs Clay's, a desired member of
+the household, or perish in the attempt. Alack! I had plenty time to
+spend in such a trifle, for I was but a derelict, broken in fierce
+struggle and hopelessly cast aside into smooth waters, safe from the
+stormy currents now too strong for my timbers. That I had means to lie
+at anchor in some genial boarding-house, instead of being dependent
+upon charity, was undoubtedly food for thankfulness, and when one has
+burned their coal-heap to ashes they are grateful for an occasional
+charcoal among the cinders.
+
+No other place near the river but Clay's would do me, though the
+valley had much to recommend it at that season, when grapes, peaches,
+and other fruits were literally being thrown away on every hand. So I
+repacked my trunk, and the 'busman who had brought me took me once
+more along the execrable streets, past the corner pub., near the
+railway station, and, it being late afternoon, the railway employes,
+as they came off duty, were streaming towards it for the purpose of
+"wetting their whistle" after their eight-houred day's work.
+
+Leaving the misguided fellows thus worse than ignorantly refreshing
+themselves, and the tin kangaroos showing that the breeze was from the
+east, I travelled farther west to a summer resort in the cool
+altitude, there to await from Mrs Martha Clay a recall to the vale of
+melons. That I would get one I was sure, and so little was there in my
+life that even this prospect lent a zest to the mail each day.
+
+I had neither relatives nor friends. Fate had apportioned me none of
+the former, and fierce, absorbing endeavour had left little time for
+cultivating the latter, while pride made me hide from all
+acquaintances who had known me standing amid the plaudits of the
+crowd--strong and successful; and fiercely desiring to be left to
+myself, I shrank with sensitive horror from the sympathy that is only
+careless pity.
+
+
+
+
+TWO.
+
+AT CLAY'S.
+
+
+The long hot days gave place to cooler and shorter, and there was none
+left of the beautiful fruit--peaches, apricots, figs, plums,
+nectarines, grapes, and melons--which, for want of a market, had
+rotted ankle-deep in some parts of the fertile old valley of Noonoon
+ere I received a communication from Mrs. Clay.
+
+     "If you think it worth your while you can investigate my
+     place now. All the summer weather folk has gone. I would
+     only take one or two nice people now that would live with us
+     in our own plain way and who would be company for the
+     family, so I could not undertake to give you a separate
+     parlour and table and carry on that way, but if you like to
+     call and see me, please yourself."
+
+Accordingly, I lost no time in once more patronising the town 'busman,
+and being his only patron that day, he rattled me past the tin
+kangaroo weather-cocks, the battered corner pub. and its colleague a
+few doors on, and entering the principal street where Jimmeny's Hotel
+filled the view, turned to the right across fertile flats held in
+tenure by patient Chinese gardeners.
+
+Being a region of quick growth, it was of correspondingly rapid decay,
+and the season of summer fruits had been entirely superseded by autumn
+flowers. The vale of melons was now a valley of chrysanthemums, and
+with a little specialisation in this branch of horticulture could
+easily have out-chrysanthemumed Japan. Without any care or cultivation
+they filled the little gardens on every side; children of all sizes
+were to be seen with bunches of them; while discarded blossoms lay in
+the streets, after the fashion of the superabundant melons and orchard
+fruits during their season.
+
+About a mile from the station we halted before a ramshackle old
+two-storey house that was covered by roses and hidden among orange and
+fig trees. The approach led through an irregular plantation of cedar
+and pepper trees, pomegranates and other shrubs, and masses of
+chrysanthemums and cosmos that flourished in every available space.
+
+The friendly 'busman directed me to a gable sheltered by a yellow
+jasmine-tree, where I tapped on the door with my knuckle. Footsteps
+approached on the inside, and after some thumping and kicking on its
+panels it was burst open by a nimble old lady in immaculate gown, with
+carefully adjusted collar, and wavy hair combed back in a tidy knot
+and with still a dark shade in it.
+
+"Them blessed white ants!" she exclaimed. "They've very near got the
+place eat down, so that you have to make a fool of yourself opening
+the door, and that blessed feller I sent for hasn't come to do 'em up
+yet; but some people!" She finished so exasperatedly that I felt
+impelled to state my name and business without delay, and with a prim
+"Indeed," she led the way across a narrow linoleumed hall, so
+beeswaxed that one had to stump along carefully erect.
+
+She invited me to a chair in a stiff room and began--
+
+"I've only got another young lady in the place now, and if you come
+you'll have to eat with the family."
+
+I considered this an attraction.
+
+"And there'll be no fussing over you and pampering you, for I'm not
+reduced to keeping boarders out of necessity. They ain't all I've got
+to depend on," she said with a fiery glance from her choleric
+blue-grey eyes.
+
+"Certainly not; I'm sure of that by your style, Mrs. Clay."
+
+"But of course I like to make a little; this Federal Tariff has rose
+the price of living considerable," she said, softening somewhat as we
+now sat down on the formidable and well-dusted seats.
+
+"But I believe you are somethink of a invalid."
+
+"Unfortunately, yes."
+
+"Well, this isn't no private hospital, and never pretended to be. Sick
+people is a lot of trouble potterin' and fussin' around with. I
+couldn't, for the sake of my granddaughter, give her a lot of extra
+work that wouldn't mean nothink."
+
+This might have sounded hard, but with some people their very
+austerity bespeaks a tenderness of heart. They affect it as a shield
+or guard against a softness that leaves them the too easy prey of a
+self-seeking community, and such I adjudged Mrs. Clay. Her stiffness,
+like that of the echidna, was a spiky covering protecting the most
+gentle and estimable of dispositions.
+
+"My ill-health is the sort to worry no one but myself. I need no
+dieting or waiting upon. It is merely a heart trouble, and should it
+happen to finish me in your house, I will leave ample compensation,
+and will pay my board and lodging weekly in advance."
+
+"I ain't a money-grubber," she hastened to assure me; "I was only
+explaining to you."
+
+"I'm only explaining too," I said with a smile; and having arrived at
+this understanding of mutual straight-going, she intimated that I
+could inspect a room I might have.
+
+In addition to a couple of detached buildings composed of rooms which
+during the summer were given to boarders, there were a few apartments
+in the main residence which were also delivered to this business, and
+I was conducted to where three in an uneven gable faced west and
+fronted the river.
+
+"This is my granddaughter Dawn's, and this one is empty, and this one
+is took by a young party for the winter," said the old dame.
+
+I selected the middle room, as it gave promise of being companionable
+with those on either hand occupied, and its window commanded an
+attractive view. A tangled old garden opened on a steep descent to the
+quiet river, edged with willows and garnished by a great row of red
+and blue boats rocking almost imperceptibly in the even flow, while a
+huge placard advertised their business--
+
+     BEST BOATS ON THE RIVER TO BE HIRED HERE.
+
+                            MRS. MARTHA CLAY.
+
+To the right was an imposing bridge, and on the other side of the
+water, right at the foot of the great range which in the early days
+had remained so long impassable, lay the quiet old settlement of
+Kangaroo.
+
+"If you think that room will do, you are welcome to it," continued
+Mrs. Clay. "Seventeen-and-six a-week without washing--a pound with."
+
+I agreed to the "with washing" terms, so the affable jehu hauled in
+what luggage I had brought, and at last I was installed at Clay's.
+
+The only thing wanting to complete the incident was the advent of
+Dawn, but she was nowhere to be seen. As it was only eleven in the
+morning I sat in my room and waited for her and a cup of tea, but
+neither were forthcoming. In her own words, Mrs. Clay "was never give
+to running after people an' lickin' their boots." Eventually, having
+grown weary of waiting for Dawn and luncheon and other things, I went
+out on a tour of inspection. First find was a tall dashing girl of
+twenty-four or thereabouts, dusting the big heavily encumbered
+"parler" into which my room opened.
+
+"Good morning!" heartily said she.
+
+"Good morning! Are you Dawn?" inquired I.
+
+"Dawn! No. But you might well ask, for it's nothing but Dawn and her
+doings and sayings and good looks here! You'd think there was no other
+girl in Noonoon. She won't take it as any compliment to be taken for
+me."
+
+"Well, she must be something superlative if it would not be a
+compliment to be taken for you."
+
+"Oh me! I'm only Carry the lady-help--general slavey like, earning my
+living, only that I eat with the family and not in the kitchen. In the
+summer they hire a cook and others, but in the winter there are only
+me and Dawn and the old woman," said this frank and communicative
+individual in the frank and communicative manner characteristic of the
+Clay household.
+
+Proceeding from this encounter, I went out the back way past more
+gardens and irregular enclosures, where under widespreading
+cedar-trees I found a boy at the hobbledehoy age chopping wood in a
+desultory fashion, as though to get rid of time, rather than to
+enlarge the stack of short sticks, were the most imperative object.
+Driving his axe in tight and holding on to it as a sort of balance, he
+leant back, effected a passage in his nostrils, and after having
+regarded me with a leisurely and straightforward squint, observed--
+
+"I reckon you're the new boarder?"
+
+"I reckon so. I reckon you belong to this place."
+
+"Yes, Mrs. Clay, she's my grandma."
+
+"Is that your grandfather?" I inquired, pointing to the old man who
+had travelled with me on the day of my first visit to the town, and
+now supporting an outhouse door-post, while a young man with whom he
+talked leant against the tailboard of a cart advertising that he was
+the first-class butcher of Kangaroo, and had several other
+unsurpassable virtues in the meat trade.
+
+"No, he ain't me grandfather, thank goodness he's only me uncle;
+that's plenty for me."
+
+"Aren't you fond of him?"
+
+"I ain't _dying_ of love for him, I promise you. Old Crawler! He
+reckons he's the boss, but sometimes I get home on him in a way that a
+sort of illustrates to his intelligence that he ain't. Ask Dawn. She's
+the one'll give you the straight tip regarding him."
+
+"Where is Dawn?"
+
+"Oh, Dawn's in the kitchen. She an' Carry does the cookin' week about
+w'en the house ain't full. Grandma makes 'em do that; it saves rows
+about it not bein' fair. You won't ketch sight of Dawn till dinner.
+She'll want to get herself up a bit, you bein' new; she always does
+for a fresh person, but she soon gets tired of it."
+
+"And you, are you going to get yourself up because I'm new?"
+
+"Not much; boys ain't that way so much as the wimmin," he said, and
+the grin we exchanged was the germ of a friendship that ripened as our
+acquaintance progressed. I intended to settle down to the enjoyment
+afforded by my sense of humour. I had preserved it intact as a private
+personal accomplishment. On the stage, having steered clear of comedy
+and confined myself to tragedy, it had never been cheapened and made
+nauseous by sham and machine representations indigenous to the hated
+footlights, and was an untapped preserve to be drawn upon now.
+
+So I was not to see Dawn till the midday dinner; she was to appear
+last, like the star at a concert.
+
+A star she verily was when eventually she came before me carrying a
+well-baked roast on an old-fashioned dish. Her lovely face was scarlet
+from hurry and the fire, her bright hair gleamed in coquettish rolls,
+and a loose sleeve displayed a round and dimpled forearm--a fitting
+continuance of the taper fingers grasping the chief dish of the
+wholesome and liberal menu she had prepared.
+
+Old Uncle Jake took the carver's place, but Grandma Clay sat at his
+left elbow and instructed him what to do. He handed the helpings to
+her, and she supplemented each with some of all the vegetables,
+irrespective of the wishes of the consumers, to whom they were handed
+in a business-like method. The puddings were distributed on the same
+principle, grandma even putting milk and sugar on the plates as for
+children; and further, she talked in a choleric way, as though the
+children were in bad grace owing to some misdemeanour, but that was
+merely one of her mannerisms, as that of others is to smile and be
+sweet while they inwardly fume.
+
+Excepting this, the unimpressive old smudges hung above the mantel,
+and probably standing for some family progenitors, gazed out of their
+caricatured eyes on an uneventful meal. Conversation was choppy and of
+the personal order, not interesting to a stranger to those mentioned.
+I made a few duty remarks to Uncle Jake, which he received with
+suspicion, so I left him in peace to suck his teeth and look like a
+sleepy lizard, while I counted the queer and inartistic old vases
+crowded in plumb and corresponding pairs on the shelf over the
+fireplace.
+
+Miss Flipp, the other boarder, was in every respect a contrast to me,
+being small, young, and dressed with elaboration in a flimsy style
+which, off the stage, I have always scorned. Her wrists were laden
+with bangles, her fingers with rings, and her golden hair piled high
+in the most exaggerated of the exaggerated pompadour styles in vogue.
+Her appetite was indifferent; the expression of her eyes bespoke
+either ill-health or dissipation, and she was very abstracted, or as
+Mrs Clay put it--
+
+"She acts like she had somethink on her mind. Maybe she's love-sick
+for some one she can't ketch, and she's been sent up here to forget."
+
+This was after Miss Flipp had retreated to her room, and Carry
+continued the subject as she cleared the table.
+
+"She _says_ she's an orphan reared by a rich uncle; she's always
+blowing about him and how fond he is of her. She's just recovered from
+an operation and has come up here to get strong. That's why she does
+nothing, so she _says_, only poke about and read novels and make
+herself new hats and blouses; but _I_ think she'd be lazy without any
+operation. She'd want another to put some go in her."
+
+"She'd require inoculating with a little of yours," said I, watching
+with what enviable vigour the girl's work sped before her as though
+afraid. I also retired to my room for a rest, intending to come out
+and pave the way for friendship with Dawn by-and-by, for I quickly
+perceived she was not the character to go out of her way to make the
+first overture.
+
+Some time after, when strolling around in an unwonted fashion, I was
+pleased to again encounter my friend Andrew. Evidently he had been set
+to clean out the fowl-houses, for a wheelbarrow half full of manure
+stood at the door of a wire-netted shed, and in the middle of this
+task he had sought diversion by shooting rats from among the straw in
+a big old barn, where a great heap of unused hay made them a harbour.
+In this warm valley, carpeted in the irrepressible couch-grass, there
+was no lack of fodder that season, and even the lanes and byways would
+have served as fattening paddocks. Andrew leant upon his gun, and
+having delivered himself of certain statistics in rat mortality, and
+exhibiting some specimens by the tail, he began a conversation.
+
+"Say, what did you think of Miss Thing-amebob, Miss Flipp I mean?"
+
+"I didn't bother thinking anything at all about her."
+
+Andrew looked interrogatively at me and broke into a grin.
+
+"Well, I reckon she's the silliest goat I ever came across. She came
+out to me and asked did I think she looked pretty, as her uncle is
+coming up to-night, and if she looks nice he'll give her a present or
+something. I reckon she'd have to look not such a mad-headed rabbit
+before I'd give her anything but some advice to bag her head. And he
+must be a different uncle to Uncle Jake; I reckon he wouldn't give you
+nothing if you had on two heads at once. Here's Larry Witcom coming
+back from his rounds, and he promised me a bit of meat for Whiskey!
+Here, Whiskey! Whiskey!" he roared, and a small canine pet that had
+been hunting rats desisted from the fray and ran with his master. I
+also walked with him--this without exception, even in slum scenes on
+the stage, being the dirtiest escort I ever had had. His face was
+grimed, his shirt like an engine-rag, and his trousers dusty, while
+from a hole in the seat thereof fluttered a flag of garment--such an
+ingratiatingly wholesome blunderbuss of a boy!
+
+"Here, you Larry," he yelled, "you promised me! Come on, Whiskey! Why,
+ain't he a bosker!" he enthusiastically exclaimed, as the hideously
+unprepossessing little mongrel stood on his hind legs and yelped in
+excited begging.
+
+"Hullo, Andrew! Don't bust! Who's that you had with you?--(I had
+turned a corner)--a new boarder, I suppose? Rather an old piece!"
+
+"Yes," said Andrew. "Her hair is a little white, but she ain't sour
+and stuck up."
+
+"A chance for you to hang your hat up, Jake," said Larry.
+
+"No, thanks! I'm cautious of them old maids. If you say a pleasant
+word to 'em they can't be shook off, and might have you up for breach
+of promise like with Tom Dunstan."
+
+"I suppose there is a danger, you being so fascinating," chuckled the
+butcher as I went inside, with a premonition that should it come to
+taking sides in the Clay household, if avoidable I would not be on
+Uncle Jake's.
+
+"Who is Uncle Jake?" said Carry in response to my inquiry, as she
+prepared four o'clock tea; "he's Uncle Jake, that's what he is, and
+enough for me too, that he is. The old swab wants hanging up by the
+beard."
+
+"Yes, but what place does he hold in the house?"
+
+"Place! that of walking round poking his nose in everywhere and
+growling about things that don't concern him. Mrs Clay keeps
+him--gives him fifteen shillings a-week--because he's her brother, and
+you'd think he owned everything. If you want to know what he is, he's
+a terribly bad example to Andrew. _He's_ the greatest clumsy,
+lumbering, dirty lump (oh, you should see his clothes, what they are
+like to wash, and the only way to keep him clean would be to stuff him
+in a glass case!), but for all that he's a very fair kid. You can't
+expect much of boys, you know, and have to be thankful for any good
+points at all. O Lord!" she here exclaimed, looking out a window,
+where along a path through the orchard she descried approaching a fine
+buxom dame in a fashionably cut dress, "here's Mrs Bray in full sail.
+I suppose she saw the 'busman leaving you here to-day, and her
+curiosity couldn't stand any longer without coming on a tour of
+inspection."
+
+"Who is Mrs Bray?"
+
+"She won't let you overlook who she is, and what she owns, and what
+she '_done_,' you'll soon hear it. She's the most inquisitive
+blow-hard I ever came across."
+
+Dawn now appeared and invited me to afternoon tea, which was a
+friendly and hospitable meal spread on a big table on a back verandah,
+so enclosed by creepers and pot-plants and little awnings leading in
+various directions as to be in reality more of a vestibule. Mrs Bray
+hove into near view and took up a seat beside a bank of lovely
+maiden-hair fern.
+
+"How are you living?" she asked Grandma Clay as she complacently shook
+hands. "Nice cool weather now and not so many beastly mosquitoes."
+
+"By Jove! Did you know about the 'skeeters' here?" inquired Andrew of
+me. "They're big enough to ride bikes and weigh a pound. You wait till
+you hear 'em singing Sankey's hymns to-night."
+
+"If I were you I'd hold my tongue and not draw attention to my
+dirtiness," said Dawn. "It's a wonder a garden doesn't sprout upon
+you."
+
+I was then introduced to Mrs Bray, who acknowledged me genially, and
+seemed so flourishing, and was so complacent regarding the fact, that
+it did one good to look at her.
+
+After addressing a few remarks to me she had to move, for the trimming
+of her hat caught in the cage of a parakeet, and she took another seat
+in the shelter of a tree-fern near Uncle Jake.
+
+"You have some lovely pet birds," I remarked by way of making myself
+agreeable to Grandma Clay.
+
+"The infernal old nuisances!" she said irascibly, "I wish they'd die.
+Andrew calls them his, but they'd starve only for me. I'm always
+saying I'll have no more pets, and still they're brought here. Some
+day when he has a home of his own and people plague him, he'll know
+what it is."
+
+On the other side of the verandah above Uncle Jake stretched a passion
+vine, where a thick row of belated fruit hung like pretty pale-green
+eggs, and evil entering Andrew's mind, he remarked to me--
+
+"Wouldn't it be just bosker if one of them fell on his old nut," and
+going out he returned with a pair of orange clippers.
+
+"Where's Carry got to?" asked grandma.
+
+"I saw her out there doing a mash with Larry Witcom," said Andrew.
+
+"Now, do you think there'll be anything in that?" interestedly asked
+Mrs Bray. "I suppose she'd be glad to ketch anything for a home of her
+own."
+
+"Well, it's to be hoped the home she'd catch with him would be better
+than some of the meat we've caught from him lately--it was as tough as
+old boots," put in Dawn.
+
+At this point Andrew succeeded in disturbing Uncle Jake--succeeded
+beyond expectation. Uncle Jake had just sucked his fuzzy 'possum-grey
+moustache in the noisy manner peculiar to him, and was raising his tea
+again, when he was struck by the passion fruit, causing him to let
+fall the cup.
+
+"Just like you! On the clean boards! Carry will be pleased. I'm glad
+it's not my week in the house," said Dawn. What Uncle Jake said is
+unfit for insertion in a record so respectable as this is intended to
+be, and grandma seemed to grow too agitated for verbal utterance, but
+her facial expression was very fiery indeed as Andrew and Uncle Jake
+withdrew and settled their little score in a manner unknown to the
+company.
+
+"Well, it's an ill wind that don't blow nobody no good, and though
+there's a cup broke, it's got us rid of the men, and there's never no
+talking in comfort where they are," remarked Mrs Bray, who had a
+facility for constructing sentences containing several negatives. Two,
+we learn in syntax, have the effect of an affirmative, but there being
+no reference to a repletion, only that her utterances were
+unmistakably plain, Mrs Bray might have reduced one to wondering the
+purport of her remarks.
+
+"Did you hear the latest?" she said, laughing boisterously. "You don't
+know the people yet," she continued, turning to me, "half of 'em want
+scalding."
+
+Here she burst into a full flood of gossip regarding the misconduct of
+the leading residents; but honest and straightforward though her
+communications were, I cannot include them here, for this is a story
+for respectable folk, and a transcript of the straight talk of the
+most respectable folk would be altogether out of the question. I must
+confine myself to the statement that Mrs Bray had found few beyond
+reproach, and "the latest," as she termed it, concerned one Dr Tinker,
+whose wife--known colloquially as the old Tinkeress--had recently
+administered a public horsewhipping to a young lady whom the doctor
+had too ardently admired. Mrs Bray had only just unearthed the facts
+that day, and was overwhelmingly interested in them.
+
+"I tell you what ought to be done with some people," said grandma when
+Mrs Bray halted for breath. "There's no respectability like there used
+to be in my young days. In Gool-gool--that's where I was rared--the
+people used to take up anythink that wasn't straight. There was a
+woman there. She and her husband lived happy and respectable, with no
+notion of anythink wrong, till a feller--a blessed feller," grandma
+waxed fierce, "that was only sellin' things and making a living out of
+honest folk, come to town an' turned her head. I won't say but he was
+a fine-lookin' man, had a grand flowin' beard," grandma spread her
+hands out on her chest.
+
+"Must have been lovely with a _beard_, especially if it was like Uncle
+Jake's!" interposed Dawn.
+
+"How dare you, miss! Beards is a natural adornment gave to man by God,
+and it's a unnatural notion to carve them off--"
+
+"Some of them do want adorning, I'll admit," said Dawn.
+
+"He was a good-lookin' man," persisted grandma.
+
+"Must have been with a _beard_!" scornfully contended the
+irrepressible Dawn.
+
+"She must be smitten on some of these clean-faced articles," said Mrs
+Bray with a laugh, which effected the collapse of Dawn.
+
+"Hold your tongue, miss! surely I can speak in me own house!"
+continued grandma. "And he could sing and play, and that sort of
+thing. At any rate, this woman was terribly gone on him, and her
+husband was heart-broke, and they always lived so happy till then that
+the people of the town took it up. They went to the sergeant and told
+him what they was goin' to do, and he was in such sympathy with 'em
+that he got business that took him to the other end of the town for
+that night."
+
+"That'll tell you now!" exclaimed Mrs Bray with interest.
+
+"And they went and collared him," proceeded the narrator.
+
+"That'll tell you now, the faggot!" exclaimed Mrs Bray again.
+
+"So they took him and put him on a horse, naked except his trousers,
+about twenty of 'em did it, and rode on either side with tar-pots; and
+every time he'd turn his head any way to jaw about what he'd do,
+they'd swab him in the mouth with it; and they had bags of feathers,
+and nearly smothered him with 'em, till with the black tar stickin'
+on every way, and all in his great beard, he would be mistook for
+Nebuchadnezzar. When they got him out of the town he was let go, an'
+they said if he showed hisself in it again worse than that would
+happen him. That's what the men of my day did with a bad egg,"
+concluded the old lady, firm in the belief of the superior virtue of
+her generation.
+
+"What price beards in a case like that?" came from Dawn.
+
+"That clean-faced feller of yours would have the advantage then," said
+Mrs Bray. "And now I'll tell you the point of that story. It was just
+the men stickin' up for themselves. If that had been a woman harmed by
+her husband going away with some barmaid, or other of them hussies men
+are so fond of, there wouldn't have been nothing done to avenge _her_.
+_Her_ heart could have broke, and if she said anything about it people
+would have sat on her, but when one of the poor darling men is hurt
+it's a different thing."
+
+Mrs Bray had yet more to tell, and after another hearty laugh divulged
+a secret that should have pleased a Government lately reduced to
+appointing a commission to inquire into a falling birth-rate.
+
+"This," said grandma in explanation, "is a girl who used to be
+milliner in Trashe's store in Noonoon--one of them give-herself-airs
+things, like all these county-jumpin' fools! W'en you go to buy a
+thing off of them they look as if you wasn't fit to tie their
+shoe-laces, and they ain't got a stitch to their back, only a few
+pence a-week from eternal standin' on their feet, till they're all
+give way, and only fit for the hospital. I won't say but this one was
+a sprightly enough young body and carried her head high. And there
+was a feller came to town, was stayin' there at Jimmeny's pub. for a
+time, an' walkin' round as if Noonoon wasn't a big enough place for
+the likes of him to own. He talked mighty big about meat export trade,
+an' that was the end of his glory. He married this girl that was
+trimmin' hats, an' she thought she was doin' a stroke to ketch such a
+bug, an' now she lives in that little place built bang on the road as
+you go into town. Larry says he often takes her some meat, he's afraid
+she'll starve; an' you know, though he'll take you down in some ways,
+he's terrible good-natured in others, and that is the way with most of
+us; we have our good an' bad points. But the poor thing! is that what
+she has come to? I ain't had a family of me own not to be able to
+sympathise with her."
+
+"Well, she don't deserve no sympathy, she upholds him in his pride,"
+said Mrs Bray.
+
+"Pride! His pride," snorted grandma, "it's of the skunk order. He'd
+make use of every one because he thinks he's an English swell, and
+then wouldn't speak to them if he met them out no more than they were
+dogs. I don't think there's a single thing he could do to save his
+life. If there's a bit of wood to be chopped, she's got to do it, an'
+yet he'd think a decent honest workin' man, who was able to keep his
+wife and family comfortable, wasn't made of as good flesh and blood as
+him. That ain't what I call pride."
+
+"There's one thing, if I ever fell in love with a man he'd have to be
+a man and not a crawler," said Dawn. "Some girls think if they get a
+bit of a swell he's something; but I wouldn't care if a man were the
+Prince of Wales and Lord Muck in one, if he couldn't do things without
+muddling, I'd throw water on him."
+
+"What about young Eweword, are you goin' to throw water on _him_?"
+laughed Mrs Bray.
+
+"Ask Carry, she knows more about him than I do."
+
+"Dawn finds it handy to put her lovers on to me," said Carry, who was
+washing away the spilt tea and airing some uncomplimentary opinions of
+Andrew and Uncle Jake between whiles.
+
+"Why don't you come and see me, Carry?" continued Mrs Bray.
+
+"I can't be bothered, I've got my living to earn and have no time for
+visiting," said that uncompromising young woman.
+
+"Anything new on here, Dawn?" asked Mrs Bray, turning to her.
+
+"No, only Miss Flipp's uncle is coming up by this afternoon's train
+and we're dying to see him, there's been so much blow about him.
+Andrew is going to get out a tub to hold the tips."
+
+"Well, I'll be going now to get Bray his tea or there'll be a jawin'
+and sulkin' match between us. That's the way with men,--if you're not
+always buckin' around gammoning you think 'em somebody, they get like
+a bear with a scalded head. Well, come over and see me some day," she
+said hospitably to me. "Walk along a bit with me now and see the way."
+
+To this I agreed, and going to get a parasol heard the incautious
+woman remark behind me--
+
+"Seems to be an old maid--a gaunt-lookin' old party--ain't got no
+complexion. I wonder was she ever going to be married. Don't look as
+if many would be breakin' their necks after her, does she?"
+
+Mrs Bray posed as a champion of her sex, but could not open her mouth
+without belittling them. However, I was too well seasoned in human
+nature to be disconcerted, and walked by her side enjoying her
+immensely, she was so delightfully, transparently patronising. There
+are many grades of patronage: that from people who ought to know
+better, and which is always bitterly resented by any one of spirit;
+while that of the big splodging ignoramus who doesn't know any better,
+to any one possessed of a sense of humour, is indescribably amusing.
+Mrs Bray's was of this order, and would have been galling only to the
+snob whose chief characteristic is a lack of common-sense--lack of
+common-sense being synonymous with snobbery.
+
+"You'll get on very well with old grandma," she remarked, "she ain't
+such a bad old sort when you know her; she must have a bit of property
+too. Of course, I find her a bit narrer-minded, but that's to be
+expected, seeing I've lived a lot in the city before I come here, and
+she's only been up the country; but that Carry's the caution. The
+hussy! I only asked her over out of kindness, being a woman with a
+good home as I have, and did you hear her? Them hussies without homes
+ain't got no call to give themselves airs,--bits of things workin' for
+their livin'."
+
+"I'm afraid I'm in the same category, as I have no home," I said by
+way of turning her wrath.
+
+"Oh, well, yes, but you're different; you don't have to _work_ for
+your livin'."
+
+"Have you any daughters?" I asked.
+
+"I had one, but she soon married. Like me, she was snapped up soon as
+she was old enough." Mrs Bray laughed delightedly.
+
+Here was a broad-minded democrat who considered a woman lowered in
+becoming a useful working member of society, instead of remaining a
+toy or luxury kept by her father or some other man, and who, while
+loudly bawling for the emancipation of women from the yoke of men,
+nevertheless considered the only distinction a woman could achieve was
+through their favourable notice--an attitude of mind produced by moral
+and social codes so effectively calculated to foster immoral and
+untenable inconsistency!
+
+
+
+
+THREE.
+
+BECOMING ACQUAINTED WITH GRANDMA CLAY.
+
+
+When I returned the 'busman was driving away after having brought Miss
+Flipp's uncle, and Andrew was assisting to fill a spring-cart with
+pumpkins. This vehicle had arrived under guidance of a tall, fair
+young man with perfect teeth and a pleasant smile, which kept them
+well before the public, seeing they were not concealed by any hirsute
+ambuscade, regarding the adorning qualities of which Dawn and her
+grandmother were divided. The former came out to inform Andrew that
+the pony had to be harnessed, as Mrs Clay had promised Miss Flipp she
+could drive her uncle back to catch the train.
+
+"I hope the old thing won't smash up the sulky," said Andrew. "He's
+the old bloke that come down here in the summer in a check suit, an' I
+told him you was all out an' we was full up."
+
+"A few of him would soon fill up. He! he! ha! ha!" laughed the fair
+young man. "He looks as if he were always full up! He! he! ha! ha!
+ha!"
+
+"Well, he's the purplest plum I ever saw," said Dawn. "He's a complete
+hog. He has one of these old noses, all blue, like the big plums that
+grew down near the pig-sty. I think he was grown near the pig-sty,
+too, by the style of him. It must have taken a good many cases of the
+best wine to get a nose just to that colour. Like a meerschaum pipe,
+it takes a power of colouring to get 'em to the right tinge. And his
+eyes hang out like this," said the girl, audaciously stretching her
+pretty long-lashed lids in a way that would have been horrible on a
+less beautiful or less successfully saucy girl, but which in this case
+was irresistibly amusing. The fair young man was convulsed.
+
+"His figure is like as if he had swallowed our great washing-copper
+whole and then padded round it with hay bags, and he has a great
+vulgar stand with one foot here and the other over there by the
+wheelbarrow."
+
+"He must be a acrobat or be made of wonderful elastic, if he could
+stretch that far!" remarked Andrew.
+
+"Yes, and he gets up a gold-rimmed eyeglass and sticks it on his old
+eye like this, and so I up with my finger and thumb this way in a ring
+and looked at him," said Dawn, with a moue and the protrusion of a
+healthy pink tongue which for dare-devil impertinence beat anything I
+had seen off the stage, and I succumbed to laughter in chorus with the
+young man.
+
+By some intangible indications Andrew and I felt impelled to leave, he
+proceeding to harness the horse and I accompanying him.
+
+"Just look here, 'Giddy-giddy Gout with his shirt-tail out,'"
+exclaimed the lad, breaking into one of the poetic quotations of which
+he was rarely guilty. "Now, I didn't know me pants was tore. I must
+have looked a goat!"
+
+I offered to put a stitch in the breach, so he brought needle and
+thread.
+
+"Now don't you sew me on to me pants. Dawn done that once, thought it
+was a great lark, an' I jolly well couldn't get out; so I busted up
+the whole show, and grandma joined in the huspy-puspy, and there's
+been no more larks like that. Thanks, I must do a get and put the pony
+in. Did you notice that bloke fillin' up the cart with pumpkins? He's
+gone on Dawn!"
+
+"He shows good taste."
+
+"Do you reckon Dawn's fit to knock 'em in the eye?"
+
+"Rather!"
+
+"That's bein' a stranger! When you are used to a person every day an'
+they belong to you, you don't think so much of 'em, and at the same
+time think more, if you can understand. What I mean is this. When I'm
+busy fightin' with Dawn, and she's blowing me up for not doing things
+and tellin' grandma on me, I can't see what the blokes can see in her;
+but then if I caught any one saying she wasn't good for anything, if
+he was a bloke I felt fit to wallop, I'd give him a nice sollicker
+under the ear, an' I wouldn't bother about any other girl. Do you
+see?"
+
+"Yes; I'll hold up the shafts for you."
+
+"Thanks. Well, that's 'Dora' Eweword that's doin' a kill with Dawn
+now."
+
+"Dora is a funny name for a man."
+
+"It ain't his name. He's called it for a lark because he was after a
+girl up in town named Dora Cowper. She serves in a hay and corn store
+at the corner. Things were gettin' on pretty strong, and he used to be
+taking her out all hours of the night and day. Some reckon she's
+better-lookin' than Dawn, and her mother put it around that Eweword
+would make a brilliant match for her, and that shooed him off at once.
+I reckon if I was a girl and wanted to ketch a man I'd hold me mag
+about it, as I know two or three now has been turned off the same
+way."
+
+"Perhaps Dora Cowper didn't lose much."
+
+"Well, he has a bosker farm, you see. He keeps a power of pigs and
+fattens 'em. Then he went after one or two more girls, and now he
+comes here. Buying these pumpkins is only a dodge to get a chip in
+with Dawn. He has plenty lucerne for his pigs, but we have so many
+pumpkins rotting we are glad to get rid of them at two bob a load, and
+I suppose that is cheap to get a yarn with Dawn. He ain't preposed to
+Dawn yet, but I'm sure he's goin' to, because I asked him if he was
+goin' to marry Dora Cowper, an' he said no. Dawn is only pullin' his
+leg for him--she's got all the blokes on a string. You should see her
+with those that comes up in the summer. It's worth bein' alive in the
+summer. We had melons here in millions. We used to open a big Dixie or
+Cuban Queen and just only claw out the middle. We used to fill the
+water-cask with 'em to cool, an' every time Dawn came out to dive in
+her dipper, wouldn't she rouse! Me an' Uncle Jake used to race to see
+who could eat the most, but he beat. He's a sollicker to stuff when he
+gets anything he likes. It's a wonder we didn't bust. The oranges will
+soon be ripe, that's good luck: I can eat eighty a-day easy. Here
+comes old Bolliver!"
+
+A huge figure as described by Dawn came out of the house in company
+with Miss Flipp, and I recognised Mr Pornsch, the heavy swell who had
+travelled in the 'bus with me on the day of my first arrival in
+Noonoon.
+
+With repulsive clumsiness he climbed into the vehicle, and then said
+roughly, almost brutally, to his niece--
+
+"Get in! get in!" and scarcely gave her time to be seated ere he hit
+the pony and nearly screwed its jaw off getting out of the yard.
+
+"Cock-a-doodle-do! Ain't it nice to have a sweet temper," loudly
+remarked Andrew, as he stood aside. "He just is a purple plum. He's
+the kind of old cove I'd like to get real narked and then scoot.
+Wouldn't he splutter and think himself Lord Muck, and that every one
+oughter be licking his boots!"
+
+Dawn and "Dora" Eweword were still hanging over a garden fence as
+Andrew went after his cows and I betook myself to the house. Uncle
+Jake was in conference with his sister, and gave evidence of fearing I
+should pursue him, so I mercifully betook myself to my own apartment.
+Miss Flipp presently returned, and saying she had had tea up town with
+her uncle and would not want any more, shut herself in her room, from
+whence I soon detected the sound of impassioned sobbing. My first
+impulse was to ask her what was the matter, but my second, born of a
+wide experience of grief, led me to hold my tongue and tell no one
+what I had heard; but to escape from the sound of that pitiable
+weeping I went out in the garden, where I was joined by Mrs Clay.
+
+"Did you see that young feller out there this afternoon? Fine stamp of
+a young man, don't you think?" remarked she.
+
+"He should be able for a good day's work."
+
+"Yes; he's none of your tobacco-spitting, wizened-up little runts like
+you'll see hangin' on to the corner-posts in Noonoon."
+
+"Seems to admire your granddaughter?"
+
+"An' he's not the first by a long way that has done that, though she
+was only nineteen this month."
+
+"I can quite believe it. She is a lovely girl."
+
+"An' more than that, a good one. I've never had one moment's
+uneasiness with Dawn; she took after me that way. I could let her go
+out in the world anywhere with no fear of her goin' astray. She's got
+a fine way with men, friendly and full of life, but let 'em attempt to
+come an inch farther than she wants, and then see! Sometimes I'm
+inclined to wish she's be a little more genteeler; but then I look
+around an' see some of them sleek things, an' it's always them as are
+no good, an' I'm glad then she's what she is. There's some girls here
+in town,"--the old lady grew choleric,--"you'd think butter wouldn't
+melt in their mouths, an' they try to sit on Dawn. It's because
+they're jealous of her, that's what it is. I wouldn't own 'em! They'd
+run a man into debt and be a curse to him; but there's Dawn, the man
+that gets her, he'll have a woman that will be of use to him and not
+just a ornament."
+
+"He'll have an ornament too."
+
+"Perhaps so. I've spent a lot of money on her education. She's been
+taught painting and dancing. I had her down at the Ladies' College in
+Sydney for two years finishing, an' she's had more chances of being a
+lady than most. Some of these things in town here turn up their noses
+at her an' say, 'She's only old Mrs Clay's granddaughter, who keeps a
+accommodation house,' but I pay me bills and ain't ashamed to walk up
+town an' look 'em all in the face."
+
+"But it's generally those who owe the most who have the most lordly
+mien."
+
+"You're right. I could point you out some of them up town as hasn't a
+shirt to their back, an' they look as they owned everythink--the
+brazenest things!" The old dame's indignation waxed startling in its
+intensity.
+
+"But I was going to tell you about young Eweword. I've set me heart on
+him for Dawn. He's somethink worth lookin' at an' worth havin' too. He
+knows how to farm and make it pay, an' owns one of the best pieces of
+land about Noonoon--all his own. Dawn don't seem to take to him as
+she ought. He was after a girl here in town, a Dora Cowper, an' so she
+says she ain't goin' to take any leavin's; but he ain't any leavin's,
+she can be sure of that, for if he'd wanted Dora Cowper they'd have
+snapped him up, an' I think as long as a young feller don't go making
+too much of a fool of a girl, a little flirtation's only natural. This
+has been the mischief with Dawn. There's a lot of people here in the
+summer from the city, and they're all taken with her, and for
+everlasting telling her she's wasting her talents here, that she ought
+to be on the stage. It's a wonder people can't mind their own
+concerns!" (The old dame grew choleric again.) "It makes her think
+what I can give her ain't good enough. It's all very fine in a good
+comfortable home of her own, with love and protection around her, to
+think people mean that sort of thing, an' that w'en she walked out in
+the world they would be anxious to worship her. Just let her go out
+an' try, an' she'd find it all moonshine; but w'en I tell her, she
+only thinks I'm a old pig, an' only she's that stubborn I know she'd
+never come back. (I would be the same myself w'en young, so can't
+blame her.) I'd let her have a taste of hardship to bring her to her
+bearin's. But while I'm alive she'll never have my consent to be a
+actress. W'en I was young they was looked upon as the lowest hussies.
+I'd like to hear what my mother would say if I had wanted to be
+one--paintin' meself up an' kickin' up me heels and showin' meself
+before men in the loudest manner!"
+
+I concluded not to divulge my profession while at Clay's, and to boot,
+I held much the same point of view.
+
+"She thinks she'd like to marry some fine feller and be a toff; an'
+she's got this danger that's always the drawback of a girl bein'
+pretty, so many fellers come after them at the start they get finnicky
+an' think they can marry any one, an' leave it too late, an' in the
+end they marry some rubbishing feller an' don't came out half so well
+as the plain ones that was content with a fair thing w'en they had the
+chance of it. Just the same with a boy; it's a bad thing for them to
+be able to do everythink, they are so terribly smart they end up by
+doin' nothink, an' the ploddin' feller they grinned at for bein' a
+booby, because he stuck to the one thing, comes out on top."
+
+"Just so; want of concentration plucks one every time."
+
+"That's wot I want to save Dawn from. It's all right while I live, an'
+I don't want her to be chuckin' herself at the head of any Tom or
+Dick, but I won't live for ever, an' marriage is like everythink else,
+you want to have your eye on a good thing an' not humbug too much.
+W'en I'm gone"--the austere old face softened--"I wouldn't like to
+think of her I've spent so much money on, an' rared with me own hand,
+as I did her an' her mother before her, growin' old an' sour an'
+lonely, or bein' a slave to some worthless crawler." The old voice
+grew perilously soft, and saved itself from a break by a swift
+crescendo.
+
+"As I say, I suppose she's waitin' for some great impossible feller to
+come along, like we do w'en we're young; but these upper ten is the
+worst matches a girl can make, an' besides there's too many trying to
+ketch them in their own rank. I've had lots of 'em here, an' to see
+these swell girls the way they try to ketch some one would make you
+ill. Don't you think so?"
+
+"Well, my sympathies are always with the swell girl in the matrimonial
+market," I replied. "She has a far harder time than those of the
+working classes. You see, so many of the well-to-do eligibles prefer
+working girls--actresses, chorus-singers, and barmaids, which, in
+addition to marriage in their own class, gives these girls a chance of
+stepping up; whereas the swell girls cannot marry grooms and footmen
+and raise them to their rank as their brothers can their housemaids
+and ballet-girls. To be a success the society girl must marry a man of
+sufficient means to keep her as an expensive toy, and this description
+of bachelor being scarce in any case, little wonder she has to hunt
+hard and tries to protect her preserves from poachers. Think of it
+that way."
+
+"There is a lot in that, and that's why I like to see Dawn have young
+Eweword, who's a man I'd be happy to leave her to; but I daren't say a
+word, she's mighty touchy an' would flash up that she'd leave if I
+want to get rid of her. But while I've got breath in me body there's
+one thing I will set me foot on, an' that's these good-for-nothing
+skunks like bankers' sons an' them sort of high an' mighty pauper
+nobodies; they're fearful matches for any one. I know too much about
+the swells an' the old families of the colony, I'm thankful I ain't
+one of them. My father came out here a long time ago, an' I was born
+out here. He was a sergeant in the police. I am near seventy-six, an'
+can remember plain for seventy years back in the days w'en there was
+plenty convicts, an' me father, seein' his position, was put to see
+the floggin' of them. Me and another little girl that's dead now used
+to climb up a tree an' look over the wall like children would. We was
+stationed in Goulburn then, an' I'll never forget the scenes to me
+dyin' day. The men used to be stripped to the waist and tied on a
+triangle and walloped till they was cut to pieces, till they screamed
+like little children for mercy, and poor old wretches that had roamed
+the world for sixty years used to screech Mother! Mother! like little
+children. It was heart-renderin'! An' what used they be flogged for,
+do you think?--for the piggishness of the swells mostly. I'll tell
+you. There was a old feller lived out at Kaligiwa--that's more than
+twenty miles the other side of Goulburn, an' there's Parry's Lagoon
+there called after him till this day. He was a old Lord Muck if ever
+there was one, an' by reason of that got a land grant an' men
+assigned, an' he ought to have been give to them to kick--would have
+been the right thing; an' then he had a lot of skunks of sons,--took
+after their father, of course, an' hadn't much chance of bein'
+anythink else,--an' w'en they used to ride to town they used to have a
+man tied to the stirrup just to hold it."
+
+"What was that for?"
+
+"What was it for?" she raged. "It was because they was those skunks of
+swells that think other people is only made as floor wipes for 'em!
+An' this feller used to have to run all the way to town, and if he
+hadn't strength to run all the way he'd be dragged, an' if he give any
+lip the Parrys 'u'd report 'em; an' me father says he's often seen 'em
+flogged till their backs were like ploughed, an' then have to run the
+twenty miles home. Me father used to come in every day and fling
+hisself down an' cry and sob as if his heart would break, an' say he'd
+rather starve than stay in the police. Now, the Parrys got up an' one
+of them had a 'Sir' sent out to his name, and you'll see 'em writ
+about as one of the few _old_ families; and I hold that Dawn come from
+better stock than them, and has more to be proud of in her
+grandfather--he had some heart in him. An' Lord! there's Miss Flipp's
+uncle, one look at him ought to be sufficient warnin' to any girl.
+The likes of him is common among the swells--too much stuffin' an'
+drinkin' an' debochary. Nice thing if Dawn married a swell an' he
+developed into a old pig like that. I can tell you another great
+family of swells, the Goburnes--entertained the Royalties w'en they
+was out here, an' are such bugs one of 'em married the Governor's
+daughter. They got up about the same way. In the old days w'en things
+were carelesser an' land wasn't much, the old cock of all had the
+surveyor that was gone on his daughter measurin' the land, an' got him
+to slice in great pieces by false measurement, an' worked the lives
+out of convicts--as big a brute as the Parrys. That's the breed of the
+swells, an' I have a horror of them. The people as I consider ought to
+be the swells in this country is them that came out first, the free
+emigrants, and honestly worked up the colony with their own hands, an'
+their children done the same for four or five generations--them's the
+only proper Australian aristocracy we've got. That's why I have sich a
+contempt for this Rooney-Molyneux, Mrs Bray was tellin' of; only times
+is different he'd be the same, he's got the sort of pride that thinks
+his wife is a black gin because she was only a milliner."
+
+Out past the placard advertising Mrs Clay's boats gleamed the
+highroad, and from where we walked could be seen a now unused old
+stone milepeg, carved in Roman lettering, its legend differing
+somewhat from that in modern figures painted on the miniature wooden
+post by which it had been deposed. It was one of many relics of the
+dead and gone convicts who had done giant pioneer labour in this broad
+bright land in the days when Grandma Clay's mother had been young.
+Fine old grandma, daughter of a fine old dad who had wept for the
+cruelty endured by the men who had worked in chain-gangs and were
+flogged under his superintendence, and thinking thus I turned to the
+old dame who had ceased talking and said--
+
+"And what of your father, did he get away from seeing the convicts
+flogged?"
+
+"Yes; me mother thought he was goin' mad. He used to sob in his sleep
+an' call out and squirm that he couldn't bear to see them flogged, an'
+leap up in bed in a sweat. So he gave up the police an' we went a long
+way farther back to Gool-Gool on the Yarrangung, a tributary of the
+Murrumbidgee. The train in them days was only a little way out of
+Sydney, an' me father got a job of drivin' Cobb & Co.'s coaches from
+Gool-Gool to Yarrandogi, an' me an' me mother an' sisters an' Jake
+there used to live in a little tent at the first stage out of
+Gool-Gool, an' take care of the horses. I was fond of them horses, and
+used to sneak out to harness them on to the swingle-bar w'en I was no
+higher than the table. It's a wonder I didn't get me brains knocked
+out. I was lots smarter than Jake there with the horses, though it
+ain't supposed to be girl's work. But it came nacheral to me, an' I
+think in that case it's right. That's why I never was one to narrer
+girls down an' say you mustn't do this and that because you're a girl.
+I've always found, in spite of their talk, the best and gamest mothers
+is the ones that grew out of the tomboy girls. Well, it come that me
+father, being a steady man an' very kind and well liked, he got on
+surprisin', an' soon the tent give place to a bark hut. That's the way
+people worked up in my days, an' what they had was their own. They
+didn't want to start in mansions an' eat off of silver at the expense
+of others like in these times! After that we moved a long way down an'
+took up a position on the Murra-Murra run beside the Sydney road,
+where the coaches passed in the night; an' me mother made hot coffee
+for the passengers, an' we drove a roarin' trade, had to git girls in
+to help, an' put up a large accommodation house, and respectable
+people always made to us" (the old head went high and the eyes
+flashed) "because we was clean, temperance people, there never was no
+D.T.'s or sly grog where we had the rule. An' that's why I always like
+to have a few people in the house to this day. I'm used to their
+company like, an' feel there's nothing goin' on or doing without them.
+Well, I grew up in time. I can't say it meself, but them as knew me
+then could tell you I wasn't disfigured in any way or a cripple, an'
+had no lack of admirers. Me an' me two sisters had 'em by the score
+waitin' till we grew old enough to be married. I can tell you there
+was some smart fellers among 'em. Those were the times! Me sisters
+made what is called swell matches, an' not bein' used to bein' cooped
+up, their lives was failures. I was the only one married in me own
+circle, and my life was a pattern to the others. I was the oldest an'
+waited last, an' me mother was that disappointed in me that I had to
+run away, an' I have me reasons for fearin' Dawn is on for a swell. I
+seen me sisters' lives. I call them unwholesome marriages when girls
+marries these fellers, an' their narrer-minded people sits on her an'
+is that depraved they turn him agen her!" Mrs Clay was vehement.
+
+"When Dawn's mother grew up she was Dawn's image, an' we was keepin' a
+accommodation house too, that is Jim Clay an' me, and Dawn's mother
+was reckoned the prettiest and best girl in them parts, an' had lovers
+from far and near; but there came a feller up from Sydney to stay,
+nothin' to blow about neither, but he was dreadfully gone on me
+daughter. He seemed all right, but I was agen him--being a
+swell,--till me daughter threatened she'd run away with him if I
+didn't let her have him peaceful, an' rememberin' me own youth, I let
+her have him in spite of me misgivin's. She went home with him, an' it
+appears he was like these crawlin' fellers--couldn't do nothink, only
+what their parents give them; an' w'en they found he'd married a fine,
+good, wholesome girl, instead of one of their own style--one of the
+Parrys for instance--they cut him off with a shilling, an' poor thing
+she nearly starved, an' took to work to keep him, an' he always
+growlin' at her like the coward he was, that only for her he'd have
+been well off. A mess-alliance his people called it, but the mess
+wasn't from poor Mary's side. Well, w'en it come that she was to be a
+mother, his people took her in and told her, if you please, that if it
+was a boy they'd take it theirselves and educate it fit for their
+family, but if it was a girl they wouldn't. The poor thing, not bein'
+able for anythink an' too proud to come home, stood their insults as
+long as she could, an' at last she sneaked out at night and set off to
+walk to me. It is pitiable to think of."
+
+The poor old voice trembled.
+
+"She had more'n a hundred miles to travel an' it took her days, but
+some folk was good, an' one cold night about three hours before
+daylight she startled me by comin' into my room. I remember it like
+yesterday. 'Mother,' she says, 'I'm ill; I'm goin' to die; you won't
+let them take my child, will you?' I thought her wanderin', an' she
+was so gentle it frightened me; for we was always saucy ladies, I can
+tell you--every one of us, an' you can see Dawn is the same now. But
+that's only a way; w'en I'm ill she's as tender as anythink. It's
+grandma wouldn't this do you good, and that do you good? An' her
+little hands is very clever an' nice about my old bones w'en they
+ache. Well, her mother was took bad an' me an' her father done our
+best, an' her baby came into the world--a poor miserable little
+winjin' thing, an' its mother turnin' over said, 'What's that light,
+mother, comin' in, is it the Dawn?' an' lookin' up I see it was the
+Dawn; an' she never spoke again, but went off simple an' sudden just
+then, an' that's how Dawn come to get her name. I never thought she'd
+live to be called by it though. Little winjin' thing! I had to feed
+her on the bottle an' everythink disagreed with her. We had to keep a
+old cow especial. I remember her as clear as yesterday--a big old cow
+with a dew-lap an' a crumpled horn; we called her Ladybird because she
+was spots all over. As for _them_ getting Dawn! They had the cheek to
+write an' say if it was a boy they'd take it. They had the cheek after
+what happened--that's swells for you again! I writ them one letter in
+return that I reckon ought to last them to their dying day. I told
+them it wasn't any matter to them what _my_ child was; that they had
+_murdered_ one already, let that be sufficient for them; that they'd
+get no more unless over my dead body; an' that all I regretted was
+that the child had any of their cowardly blood in it, that it almost
+discouraged me about its rarin'. An' Dawn don't know her name, an'
+won't unless she's married. Her father married again, an' I'm glad to
+say never had another child, an' I believe hankers for Dawn, an' he
+will hanker for my part; an' I've got Dawn tootered up agen him too.
+Now you can see the blow it would be to me if she took up with a
+swell--there's no happiness marryin' out of yer own religion or class.
+Mine was what I'd call a love match now. Jim Clay _was_ a lover! I've
+seen him come in with a team of five all buckin', an' it snowin' an'
+never anythink but a laugh out of him. He'd ride miles an' miles to
+see me. The crawlers about these parts nowadays toddle about on bikes
+or sit like great-grandfathers in sulkies, an' if it was to sprinkle
+they'd think half a mile too far to go to see their sweetheart. I
+think the heart of the world must be dyin' out."
+
+"You'll tell me about Jim Clay, won't you?" I said; "for I am an
+Australian--one of those you consider entitled to be termed a real
+aristocrat. My people for several generations have practically worked
+in the building of the State, though I must admit they belonged to the
+leisured class at home."
+
+"Well, that ain't nothink agen 'em when they don't make it nothink
+agen 'em, if you understand. If a swell can prove hisself as good an'
+useful a man as another, he deserves the credit, an' comes out ahead
+too, because he has the education, an' sometimes that is useful. I'll
+tell you about me young days. Lately me mind seems to be goin' back
+more an' more to old times."
+
+"Grandma! Grandma!" called Dawn's rich young voice, "come to tea.
+Andrew and Carry want to go up town after."
+
+As I turned and looked at this glowing vision I laughed to think of
+her as a "little winjin' thing," and was grateful to the good offices
+of old Ladybird with the dew-lap and a crumpled horn.
+
+"You needn't be in such a hurry all of a suddent," said grandma
+crossly. "It's a different tune w'en _you're_ hangin' over the fence
+talkin' somewhere. There's no hurry roundin' me in to tea _then_!"
+
+We lingered awhile watching the afterglow above the great range
+dividing the coast land from the vast stretches of the interior, and
+which was no longer an impassable barrier to the people of the State.
+Now the train toiled over a stile-like way connecting east and west,
+and Noonoon and Kangaroo, divided by a mile and the river, nestled
+immediately at the foot of the zigzag climb.
+
+They lay asleep against the ranges in a slow-going world of their own,
+their little houses gleaming white in the fading light.
+
+There was a flush on the old woman's face as she turned
+houseward--also an afterglow. 'Twas a fitting nook for her present
+days, the decline of those splendidly vigorous years behind! What
+satisfaction to look back on strenuous, fruitful years, and be able to
+afford rest during the last stages!
+
+I, too, had rest; but it was only the ignominious idleness of a young
+boat with a broken propeller yarded among honourably worn-out craft to
+await a foundering.
+
+
+
+
+FOUR.
+
+DAWN'S AMBITION.
+
+
+After tea grandma took to reading the 'Noonoon Advertiser'--a
+four-sheet weekly publication containing local advertisements, weather
+remarks, and a little kindly gossip about townspeople. This was her
+usual Saturday night entertainment. Carry and Andrew went to town to
+participate in the unfailing diversion of a large percentage of the
+population. This was tramping up and down the main street in a stream
+till the business places closed, from which exercise they apparently
+derived an enjoyment not visible to my naked eye. Uncle Jake and Miss
+Flipp not being in evidence, Dawn and I were the only two unoccupied,
+and noticing that she was prettily dressed, I resorted to a point of
+common interest in promoting friendliness between members of our sex
+and invited her to look at a kimono I had bought for a dressing-gown.
+
+This had the desired effect. A look of pleasure passed over the face
+that charmed me so, and she arose willingly.
+
+"I'm glad it is my week to stay in and make the bedtime coffee," she
+said as we examined the gorgeous kimono, a garment of dark-flowered
+silk; and Dawn, having all the fetichly and long-engendered feminine
+love of self-decoration, was delighted with it.
+
+"Put it on," I suggested, and the girl complied with alacrity. She did
+not make a very natural Jap, being more on the robust than _petite_
+scale, but she was a very beautiful girl. With my impassioned love of
+beauty I could not help exclaiming about hers, and the foolish
+platitude, "You ought to be on the stage," inadvertently escaped me,
+seeing this is the highest market for beauty in these days when even
+personal emotions can be made to have commercial value.
+
+"Do you think so too?" she said eagerly, betraying what lay near her
+heart. "Do you know anything about the stage? You don't think all
+actresses bad women like grandma does, do you?"
+
+"Scarcely! Some of the most sweet and lovable women I've ever seen are
+earning their living on the boards. I'm intimately acquainted with
+several actresses, and will show you their photographs some day."
+
+"Oh, I'd love to be on the stage!" exclaimed the girl.
+
+"Tell me why and how you first came to have such a wish."
+
+"Well, it's this way," said Dawn, pulling my kimono close about her
+beautifully rounded throat and curling her pink feet on a wallaby-skin
+at the bedside as she sat down upon them. "I heard grandma telling you
+something about me this afternoon, and I suppose you think I'm a
+terrible girl."
+
+"A beautiful one," I said, revelling in the curling lips and rounded
+cheek and chin.
+
+"Don't make fun of me," said Dawn huffily, blushing like noon.
+
+"Good gracious, now _you_ are making fun of me. I'm only stating a
+patent fact. Mirrors and men must have told you a thousand times that
+you are pretty."
+
+"Oh, them! They say it to every one. Look here--there's the ugliest
+little runts of girls in Noonoon, and they're always telling their
+conquests and that this man and that man say they're pretty, when a
+blind cat could see that they are ugly, and the men must be just
+stringing them to try and take them down. So when they say it to me I
+always make up my mind I'd have more gumption than to take notice, for
+I can't see any beauty in myself. I'm too fat and strong-looking; all
+the beauties are thin and delicate-looking in the face--not a bit like
+me. I know I'm not cross-eyed or got one ear off, but that's about
+all."
+
+I had been wont to think the only place unconscious beauties abounded
+was in high-flown, unreal novels; but here was one in real life, and
+that the exceedingly unvarnished existence of Noonoon. Not that I
+would have thought any the less of her had she been conscious of her
+physical loveliness, for beauty is such a glorious, powerful,
+intoxicating gift that had I been blessed with it I'm sure I would
+have admired myself all day, and the wonder to me regarding beautiful
+men and women is not that they are so conceited, but, on the contrary,
+that they are so little vain.
+
+"I want to tell you why I want to be on the stage. I couldn't tell how
+I hate Noonoon. It's all very well for grandma to settle down now and
+want me to be the same, but when she was young (you get her to tell
+you some of the yarns, they're tip-top) she wasn't as quiet as I am by
+a long way. Just fancy marrying some galoot about here and settling
+down to wash pots and pack tomatoes and live in the dust among the
+mosquitoes, _always_! I'd rather die. I'll tell you the whole thing
+while I'm about it. You won't mind, as I'm sure you have had trouble
+too, as your white hair doesn't look to be age."
+
+Comparison of her midget irritation with those that had put broad
+white streaks in my hair was amusing, but the rosy heart of a girl
+magnifies that which it doesn't contract.
+
+"Grandma wants me to marry. Did you see that fellow who was after
+pumpkins?--he ought to make one of his head, the great thing! Grandma
+has a fancy for me having him, but I wouldn't marry him if he were the
+only man in Noonoon. Do you know, they actually call him Dora because
+he was breaking his neck after a girl of that name. He used to be
+making red-hot love to her. Young Andrew there saw him up the lane by
+Bray's with his arm round her waist, mugging her for dear life, and
+then he'd come over here and want to kiss me! If he had seen me up a
+lane hugging the baker, I wonder would he want me then!" Dawn's tone
+approached tears, for thus are sensitive maiden hearts outraged by an
+inconsistent double standard of propriety and its consequences, great
+and small.
+
+"Grandma says that's nothing if it's not worse, for that's the way of
+men, but I'd rather have some one who hadn't done it so plainly right
+under my nose; people wouldn't be able to poke it at me then. I've got
+him warded off proposing, and while I guard against that it's all
+right. Now, this is why I'd like to be on the stage. I'd love to have
+been born rich and have lovely dresses, and I'm sure I could hold
+receptions and go to balls, and the stage would be next best to
+reality."
+
+"But why not marry some one who could give you these things?"
+
+"Where would I find him? You may bet that's the sort of man I'd like
+to marry if I did marry at all," and the dullest observer could have
+seen she was heart-whole and fancy free. Certainly there would be a
+difficulty in procuring that brand of eligible. There was but a
+limited supply of him on the market, and that was generally
+confiscated to the use of imported actresses, and, could society
+journals be relied upon, it was the same in England; so Dawn showed
+good instinct in wanting to bring herself into more equal competition
+with the winners.
+
+"Can you sing?"
+
+"I've never been trained," she said, but at my request went to the
+piano in the next room and gave vent to a strong, clear mezzo. It was
+a good voice--undoubtedly so. There are many such to be heard all over
+Australia--girls singing at country concerts without instruction, or
+the ignorant instruction more injurious than helpful. These voices are
+marred to the practised ear by the style of production, which in a
+year or two leaves them cracked and awful. This widespread lack of
+voice preservation is the result of a want of public musical training.
+With all the training in Paris, Dawn would never have been a Dolores
+or Calve, but with other ability she had sufficient voice to make a
+success in comic opera or in concerts as second fiddle to a star
+soprano.
+
+"You must sing again for me," I said, "and I'll discover whether you
+have any ability." For the way to wean any one from a desire is not by
+condemnation of it.
+
+"Don't you say anything to grandma about me and the stage or she'd
+very nearly turn you out of the house. You just ask her what she
+thinks of it some time, and it will give you an idea; but I hate
+Noonoon, and would run away, only grandma goes on so terribly about
+hussies that go to the bad, and she's very old, and you know how you
+feel that a curse might follow you when people go on that way," said
+the girl in bidding me good night.
+
+Dawn had many characteristics that made one love her, and a few in
+spite of which one bore her affection. Her method of dealing with her
+native tongue came among the latter. It was reprehensible of her too,
+seeing the money her grandmother had spent in giving her a chance to
+be a lady--that is, the type of lady who affects a blindness
+concerning the stern, plain facts of existence, and who considers that
+to speak so that she cannot be heard distinctly is an outward sign of
+innate refinement. She had made poor use of her opportunities in this
+respect, but if to be honest, healthy, and wholesome is lady-like,
+then Dawn was one of the most vigorous and thoroughly lady-like folk I
+have known, and what really constitutes a lady is a mootable point
+based largely upon the point of view.
+
+
+
+
+FIVE.
+
+MISS FLIPP'S UNCLE.
+
+
+I did not sleep that night. Dawn and her grandma had given me too much
+food for cogitation. I felt I had incurred a responsibility in regard
+to the former, upon which I chewed tough cud at the expense of sleep.
+
+While there was hard common-sense in the old grandmother's point of
+view, it was also easy to be at one with the girl's desire for
+something brighter and more stirring than old Noonoon afforded. The
+fertile valley was beautiful in all truth, but with the beauty that
+appeals only to the storm-wrecked mariner, worn with a glut of human
+strife and glad to be at anchor for a time rebuilding a jaded
+constitution.
+
+Upon a first impression this girl did not seem abnormally anxious for
+the mere plaudits or the notoriety part of the stage-struck's fever,
+nor was she alight with that fire called genius which will burn a hole
+through all obstacles till it reaches its goal; she appeared rather to
+regard the stage as a means to an end--a pleasant easy way, in the
+notion of the inexperienced, of obtaining the fine linen and silver
+spoon she desired. Had she been a boy, doubtless she would have set
+out to work for her ambition, but being a girl she sought to climb by
+the most approved and usual ladder within reach--the stage; for
+actresses all married the lovely, rich (often titled) young gentlemen
+who sat in rows in the front seats and admired the high-class "stars"
+and worshipped the ballerinas and chorus girls, or so at least a great
+many people believed, being led astray by certain columns in gossip
+newspapers, which doubtless have a colouring of truth inasmuch that
+the women of the stage are idealised creatures--idealised by
+limelight, and advertised by a pushing management for the benefit of
+the box-office.
+
+Now Dawn had ample ability and appearance for success on the stage if
+her parents had been there before her, so that she could have grown up
+in touch with it, but whether she had sufficient iron and salt to push
+her way against the barriers in her pathway I doubted. Only sheer
+genius can get to the front in any line of art with which it is not in
+touch, and even giant talent is often so mangled in the struggle that
+when it wrests recognition it is too spent to maintain the altitude it
+has attained at the expense of heart-sweat and blood.
+
+The girl worried me, and it worried me more to think that after all my
+experience I was so foolish and sentimental that I could be worried
+regarding her. She had a comfortable home, a loving guardian, youth,
+health, good appearance, and, to a certain extent, fitted her
+surroundings. There was nothing of the ethereally aesthetic about her,
+and no stretch of sickly imagination could picture her as pining to be
+understood. Notwithstanding this, there was I longing to help her so
+much that, in spite of my health and an acquaintance that was only
+twelve hours old, I was contemplating entering society for her sweet
+sake. The fact was, this little orphan girl who had taken up the life
+her mother had laid down at dawn of day nineteen years ago, had
+collected my scalp, and was at leave to string it on her belt as that
+of an ardent faithful lover who never entertained one unworthy thought
+of her, or wavered in affection from the hour she first flashed upon
+her.
+
+I desired to save her from such savage disappointment as had blighted
+my life, not that she would ever have the capacity to feel my frenzy
+of griefs, but remembering my own experience, I was ever anxious to
+save other youngsters from the possibilities of a similar fate.
+
+The best disposal to be made of Dawn was to settle her in marriage
+with some decent and well-to-do man on the sunny side of thirty; but
+where was such an one?
+
+Thus I lay awake, and heard the hours chime and the trains go roaring
+by, till all the household but Miss Flipp had returned. She entered
+from the outside, did not come in till after midnight, and was not
+alone. Her uncle accompanied her. My room had French lights opening
+into the garden in the same way as Miss Flipp's, and as my ailment was
+a heart affection it was sometimes necessary for me to go outside to
+get sufficient air, and in this instance I had the door-windows wide
+open and the bed pulled almost to the opening. Miss Flipp apparently
+had her window open too, for despite the conversation in her room
+being in subdued tones, I heard it where I lay.
+
+It contained startling disclosures anent these two persons' relations
+and characters, and when Mr Pornsch went his way with the uneven
+footsteps of the overfed and of accumulating years, he left me in a
+painful state of perturbation.
+
+What course should I pursue?
+
+Casting on a pair of slippers and a heavy cloak, I took a little path
+leading from my window through the garden to the pier where the boats
+were moored, and here I sat down to consider. Experience had taught me
+to be chary of entering matters that did not concern me, but it had
+not made me sufficiently callous to preserve my equanimity in face of
+a discovery so serious as this.
+
+Miss Flipp had sinned the sin which, if discovered, put a great gulf
+'twixt her and Grandma Clay, Dawn, Carry, and myself, but which would
+not prevent her fellow-sinner from associating with us on more than
+terms of equality. Should Grandma Clay become aware of what I knew,
+she certainly would bundle the girl out neck and crop, as she would be
+justified in doing. But the girl was in a ghastly predicament, and
+more sinned against than sinning, when one heard her grief and
+remembered the age of her betrayer, which should have made him the
+protector instead of the seducer of young women.
+
+Times out of number the dramatic critics have termed me an artist of
+the first rank, and it is this temperament which furnishes the faculty
+of regarding all shades and consequences of life's issues unabashed,
+and with the power to distil knowledge from good and bad and use it
+experimentally, rather than, as a judge, condemnatory.
+
+I determined to keep the girl's secret, and show myself
+sympathetically friendly otherwise, hoping she would extend me her
+confidence, so that in a humble way I might be privileged to stand
+between her and perdition.
+
+It was a beautiful night, one of those when the moon relinquishes her
+court to the little stars. Vehicular traffic had ceased, and the only
+sound breaking the stillness of the great frostless, silver-spangled
+darkness was the panting of the steam-engines and the murmur of the
+river where half a mile down it took a slight fall over boulders. The
+electric lights of the town twinkled in the near distance, and farther
+east was a faint glow beyond the horizon, rightly or wrongly
+attributed to the lights of the metropolis. After a time it grew
+chilly, and I was glad to return to my bed. Dawn was separated from me
+by a thin wooden partition, and her strong healthy breathing was
+plainly discernible as she lay like an opening rose in maiden slumber,
+but there was now no sound from the room of the other poor girl--a
+rose devoured by the worm in its core.
+
+Next morning, however, she appeared at breakfast, for Clay's was not a
+house wherein one felt encouraged to coddle themselves without
+exceptional reason, and to all but a suspicious or hypercritical
+observer she seemed as usual.
+
+Carry was going to church.
+
+"I haven't been able to go this three weeks because my dress wasn't
+finished, and next Sunday will be my week in the kitchen, so if I
+don't go now I won't be able to show it for a fortnight," she
+announced.
+
+"Well, I ain't going," said grandma. "Gimme back your porridge, I
+forgot to dose it"--this to Andrew, on whose oatmeal she had omitted
+to put sugar and milk. "I've always found church is a good deal of
+bother when you have any important work. I contribute to the stipend;
+that ought to be enough for 'em. If one spent all their time running
+to church they would have no money to give to it, an' I never yet see
+praying make a living for any one but the parsons."
+
+Thus, Dawn being engaged in the kitchen, and her Uncle Jake keeping
+her company there while he perused the 'Noonoon Advertiser,' which
+descended to him on Sunday morning, Andrew having gone away with Jack
+Bray, and Miss Flipp being invisible, grandma and I were left together
+to enjoy a small fire in the dining-room, so I took this opportunity
+of inquiring how Jim Clay had managed to capture her. This sort of
+thing interested me; I liked life in the actuality where there was no
+counterfeit or make-believe to offend the sense of just proportions.
+Not that I do not love books and pictures, but they have to be so very
+very good before they can in any way appease one, while the meanest
+life is absorbingly interesting, invested as it must ever be with the
+dignity of reality.
+
+
+
+
+SIX.
+
+GRANDMA CLAY'S LOVE-STORY.
+
+
+"Oh, you don't want to hear it now," she said in response to my
+request, but she gave a pleased laugh, betraying her willingness to
+tell it. "Sometimes I get running on about old times an' don't know
+where to stop, an' Dawn says people only pretend to be interested in
+me out of politeness. I think I hinted to you that mine was a love
+match--the only sort of marriage there ought to be; any other sort, in
+my mind, is only fit for pigs."
+
+"But sometimes love matches would be utterly absurd," I remarked.
+
+"Well, then, people that are utterly absurd ought to be locked up in a
+asylum. Anybody that's _fit_ to love wouldn't love a fool, because
+there must be reason in everything. _Some_ people I know would love a
+monkey, but they ain't fit to be counted with the people that keeps
+the world going. Well, I got as far as we kep' a accommodation house
+on the Sydney road,--fine road it was too, level and strong, and in
+many places flagged by the convicts, an' it stands good to this day.
+It ain't like these God-forsaken roads about here,"--grandma showed
+symptoms of convulsions,--"but _some_ people is only good for to be
+stuffed in a--a--asylum, and that's where the Noonoon Municipal
+Council ought to be, an' I say it though Jake there, me own brother,
+is one of them."
+
+"Did Jim Clay--" I said, by way of keeping to the subject.
+
+"I told you how I used to sneak out to buckle the horses on; an' w'en
+Jack Clay, a great chum of me father's, used to be driving the 'Up'
+coach, me father, w'en he'd be slack of passengers,--which wasn't
+often, there being more life and people moving in the colony
+then,--an' w'en I'd be good, would put me up on the box an' take me on
+to the next stage, an' I'd come back with Jack Clay--that was me
+husband's father.
+
+"As it used to be in the night, it usedn't to take from me time, an' I'd
+be up again next day as if I'd slep' forty hours. I wasn't like the
+girls these days, if they go to a blessed ball an' are up a few hours
+they nearly have to stay in bed a week after it. In that way I come to
+be a great hand with the reins, an' me father took a deal of pride in me
+because all the young men up that way began to talk about me. Me father
+had the best team of horses on the road. He used to always drive them
+hisself. He was always a kind man to every one and everythink about him.
+He drove three blood coachers abreast and two lighter ones, Butterfly
+and Fairy, in the lead. Weren't them days! That great coach swingin'
+round the curves and sidlings in the dark, I fancy I can feel the reins
+between me fingers now! And there was always a lot of jolly fellows, and
+usedn't they to cheer me w'en the horses 'u'd play up a bit. It was
+considered wonderful for me to manage such a team. I was only a slight
+slip of a girl, not near so fat as Dawn; she takes more after her
+grandfather. Me and me sisters had no lack of sweethearts, and we didn't
+run after them neither. Some people make me that mad the way they run
+after people and lick their boots. W'en I'd be drivin' with me father,
+Jim Clay used to be with his, but he was some years older than me. He
+wanted to enter the drivin' business soon as opportunity came, an' him
+an' me were sort of rivals like. Many of the young swells used to bring
+me necklaces and brooches, but somehow when Jim Clay only brought me a
+pocket-handkerchief or a lump of ribbon I liked it better an' kep' it
+away in a little scented box an' I was supposed to be in love with a
+good many in them days. _Some people_ always knows other's business
+better than they do theirselves. Me two sisters got married soon as they
+were eighteen--one to a thrivin' young squatter, an' the other to a rich
+old banker. Seein' how she got on is what makes me agen old men marryin'
+young girls. It ain't natural. A man might marry a girl a few years
+younger than hisself, but there must be reason in everythink. I was
+older than me sisters, an' people began to twit me an' say I'd be left
+on the shelf, but before this, w'en I was sixteen an' Jim Clay twenty,
+me father broke his leg and was put by. All his trouble was his horses;
+he fretted an' fretted that they'd be spoilt by a careless driver, an'
+he had 'em trained so they knew nothing but kindness. I was only too
+willin', and I up an' undertook to drive the coach right through. Old
+Jack Clay said he'd come with me a turn or two an' leave Jim to take his
+team, but just then he had some terrible new horses that no one could
+handle but hisself,--he was a wonderful hand with horses was Jim's
+father,--so Jim was sent with me. My, wasn't there a cheer when I first
+brought the mail in all on me own!" The old face flashed forth a
+radiance as she told her tale.
+
+"Some of the old gents in the town of Gool-Gool come out an' shook
+hands with me, an' the ladies kissed me w'en I got down off of the
+box. There was a lawyer feller considered a great lady-killer in them
+days. He had a long beard shaved in the Dundreary,--Dawn always says
+he must have been a howler with a beard of that description; but times
+change, an' these clean-faced women-lookin' fellers the girls think is
+very smart now will look just as strange by-an'-by. However, he was
+runnin' strong with me, an' me mother considered him favourable,--him
+bein' a swell an' makin' his way. Soon as ever I started runnin' the
+coach he was took with a lot of business down the road, an' used to be
+nearly always a passenger."
+
+"It appears that sweetheart tactics have not changed if the style in
+beards has," I remarked with a smile.
+
+"No, an' they'll never change, seein' a man is a man an' a girl a
+girl, no matter what fashions come an' go. I never can see why they
+make such a fuss and get so frightened because wimmen does a thing or
+two now they usedn't to. Nothing short of a earthquake can make them
+not men an' wimmen, an' that's the main thing. Well, to go back to me
+yarn, lots of other passengers got took the same way, an' there was
+great bidding for the box seat: that was a perquisite belongin' to the
+driver, an' me father used to get a sovereign for it often. I used to
+dispose of it by a sort of tender, an' L5 was nothink for it; an' once
+in the gold-rush times, w'en money was laying around like water, a big
+miner, just to show off, gave me two tenners for it. They used to be
+wantin' to drive, but I took me father's advice an' never let go the
+reins. Well, among all these fine chaps Jim Clay wasn't noticed. He
+was always a terrible quiet feller. _I_ did all the jorin'. He'd
+always say, 'Come now, Martha, there's reason in everythink,' just
+w'en I'd be mad because I couldn't see no reason in nothink. He was
+sittin' in the back of the coach, an' it was one wet night, an' only a
+few passengers for a wonder, who was glad to take refuge inside. Only
+the lawyer feller was out on the box with me, an' makin' love heavier
+than it was rainin'. I staved him off all I could, an' with him an'
+the horses me hands was full. You never see the like of the roads in
+them days. It was only in later years the Sydney road, I was
+remarkin', was made good. In them times there was no made roads, and
+you can imagine the bogs! Why, sometimes you'd think the whole coach
+was going out of sight in 'em, and chargin' round the stumps up to the
+axle was considered nothink. We had more pluck in them days! Well,
+that night the roads was that slippery the brake gave me all I could
+do, an' a new horse in the back had no more notion of hangin' in the
+breechin' than a cow; so I took no notice to the lawyer, only told him
+to hold his mag once or twice an' not be such a blitherer, but it was
+no use, he took a mean advantage off of me. You can imagine it was
+easy w'en I had five horses in a coach goin' round slippery sidlin's
+pitch dark an' rainin'. He put his arms 'round me waist an' that
+raised me blood, an' I tell you things hummed a little. You'll see
+Dawn in a tantrum one of these days, but she ain't a patch on me w'en
+me dander was up in me young days." Looking at the fine old flashing
+eyes and the steel in her still, it was easy to see the truth of this.
+
+"I jored him to take his hands off me or I'd pull up the coach an'
+call the inside passengers out to knock him off. He gamed me to do it,
+an' laughed an' squeezed me harder, an' the cowardly crawler actually
+made to kiss me; but I bit him on the nose and spat at him, an took
+the horses over a bad gutter round a fallen tree at the same time--an'
+some people is afraid to let their blessed daughters out in a doll's
+sulky with a tiddy little pony no bigger than a dog. If I had children
+like that I'd give 'em all the chances goin' of breaking their neck,
+as they wouldn't be worth savin' for anythink but sausage meat. Well,
+this cur still kep' on at his larks, so soon as I got the team on the
+level,--it was at Sapling Sidin', runnin' into Ti-tree creek; I could
+hear the creek gurgling above the sound of the rain, and the white
+froth on the water I can see it plain now,--I pulled sudden and said
+'Woa!' an' it was beautiful the way they'd stop dead. The passengers
+all suspected there must be a accident, or the bushrangers must have
+bailed us up, for they was around in full blast in them days. Well,
+w'en I pulled up I got nervous an' ashamed, an' bust out crying, an'
+the passengers didn't know what to make of it; but Jim Clay, it
+appears, had his eye an' ear cocked all the time, an' before any one
+knew what had happened he had the lawyer feller welted off of the
+coach an' was goin' into him right an' left. That's what give me a
+feelin' to Jim Clay all of a sudden, like I never had to no one else
+before or since. He was always such a terrible quiet feller that no
+one seemed to notice, an' he'd never made love to me before, but he
+got besides hisself then and shouts, 'If ever you touch my girl again
+I'll hammer you to smithereens.' Then he got back on the box an' wiped
+me eyes on his handkerchief an' protected me. The men inside--mostly
+diggers makin' through to Victoria--w'en they got the hang of things
+bust out roarin' an' cheerin', an' said, 'Leave the dawg on the road
+an' giv him a stummick ache.' He tried to get up, but they pushed him
+off. He made great threats about the law, but miners is the gamest men
+alive an' loves fair play. It ain't any use in talking law to them if
+it ain't fair play, an' they give him to understand if he said
+anythink to me about it, or told any one an' didn't take his lickin'
+like a man, they'd break every bone in his body, an' they meant it
+too. Then they lerruped up the team and left him in the rain an' pitch
+dark miles from anywhere. That was the only time I give up the reins.
+I couldn't see for tears, so Jim drove; an' the men took me inside so
+he could attend to his work, they said, an' they cheered an' joked an'
+asked w'en the weddin' was comin' off, an' said they'd all come an'
+give us a rattlin' spree if we'd let 'em know. I didn't know what come
+over me; I never was much for whimperin', but I cried an' cried as if
+me heart was broke; an' it wasn't, because every time I thought of the
+way Jim Clay stuck up for me it give me the best feelin' I ever knew,
+an' the men was all on my side, an' there was no harm done, an' I
+ought to have been smilin', but I could do nothink but sob, an' I
+always think now w'en I see girls cryin' on similar occasions to let
+'em alone. Girls can't tell what's up with them, and a cry is good,
+because they ain't got the outlets that men has w'en they're worked
+up. We came to the end stage, an' w'en we got off the men all shook
+hands, an' one or two kissed me, an' pulled me curls, an' slapped Jim
+Clay on the back, an' called him my sweetheart. W'en we delivered the
+mail Jim drove me to where I stayed, an' it was terrible embarrassin'
+w'en we was left alone with no extra people to take the down off of
+the affair. Jim was painful shy, but he faced it manful; an' he said
+it didn't matter what they said about us bein' lovers, if it was
+disagreeable to me he'd never mention it nor think nothink about it,
+an' it would be forgot in a day or two, as he was a feller of no
+importance. That was the way he put it; he never was for puttin'
+hisself up half enough. So crying again I just snuggled up to him an'
+said I didn't want to forget it, I wanted to remember it more an'
+more, an' with that he took the hint an' kissed me; an' that's how we
+got engaged without no proposing or nothink. I didn't tell me mother,
+or there would have been a uproar, an' just then Jim Clay got a coach
+on the Cooma line, an' went right away. I told him I'd wait for him.
+He was away two years, an' w'en he came home we found it was still the
+same with us. I was eighteen then, an' him twenty-two.
+
+He went away to Queensland for two years more, an' in that time the
+sister next me was married, an' Jake there was comin' on; but he was
+never no good on the box--he pottered round and grew forage. Me mother
+began to suggest I ought to marry this one an' that one, but I waited
+for Jim Clay, an' w'en I was gettin' on for twenty-one, old Jack Clay
+reckoned he was gettin' too old for drivin' in all weathers, an' Jim
+come home an' took his place. A fine great feller he was, all tanned
+and brown, with his white teeth showin' among his black beard. He said
+he'd seen no girl that wasn't as tame as ditch water after me, an' as
+for me, no one else could ever give me the feelin' he could, so we
+reckoned to be publicly engaged. It raised the most terrible bobberie,
+and me mother nearly took a fit. She had me laid out for a swell like
+me sisters, an' she said I must be mad to throw myself away like that.
+Me brother-in-laws got ashamed of their wives' parents bein' in such a
+trade, an' as they had made a comfortable bit, they was goin' to give
+it best and rare a few sheep an' cattle, an' me sisters came down on
+me an' said I would disgrace them now they had rose theirselves up in
+the stirrups. Mother said she'd never give her consent, an' I told her
+very saucy I'd do without it. That's why I know it don't do to press
+Dawn over far; she must have the same fight in her, an' if drove in a
+corner there'd be no doing anythink with her. Things was very strained
+at home then; they thought to wean me of him, an' Jim Clay he hung
+back some, sayin' I'd better think twice before I threw myself away on
+him. That made me all the determinder. Jim was the only man for me. I
+never did have patience with them as can't make up their mind. So I
+waited, an' the day I was twenty-one--me two sisters was twins and
+married, one at nineteen and the other at eighteen--I gathered up a
+few things, and I had two hundred in the bank, and I went to a point
+of the road, Fern-tree Gully it was named, an' w'en Jim come down the
+hill with his horses I waved--we had it all made up--an' he stopped
+till I clambered aboard, an' the box seat was reserved for me that day
+for nothink, and at the end of the stage we was married. I stayed with
+Jim's mother for a week or two till we seen a opening, an' I kep' a
+accommodation while Jim drove a coach. Jim was always steady, an' we
+was both very popular, though I never pandered to no one, or put up
+with nothink that didn't please me. Our story was a sort of romance in
+them days, an' money was changin' hands freely, an' we was all right.
+The old folk died by-and-by; they didn't live very long, and Jake
+there come to me. He wasn't good enough for his sisters, an' somehow
+that's made us always cling together. I ain't blind, I can see he's no
+miracle; he has his faults. Who hasn't?" the old lady fiercely
+demanded. I assured her I knew none, and somewhat appeased by this she
+proceeded.
+
+"Well, as I say, Jake there ain't a wonder of smartness, but he's the
+only one belonging to the old days left to me, an' you couldn't
+understand what that means till you get to be my age. If I went to any
+one of your age, or old enough to be your mother, an' said, 'Do you
+remember this or that,' how far back could they go with me, do you
+think?"
+
+"And then did you and Jim Clay--"
+
+"Me an' Jim Clay was the happiest pair I think ever lived under a
+weddin' ring, an' it was a love match. He was quiet an' easy-goin'
+like, an' I was the one to bustle, consequently there would be times
+w'en there would be a little controversy in the house; but Jim, he'd
+always put his arm round me an' kiss me, an' that's the sort of thing
+a woman likes. She doesn't like all the love-makin' to be over in the
+courtin' days, as if it was only a bit of fishin' to ketch her. Tho'
+of course I'd tell him to leave me alone, that I couldn't bear him
+maulin' me; but women has to be that way, it bein' rared into them to
+pretend they don't like what they do. An' you see Jim always
+remembered how I had stuck to him straight, an' flung up swell matches
+for him, which must have showed I loved him. That's what gets over a
+man, he never forgets that in a girl, an' always thinks more of her
+than the one with prawperty who marries a poor girl and is always
+suspicioning she took him for what he has. Of course, there are some
+crawlers of men ain't to be pleased anyhow, but they can be left out
+of it. In givin' advice to young wives, I always tell 'em w'en they
+get sick of their husbands, which they all do at times, especially at
+the start before you get seasoned to endure them, never to let him
+suspect it, for men, in spite of all their wonderful smartness, has a
+lot of the child in 'em after all, an' can take a terrible lot of
+love. (When it comes to givin' any in return, of course that's a horse
+of another colour.) But of course this is only dealin' with a man
+that's worth anythink; as I said, there are some crawlers you could
+make a door-mat of yourself for, an' they'd dance on you an' think
+nothink of it; but as I said before, there must be reason in
+everythink to begin with. After Jim died I didn't care for livin' in
+the old place, an' thought I'd like to get somewhere near the city.
+Old people ought to have sense. They don't want to crawl round like
+Methuselah at forty, but they know w'en they git up to seventy they
+ain't goin' to live for ever, nor get any suppler in the joints, an'
+ought to make some provision to get nearer churches an' doctors an'
+all that's necessary to old people; so I sold out an' bought this
+place down here."
+
+"What family have you?"
+
+"Only Dawn's mother and Andrew's, and two sons away in America. I was
+misfortunate with me daughters; they both died young, one as I told
+you, an' the other of typhoid; and so after bein' done with me own
+family I started with others. I used to think once I'd be content to
+live till I see me little ones grown up an' settled, an' then I wanted
+to live till I see Dawn able to take care of herself, an' now I
+suppose, if I didn't take care, I'd want to be waitin' to see Dawn's
+children around me. That's the way; w'en we get along one step we want
+to go another, an' it's good some matters ain't left for us to decide.
+But it's all for Dawn and Andrew I bother now, only for them me work
+would be done; but it's good to have them, they keep me from feelin'
+like a old wore-out dress just hangin' up waitin' to be eat by the
+moths."
+
+"Grandma!" said the voice of Dawn in the doorway, "I can't get this
+beastly old stove to draw, and I'm blest if I can cook the dinner. I
+never saw such a place, one has to work under such terrible
+difficulties. It's something fearful." Her voice was cross, and her
+facial expression bore further testimony to a state of extreme
+irritation.
+
+Grandma rose to combat, she never meekly sat down under any
+circumstances, great or small.
+
+"Terrible place, indeed; see if _you_ had to provide a home what you'd
+have in it. You was never done squarkin' for that stove; some one else
+had one like it, an' you was goin' to do strokes w'en you got it. It's
+always easy to complain about things w'en you are not the one
+responsible!"
+
+Grandma and I decided to go to the kitchen and prescribe for the
+stove.
+
+From an idle onlooker's point of view it seemed an excellent domestic
+implement in good health; but the beautiful cook averred it would
+produce no heat.
+
+"It must be like Bray's," said grandma, "they thought it was no good,
+and it was only because of some damper that had to be fixed."
+
+"Yes; and they had a man there to fix it for them; that's the terrible
+want about this place, there being no _man_ about it to do anything,"
+Dawn said pointedly, looking at Uncle Jake, who was calmly sitting in
+his big chair in the corner. He was not disconcerted. A man who could
+live for years on a widowed sister without making himself worth his
+salt is not of the calibre to be upset by a few hints.
+
+"I've busted up me pants again," cheerfully announced Andrew from the
+doorway--misfortunes never come singly. "Dawn, just get a needle and
+cotton and stitch 'em together."
+
+"I never knew you when they weren't 'busted up,' and you can get
+another pair or hold a towel round you till Carry comes home; she's
+got to do the mending, it's her week in the house. I've got enough to
+worry me, goodness knows!"
+
+"Dear me!" said grandma, walking away as I once more volunteered to be
+a friend in need to Andrew, "w'en people is young, an' a little thing
+goes wrong, they think they have the troubles of a empire upon them,
+but the real troubles of life teaches 'em different. You are a
+good-for-nothink lump anyhow, Andrew. Where have you been on a Sunday
+morning tearing round the country?"
+
+Andrew threw no light on the question, and his grandma repeated it.
+
+"Where have you been, I say--answer me at once?"
+
+"Oh, where haven't I been!" returned Andrew a trifle roughly, "I
+couldn't be tellin' you where I've been. A feller might as well be in
+a bloomin' glass case as carry a pocket-book around an' make a map of
+where he's been."
+
+The old lady's eyes flashed.
+
+"None of yer cheek to me, young man! You're getting too big for yer
+boots since you left school. If in five minutes you don't tell me
+where you've been an' who you was with, I'll screw the neck off of
+you. Nice thing while you're a child an' looking to me for everythink
+that goes into your stummick an' is put on your back, an' I'm
+responsible for you, that you can't answer me civil. Your actions
+can't bear lookin' into, it seems. I'll go over an' see Mr Bray about
+it this afternoon if you don't tell me at once."
+
+"I ain't been anywhere, only pokin' up an' down the lanes with Jack
+Bray."
+
+"Well, why couldn't you say so at once without raisin' this rumpus.
+Them as has rared any boys don't know what it is to die of idleness
+an' want of vexation."
+
+"It wasn't _me_ rose the rumpus. Some people always blames others for
+what they do themselves: it 'u'd give a bloke th' pip," grumbled
+Andrew, as I put the last stitch in his trousers and his grandma
+departed. Her black Sunday dress rustled aggressively, and her plain
+bibless holland apron, which she never took off except when her bonnet
+went on for street appearance or when she went to bed, and her little
+Quaker collars and cuffs of muslin edged with lace, were even more
+immaculate than on week-days. She scorned a cap, and her features were
+so well cut that she looked well with the grey hair--wonderfully
+plentiful and wavy for one of her years,--simply parted and tidily
+coiled at the back. This costume or toilet, always fresh and never
+shabby, was invariably completed by a style of light house-boots,
+introduced to me as "lastings"; and there was an unimpaired vigour of
+intellect in their wearer good to contemplate in a woman of the people
+aged seventy-five.
+
+It came on to rain after dinner and confined us all to the house.
+
+Dawn borrowed an exciting love-story from Miss Flipp; grandma read a
+"good" book; Uncle Jake still pored over the 'Noonoon Advertiser,'
+while Andrew repaired a large amount of fishing-tackle, with which
+during the time I knew him I never knew him to catch a fish, and Carry
+grumbled about the rain.
+
+"Poor Carry!" sympathised Andrew, "she can't git out to do a spoon
+with Larry, an' the poor bloke can't come in--he's so sweet, you know,
+a drop of rain would melt him."
+
+"It would take something to melt you," retorted Carry. "The only thing
+I can see good in the rain is that it will keep Mrs Bray away."
+
+And thus passed my first full day at Clay's.
+
+
+
+
+SEVEN.
+
+THE LITTLE TOWN OF NOONOON.
+
+
+The little town, situated whereaway it does not particularly matter,
+and whose name is a palindrome, is one of the oldest and most
+old-fashioned in Australia. Less than three dozen miles per road, and
+not many more minutes by train from the greatest city in the Southern
+hemisphere, yet many of its native population are more unpolished in
+appearance than the bush-whackers from beyond Bourke, the Cooper, and
+the far Paroo. It is an agricultural region, and this in some measure
+accounts for the slouching appearance of its people. Men cannot wrest
+a first-hand living from the soil and at the same time cultivate a
+Piccadilly club-land style and air.
+
+It is a valley of small holdings, being divided into farms and
+orchards, varying in size from several to two or three hundred acres.
+Many grants were apportioned there in the early days. Representatives
+of the original families in some instances still hold portions of
+them, and the stationary population has drifted into a tiny world of
+their own, and for want of new blood have ideas caked down like most
+of the ground, and evinced in many little characteristics distinct
+from the general run of the people of the State.
+
+Though they were, when I knew them, possessed of the usual human
+failings in an average degree, they were for the most part a splendid
+class of population--honest, industrious producers, who, in Grandma
+Clay's words, "Keep the world going." There was only a small
+percentage of idlers and parasites among them, but they did duty with
+a very small-minded unprogressive set of ideas.
+
+There is a place in New South Wales named Grabben-Gullen, where the
+best potatoes in the world are grown. Great, solid, flowery beauties,
+weighing two pounds avoirdupois, are but ordinary specimens in this
+locality, and the allegorical bush statement for illustrating their
+uncommon size has it that they grow under the fences and trip the
+horses as they travel the lanes between the paddocks. Similarly, to
+explain the wonderful growth of vegetation in the fertile valley of
+Tumut, its inhabitants assure travellers that pumpkin and melon vines
+grow so rapidly there that the pumpkins and melons are worn out in
+being dragged after them.
+
+Now, as I strolled around the lanes of Noonoon, I felt the old slow
+ways, like Grabben-Gullen potatoes, protruding to stifle one's mental
+flights; but there was nothing representative of the Tumut pumpkin and
+melon vines to wear one out in a rush of progress. The land was rich
+and beautiful and in as genial and salubrious a climate as the heart
+of the most exacting could desire; but the residents had drifted into
+unenterprising methods of existence, and progress had stopped dead at
+the foot of the Great Dividing Range. The great road winding over it
+bore the mark of the convicts, and other traces of their solid
+workmanship were to be found in occasional buildings within a radius
+of twenty miles; but their day had passed as that of the bullock-dray
+and mail-coach, superseded by the haughty "passenger-mail" and giant
+two-engined "goods" trains,--while for quicker communication with the
+city than these afforded, the West depended upon the telegraph wires.
+
+In days gone by the swells had patronised Noonoon as a week-end resort,
+and some of their homes were now used as boarding-houses,--while their
+one-time occupants had other tenement, and their successors patronised
+the cooler altitudes farther up the Blue Mountains, or had followed the
+governor to Moss Vale.
+
+Once upon a time Noonoon had rushed into an elaborate, unbalanced
+water scheme, and had lighted itself with electricity. To do this it
+had been forced to borrow heavily, so that now all the rates went to
+the usurer, and no means were available for current affairs. The
+sanitation was condemned, and the streets and roads for miles, as far
+as the municipality extended, were a disgrace to it.
+
+Exceedingly level, they possessed characteristics of some of the best
+thoroughfares; but the wheel-ways were formed of round river stones
+which neither powdered nor set, and to drive along them was cruel to
+horses, ruinous to vehicles, and as trying on the nerves of travellers
+as crossing a stony stream-bed. There seemed to be nothing possible in
+the matter but to abuse the municipal council as numskulls and
+crawlers, and this was done on every hand with unfailing enthusiasm.
+
+Though so near the metropolis, Noonoon was less in touch with it than
+many western towns,--in most respects was a veritable great-grandmother
+for stagnation and bucolic rusticity, and in individuality suggested
+one of the little quiet eddies near the emptying of a stream, and which,
+being called into existence by a back-flow, contains no current. But
+while thus falling to the rear in the ranks of some departments of
+progress, the little town retained a certain degree of importance as one
+of the busiest railway centres in the state, and its engine-sheds were
+the home of many locomotives. Here they were coaled, cleaned, and oiled
+ere taking their stiff two-engine haul over the mountains to the wide,
+straight, pastoral and wheat-growing West, and their calling and
+rumbling made cheery music all the year round, excepting a short space
+on Sundays; while at night, as they climbed the crests of the
+mountain-spurs, every time they fired, the red light belching from their
+engine doors could be seen for miles down the valley. Thus Noonoon's
+train service was excellent, and a great percentage of the town
+population consisted of railway employes.
+
+What is the typical Australian girl, is a subject frequently
+discussed. To find her it is necessary to study those reared in the
+unbroken bush,--those who are strangers to town life and its
+influences. City girls are more cosmopolitan. Sydney girls are
+frequently mistaken for New Yorkers, while Bostonian ladies are as
+often claimed to be Englishwomen; and it is only the bush-reared
+girl--at home with horse, gun, and stock-whip, able to bake the family
+bread, make her own dresses, take her brother's or father's place out
+of doors in an emergency, while at the same time competent to grace a
+drawing-room and show herself conversant with the poets--who can
+rightfully lay claim to be more typically Australia's than any other
+country's daughter. Of course the city Australians are Australians
+too. Australia is the land they put down as theirs on the census
+paper. She is their native land; but ah! their country has never
+opened her treasure-troves to them as to those with sympathetic and
+appreciative understanding of her characteristics, and many of them
+are as hazy as a foreigner as to whether it is the kooka-burra that
+laughs and the moke-poke that calls, or the other way about. They are
+incapable of completely enjoying the full heat of noonday summer sun
+on the plains, and the evening haze stealing across the gullies does
+not mean all it should. The exquisite rapturous enjoyment of the odour
+of the endless bush-land when dimly lit by the blazing Southern stars,
+or the companionship of a sure-footed nag taking the lead round stony
+sidlings, or the music of his hoof-beats echoing across the ridges as
+he carries a dear one home at close of day, are all in a magic
+storehouse which may never be entered by the Goths who attempt to
+measure this unique and wonderful land by any standard save its
+own,--a standard made by those whose love of it, engendered by
+heredity or close companionship, has fired their blood.
+
+These observations lead up to the fact that Noonoon folk boasted their
+own individuality, smacking somewhat of town and country and yet of
+neither. Some of the older ones patronised the flowing beards and
+sartorial styles "all the go way up in Ironbark," yet if put Out-Back
+would have been as much new chums as city people, and were wont to
+regard honest unvarnished statements of bush happenings as "snake
+yarns"; while the youths of these parts combined the appearance of the
+far bush yokel and the city larrikin, and were to be seen following
+the plough with cigarettes in their mouths.
+
+The small holdings were cut into smaller paddocks, the style of fence
+mostly patronised being two or three strands of savage barbed wire
+stretched from post to post. This insufficient separation of stock was
+made adequate by the cattle themselves carrying the remainder of the
+white man's burden of fencing around their necks, in the form of a
+hampering yoke made of a forked tree-limb with a piece of plain
+fencing-wire to close the open ends. This prevented them pushing
+between the wires, and it was a pathetically ludicrous sight to see
+the calves at a very tender age turned out an exact replica of their
+elders. All the places opened on to the roads like streets; and to go
+across country was a sore ordeal, as one had to uncomfortably cross
+roughly upturned crop-land, and every few hundred yards roll under a
+line of barbed wire about a foot from the ground, at the risk of
+reefing one's clothes and the certainty of dishevelment. To walk out
+on the main roads and stumble over the loose stones ankle-deep in the
+dust was torture. Some averred they had known no repairs for ten
+years, and that they were as good as they were, because to have been
+worse was impossible. Walking in this case being no pleasure, I
+bethought me of riding for gentle exercise, and inquired of Grandma
+Clay the possibilities in that respect.
+
+"Ride! there ain't nothink to ride in this district, only great
+elephant draughts or little tiddy ponies the size of dogs," she said
+with unlimited scorn; "I never see such crawlers, they go about in
+them pokin' little sulkies, and even the men can't ride. In my young
+days if a feller couldn't ride a buck-jumper the girls wouldn't look
+at him, an' yet down here at one of the shows last year in the prize
+for the hunters, the horses had to be all rode by one man; there
+wasn't another young feller in the district fit to take a blessed moke
+over a fence. I felt like goin' out an' tacklin' it meself, I was that
+disgusted. I never was a advocate for this _great_ ridin' that racks
+people's insides out an' cripples them, there ain't a bit of necessity
+for it, but there is reason in everythink, an' they're goin' to the
+other extreme, and will have to be carried about on feather-beds in a
+ambulance soon if they keep on as they are. There's nothink as good as
+it was in the old days. As for a woman ridin' here, all the town would
+go out to gape like as she was somethink in the travellin' show
+business. I used to ride w'en I come down here first,--that was
+sixteen year ago,--but every one asked me such questions, an' looked
+at me like a Punch an' Judy show, that I got sick of it. I rode into
+Trashe's at the store there one day, an' w'en I was comin' out he
+says, 'Will you have a chair to get on?' an' as he didn't seem to be
+man enough to sling me on, I said I supposed so. He goes for one of
+them tallest chairs--it would be as easy to get on the horse as
+it--an' I sez, 'Thanks, I'm not ridin' a elephant, one of them little
+chairs would do.' But even that didn't seem to content him; he put it
+high on the pavement an' put the horse in the gutter. Then, instead of
+puttin' the reins over the horse's head proper, he left them on the
+hook, an' with both hands an' all his might holds the beast short by
+them in front of its jaw, like as it was the wildest bull from the
+Bogongs. The idiot! Supposin' the beast was flash an' pulled away from
+him, where would I be without the reins? That about finished me, I was
+sick of it, as I could not have believed any man, even out of a
+asylum, could be so simple about puttin' a person on a horse."
+
+For this kind of exercise there seemed no promising outlet, and I was
+put to it to think of some other. As grandma said, with few
+exceptions, the only horses in the district were draughts and ponies.
+Every effect has a cause, and the reason of this was that these big
+horses were the only ones properly adapted to agriculture, and the
+smallness of the holdings did not admit of hacks being kept for mere
+pleasure, so the cheapest knockabout horse to maintain was a pony, as
+not only did it take less fodder and serve for the little saddle use
+of this place, but tethered to a sulky, took the wives and children
+abroad. It was the land of sulkies,--made in all sizes to fit the pony
+that had to draw them, and of quality in accordance with the purse
+that paid for them,--and a pair of horses and a buggy was a rare
+sight.
+
+Andrew suggested that I should go rowing, and glowingly recommended a
+little two-man craft named the _Alice_, and as I could row well in my
+young days, I determined to test her capacity by going up stream very
+gently, as my time was unlimited and my strength painfully the
+reverse. It was a crisp day towards the end of April, so I was feeling
+brisker than usual, and the _Alice_ was deserving of her good
+reputation. The Noonoon was one of the noblest and most beautiful
+streams in the State, and above the substantial and unique old bridge
+its deep, calm waters stretched for about two miles as straight as a
+ribbon, in a reach made historic because it has been the racecourse of
+some of the greatest sculling matches the world has known. Orange and
+willow-trees were reflected in the clear depths of the rippleless
+flow, and lured by its beauty, the responsiveness of my craft, and an
+unusual cheerfulness, I foolishly overdid my strength. I was thinking
+of Dawn. Her girlish confidence regarding the desire of her hot young
+heart had so appealed to me that I was exercised to discover a
+suitable knight, for this and not a career I felt was the needful
+element to complete her life and anchor her restless girlish energy.
+To tell her so, however, would ruin all. Time must be held till the
+appearance of the hero of the romance I intended to shape. With this
+end in view I thought of recommending her grandma to let her voice be
+trained. Two years at the very least would thus be gained, and if
+properly floated and advertised in the matrimonial field, what may not
+be accomplished in that time by a beautiful and vivacious girl of
+eighteen or nineteen? I was recalled from such speculations by finding
+that it was beyond me to row another stroke, and I was in a fix. A
+slight wind turned the boat, and she drifted on to a fallen tree a
+little below the surface, and, though not upsetting, stuck there, and
+was too much for me to get off.
+
+At that time of the year, except very occasionally, the river was free
+from boaters and the fishers who told of the fish that used to be got
+there in other times, so there was nothing to do but wait until my
+absence caused anxiety, when some one would surely come after me. Not
+a very alarming plight if one were well, but I felt one of my old
+cruel attacks was at hand, which was not encouraging. No one was
+within sight, but in case there should be a ploughman over a rise
+within hearing, I coo-eed long and well. My voice had been trained. I
+coo-eed three times, allowing an interval to elapse, and then settled
+into the bottom of the boat to await developments. Soon I was
+disturbed by the plunk! plunk! of a swimmer, and saw a young man
+approaching by strong rapid strokes. It is strange how hard it is to
+recognise any one when only their face is above water and one meets
+them in an unexpected place, and though this face seemed familiar
+there was nothing unusual in that, as I knew so many theatre patrons'
+faces in a half fashion. My rescuer having ascertained the simple
+nature of my dilemma, and easily gaining the boat by reason of the
+log, exclaimed--
+
+"Why, it's never you! What on earth are you doing here?" and I
+responded--
+
+"Ernest Breslaw! It's never you! What are _you_ doing here? _I'm_
+stuck on this log."
+
+"And I've come to get you off it," he laughed.
+
+"Yes, but otherwise? This may be a suitable cove for a damaged hull,
+but what can a newly-launched cruiser like you be doing here?"
+
+"I'm in training, and was just taking a plunge; it's first-class!" he
+said enthusiastically, and looking at his splendid muscles, enough to
+delight the eye of even such a connoisseur in physique as myself, and
+well displayed by a neat bathing-suit, there was no need to inquire
+for what he was in training. 'Twas no drivelling pen-and-ink
+examination such as I could have passed myself, but something needing
+a Greek statue's strength of thew.
+
+"Are you feeling ill?" he considerately inquired, and as I assured him
+to the contrary, though I was feeling far from normal, he put me out
+on the bank while he rowed up stream for his clothes and returned to
+take me home. Having encased himself in some serviceable tweeds and a
+blue guernsey, he rolled me in his coat ere beginning to demolish the
+homeward mile--an infinitesimal bagatelle to such a magnificent pair
+of arms. I enjoyed the play of the broad shoulders and ruddy cheeks,
+and did not talk, neither did he. He was an athlete, not a
+conversationalist, while I was a conversationalist lacking sufficient
+athletic strength to keep up my reputation just then.
+
+"It was very silly of you to come out alone or attempt to row in your
+state of health! It might have been your death," he presently remarked
+in a grandfatherly style. "Where are you putting up?"
+
+"At Clay's."
+
+"I know; the old place with the boats," he replied as the _Alice_
+whizzed along.
+
+"I was aching for diversion," I said, in excuse for the rashness of my
+act.
+
+"Well, I can take you for a pull now. I'll be here for a few weeks.
+Will you come to-morrow afternoon? Would three o'clock suit you?" he
+inquired as he moored. "The scenery is magnificent farther up the
+river."
+
+"Yes, if I'm not here at three o'clock you'll know that I'm not able
+to come. You are very good, Ernest, to waste time with me."
+
+"I'm only too proud to be able to row you about and expend a little
+despised brute force in returning all the entertainment with brains in
+it you have given me in the past."
+
+"Yes, at the cost of anything under 7s. 6d. an evening,--am I to pay
+you that for rowing me?"
+
+"Put it in the hospital-box," he said with a laugh that displayed his
+strong white teeth between his firm bold lips. He was altogether a
+sight that was more than good in my eyes.
+
+I found I was not strong enough to spring ashore, but young Breslaw
+managed that and my transit up the steep bank to the house with an
+ease and gentleness so dear to woman's heart, that the strength to
+accomplish it is the secret of an athlete being in ninety per cent of
+cases a woman's ideal.
+
+"Oh, I say," as he was leaving me at the gate, "if you mention me,
+speak of me as R. Ernest, as I've dropped the Breslaw where I'm
+staying. I don't want wind of my being here to get into the papers.
+I'm practising in the dark, as I'd like to give some of the cracks a
+surprise licking."
+
+"Very well, I'm under an alias too, so please don't forget. To all
+except a few theatre patrons I'm as dead as ditch-water; but some one
+might recognise the old name, and it would be very unpleasant."
+
+"Right O! To-morrow at three, then, I'll give you a pull," he said,
+doffing his cap from his heavy ruddy locks, now drying into waves and
+gleaming a rival hue in the setting sun, as he bounded down the bank
+and made his way along the river-edge to the bridge, as his place of
+sojourn was farther up than Clay's and on the other side.
+
+The excitement of thus meeting him had somewhat revived me, for here
+at once, as though in response to my wish, was a fitting knight to
+play a leading _role_ with my young lady, the desire for whose
+wellbeing had taken grip of me. For her sweet sake, and the sake of
+the fragrant manliness of the stalwart and deserving knight, I
+straightway resolved to enter the thankless and precarious business of
+matchmaking, one in which I had not had one iota of experience; but as
+women have to ace marriage, domesticity, and mostly all the issues of
+life assigned them, without training, I did not give up heart. As a
+first effort I determined that Dawn should chaperon me when I went for
+my row on the morrow. As I looked at the sun sinking behind the blue
+hills and shedding a wonderfully mellow light over the broad valley, I
+thought of my own life, in which there had been none to pull a
+heart-easing string, and the bitterness of those to whom that for
+which they had fought has been won so late as to be Dead Sea fruit,
+took possession of me.
+
+The doctors had several long and fee-inspiring terms for my malady,
+but I knew it to be an old-fashioned ailment known as heart-break--the
+result of disappointment, want of affection, and over-work. The old
+bitterness gripped the organ of life then; it brought me to my knees.
+I tried to call out, but it was unavailing. Sharp, fiendish pain, and
+then oblivion.
+
+
+
+
+EIGHT.
+
+GRANDMA TURNS NURSE.
+
+
+When I came to it was dark enough for lights, Dawn's well-moulded
+hands were supporting my head, Grandma Clay's voice was sternly
+engineering affairs, and Andrew was blubbering at the foot of the bed
+on which I was resting.
+
+I tried to tell them there was no cause for alarm, and to beg
+grandma's pardon for turning her house into a "sick hospital," but
+though not quite unconscious, I appeared entirely so.
+
+"I wish you had sense to have gone for Dr Tinker when Dr Smalley
+wasn't in," said the old lady, with nothing but solicitude in her
+voice.
+
+The sternness in evidence when I had been trying to gain entrance to
+her house was entirely absent.
+
+"I'm afraid she's dead," said Dawn.
+
+"Oh, she ain't; is she, Dawn?" sobbed Andrew. "She was a decent sort
+of person. A pity some of those other old scotty-boots that was here
+in the summer didn't die instead." And that cemented a firm friendship
+between the lad and myself. An individual utterly alone in the world
+prizes above all things a little real affection.
+
+Presently there was a clearance in the room, effected by the doctor,
+who, after a short examination, pronounced my malady a complication of
+heart troubles, gave a few instructions, and further remarked, "Send
+up for the mixture. She isn't dead, but she may snuff out before
+morning. She's bound to go at a moment's notice, sometime. Give her
+plenty of air. If she has any friends she ought to be sent to them if
+she pulls through this."
+
+Grandma gave the meagre details she knew concerning me, and as the
+practitioner, whom I took to be a veterinary surgeon called in for the
+emergency, went out, he said--
+
+"If she dies to-night you can send me word in the morning; that will
+be soon enough; and if I don't hear from you I'll call again
+to-morrow."
+
+"She ain't goin' to die if I can stop her," said grandma when he had
+departed. "I'll bring her to with a powltice. I ain't given to be
+cumflummixed by what a doctor says; many a one they give up is walking
+about as strong as bull-beef to-day. I never see them do no good in a
+serious case. They are right enough to set a bone or sew up a cut, but
+when you come to think of it, what could be expected of them? They
+know a little more than us because they've hacked up a few bodies an'
+know how the pieces fit together, but as for knowin' what's goin' on,
+they ain't the Almighty, and ain't to be took notice of. The way they
+know about the body is the same as you and Carry know the kitchen, an'
+could go in the dark an' feel for anythink while all was well, but if
+anythink strange was there you couldn't make it out," and setting to
+work, brewing potions and applying remedies of her own, the practical
+old lady soon brought me around so that I was able to make my
+apologies.
+
+"Good Heavens! What do you take us for?" she exclaimed. "It would be a
+fine kind of a world if we wasn't a little considerate to each other.
+It does the young people good to learn 'em a little kindness. I
+couldn't be askin' people like Carry there to wait on people, but it's
+Dawn's week in the house an' she'll look after you, an' you needn't be
+wantin' to clear out to the hospital. You won't be no better looked
+after there than here."
+
+Never was more tactful kindness on shorter acquaintance.
+
+Little Miss Flipp undertook to sit by my bed during the early watches
+of the night, for they could not be persuaded to leave me alone. Her
+eyes bore evidence of many more sleepless watches, but the poor little
+thing did not unburden her heart to me. Dawn appeared to relieve her
+at 2 A.M., and the engaging child manfully struggled against the sleep
+that leadened the pretty blue eyes till morning, when grandma, brisk
+as a cricket, took her turn.
+
+At eleven I was interested by the doctor's entrance. He came on
+tiptoe, but like a great proportion of male tiptoeing it defeated its
+intention and made more noise than walking. Bearing down upon grandma,
+he inquired in a huge whisper, "How is she?"
+
+At this juncture I opened my eyes, so he cheerfully remarked, in a
+strong twang known by some supercilious English as the "beastly
+colonial accent"--
+
+"So you didn't peg out after all!"
+
+This being the language applied to stock, confirmed me in the notion
+that he was a veterinary. I had once before heard it applied to a
+human being in a far bush place, where a man who lived unhappily with
+his wife one morning remarked to a neighbour that "The missus nearly
+pegged out last night," and it was considered a fitting remark for
+such a monster as this man was supposed to have been, but this doctor
+said it quite naturally.
+
+I found him a friendly and communicative fellow, and as he gave in an
+hour's gossip with grandma and me for one fee, I was willing to take
+it to pass away a dull morning.
+
+"What on earth did you go rowing for?" he asked me.
+
+"The roads are too bad to go walking."
+
+"That's only within range of the municipality. The council wants
+bursting up. They can't do anything with everything mortgaged to old
+Dr Tinker. He holds the whole thing. It's a pity he wouldn't peg out
+one of these nights, and we might get something done. But it's not him
+who has the money--it's the old woman."
+
+"That's her Mrs Bray was tellin' us walloped the girl for bein'
+admired by the old doctor," explained grandma.
+
+"Money, that's what he married her for," continued the doctor. "I
+don't know where he could have picked her up. Some say she is a
+publican's widow, but Jackson, the solicitor here, has a different
+hypothesis. He says he's seen her running along carrying five cups and
+saucers of tea at once, and no one but a ship's waitress could do
+that. At any rate she's a great man of a woman; can swear like a
+trooper if things don't go right. She's got the old man completely
+cowed."
+
+"Am I to infer that cowing her spouse and swearing outrageously makes
+her _man_-like?" I laconically inquired. But the doctor's
+understanding didn't seem to go in for small satirical detail, he
+conversed on a more wholesale fashion, rattling on for a good
+half-hour to a patient for whom quietude was necessary, lest she
+should "peg out."
+
+"Ain't he a bosker?" enthusiastically commented Andrew, coming in to
+see what I had thought of this doctor, who was the idol of Noonoon.
+
+"Has he a large practice?" I cautiously inquired, seeking to discover
+was he really a doctor.
+
+"My word! Nearly all the people go to him, he's so friendly and don't
+stick on the jam--speaks to you everywhere, and has jokes about
+everything."
+
+"He's a fine man!" corroborated grandma.
+
+"Yes; must be more than six feet high," I responded.
+
+"An' such a gentleman, he's never above having a yarn with you about
+anythink and everythink."
+
+"Oh, well," I said, "any time I take these turns just send for him."
+
+One doctor was as harmless as another to me. I knew it would relieve
+the household to have a medico, and he could not injure me, seeing I
+accorded his medicine and advice about as much deference as the hum of
+a mosquito.
+
+"Is he a family man?" I asked.
+
+"Yes; so there are all your chances gone in one slap," said Carry,
+appearing to inquire my state.
+
+I did not tell her there was the most insuperable of all barriers in
+the way of my marrying any one, and that I had no desire if I could.
+The first I did not want known, and the second would not be believed
+if it were, because, though woman is somewhat escaping from her
+shackles, the skin of old crawl subjection still clings sufficiently
+tight for it to be beyond ordinary belief that one could be other than
+constantly on the look-out to secure a berth by appending herself to
+some man, and more especially does this suspicion hang over a spinster
+with her hair as grey as mine, and who takes up a position at a
+boarding-house which is supposed to be the common hunting-ground of
+women forced on to the matrimonial war-path.
+
+"He has seven little children, and one's a baby, an' his wife is a
+poor broken-down little thing near always in the hospital. You'd
+wonder how he married her, _he's_ such a fine-looking man," vouchsafed
+Andrew.
+
+"Such a fine man that you'd wonder concerning several other patent
+facts about him," I responded.
+
+There was quite a chorus in favour of him now. He was evidently a true
+gentleman in his patients' eyes, because he was not above stopping to
+talk to them in their own vernacular about local gossip, and had the
+reputation of great good nature in regard to the bills of the poor,
+and they loved his jokes. They were of the class within grasp of the
+elementary sense of humour of his audience. This type of gentleman he
+undoubtedly was, but to that possessed of graceful tact and expressing
+itself in good diction--by some considered necessary attributes of a
+gentleman--he could lay no claim. Neither could he to that ideal
+enshrined in my heart, who would not have had seven little
+children--one of them a baby--and a poor little broken-down wife at
+the same time; but as to what is really a gentleman depends on the
+attitude of mind.
+
+
+
+
+NINE.
+
+THE KNIGHT HAS A STOLEN VIEW OF THE LADY.
+
+
+Grandma Clay kept me in bed that day, so I forgot all about my
+appointment on the river until some time after three, when Andrew
+announced from the doorway--
+
+"A man wants to know can he see you?"
+
+"Who can he be?"
+
+"He's a puddin'-faced, red-headed bloke, wearin' a blue sweater under
+his coat like the bike riders," was Andrew's very unknightly
+description of the knight whom I had chosen to play lead in the drama
+of the beautiful young lady at Clay's.
+
+"That's a particular friend of mine, you may show him in," I said.
+
+"Oughtn't Dawn to be woke up first and told to scoot out of that?"
+said he.
+
+Dawn was one of those young beings so thoroughly inured to easy living
+that the few hours' sleep she had lost the night before had made her
+so dozy when she had come to keep me company now, that I had persuaded
+her to rest beside me on the broad bed, where, much against Andrew's
+sense of propriety, she was fast asleep.
+
+"I'll hide her thus," I said, covering her with the counterpane, for
+it would not be good stage management to allow the lady to escape
+when a fitting knight was on the threshold. This satisfied Andrew, who
+withdrew to usher in the "puddin'-faced, red-headed bloke," who sat in
+the doctor's chair, and made a few ordinary remarks about the weather
+and some equally kind about my state of health.
+
+When in the company of ladies the only brilliance in evidence about my
+young friend was the colour of his hair, so there was little danger of
+his waking Dawn with his chatter, as he sat inwardly consumed with a
+desire to escape. As I lay with my hand where I could feel the girl's
+healthy breathing, I wondered would she too dismiss my chosen knight
+as pudding-faced and red-headed, or would she see him with my eyes!
+His locks certainly were of that most attractive shade hair can be,
+and his good looks were further enhanced by a clear tanned skin and
+dark eyes. His large clean-shaven features had the fulness and
+roundness of unspent youth in full bloom, and he was far from the
+small bullet-headed type, which accounted for Andrew's designation of
+"puddin'-faced." I had always found him one of the most virile and
+upright young creatures I had ever seen, and he had endeared himself
+to me by his simple, untainted manliness, and the fragrant evidence of
+health his presence distilled. Dawn, too, was so robust that there was
+a likelihood of her being attracted by her opposite, and inclined to
+favour a carpet knight before one of the open field.
+
+Some men have brain and muscle, but this is a combination as rare as
+beauty and high intellect in women, and almost as startling in its
+power for good or evil; but apart from the combination the wholesome
+athlete is generally the more lovable. When his brawn is coupled with
+a good disposition, he sees in woman a fragile flower that he longs
+to protect, and measuring her weakness by his beautiful strength, is
+easily imposed upon. His muscle is an engine a woman can unfailingly
+command for her own purposes, whereas brilliance of intellect, though
+it may command a great public position in the reflected glory of which
+some women love to bask, nevertheless, under pressure in the domestic
+arena, is liable to be too sharply turned against wives, mothers, and
+daughters to be a comfortable piece of household furniture. On the
+other hand, the athlete may have the muscles of a Samson, and yet,
+being slow of thought and speech, be utterly defenceless in a woman's
+hands. No matter how aggravatingly wrong she may be, he cannot bring
+brute force to bear to vanquish a creature so delicate, and being
+possessed of no other weapon, he is compelled to cultivate patience
+and good temper. Also, health and strength are conducive to equability
+of temper, and hence the domestic popularity of the man of brawn above
+the one of brain, who is not infrequently exacting and crossly
+egotistical in his family relations where the other would be lenient
+and go-easy.
+
+The silence of my guest and myself was presently broken by Dawn
+turning about under the counterpane.
+
+"Good gracious! what have you got there?" inquired Ernest. "Is it that
+old terrier you used to have?"
+
+"Terrier, indeed! I have here a far more beautiful pet. Because you
+are such a good child I will allow you just one glance. Come now, be
+careful."
+
+The girl's dress was unbuttoned at the throat, displaying a perfect
+curve of round white neck; her tumbled brown curls strayed over the
+dimpled oval face; the long jetty lashes resting on the flushed cheeks
+fringed some eyelid curves that would have delighted an artist; the
+curling lips were slightly parted showing the tips of her pretty
+teeth, and the lifted coverlet disclosed to view as lovely a sleeping
+beauty as any of the armoured knights of old ever fought and died for.
+The latter-day one, politely curious regarding my pet, bent over to
+accord a casual glance, but the vision meeting his eyes sent the blood
+in a crimson wave over his tanned cheeks and caused him to draw back
+with a start. It was inconsistent that he should have been so
+completely abashed at sight of a fully-dressed sleeping girl who was
+placidly unconscious of his gaze, when it was his custom to regularly
+occupy the stalls and enjoy the choruses and ballets composed of young
+ladies very wide awake, and wearing only as much covering as compelled
+by the law; but where is consistency?
+
+"I had no idea it would--er--be a young lady," he stammered, keeping
+his eyes religiously lowered, and fidgeting in a palsy of shyness such
+as used to be an indispensable accomplishment of young ladies in past
+generations.
+
+"Just take a good look, she'll bear inspection," I said.
+
+"I'd rather not, the young lady might not like it."
+
+"But I'm giving you permission, she's mine, and then run before she
+discovers you have pirated a glance. I will keep the secret."
+
+He lifted his eyes, but so swiftly and hesitatingly that I could not
+be sure that he had discerned the beauty that was blushing half
+unseen, instead of being displayed under limelight and drawn attention
+to by brass trumpets in accordance with the style of this advertisemal
+age.
+
+As Ernest went out Andrew came in and awakened Dawn with a request to
+make him some dough-nuts for tea, but she ordered him to go to Carry
+as it was her week in the kitchen.
+
+"Bust this week in the kitchen! A feller can hear nothing else, it's
+enough to give him the pip; it ought to be put up like a notice so it
+could be known," he grumbled as he departed.
+
+That evening Mrs Bray made one of her calls, which were always more
+good-natured regarding the length of time she gave us than the tone of
+her remarks about people.
+
+The famous Mrs Tinker, it appeared, from the latest account of her
+vagaries, had enlivened the lives of Noonoon inhabitants by swearing
+in a hair-lifting manner at one of the local shows because her horses
+had not been awarded first prize, &c., &c.
+
+Whether, as Carry averred, it was this conversation that did the
+mischief or not, the fact remains that I became too faint to speak,
+and the girls would not leave me all night. I lay that way all the
+next day too, so that when Ernest called to make inquiries and
+discovered my state he took a turn at making himself useful,
+prevailing upon Grandma Clay to allow him to do so by explaining that
+he was a very firm friend of mine, and had had some experience of
+invalids owing to his mother having been one for some years before her
+death, both of which statements were perfectly true.
+
+As I improved, I was anxious to discover what impression he had made
+on the household, and cautiously sounded them.
+
+"He seems to be a chap with some heart in him," said grandma. "He'd
+put some of these fine lah-de-dahs to shame. I always like a man that
+ain't above attending on a sick person. Like Jim Clay, he could put a
+powltice on an' lift up a sick person better'n all the women I ever
+see."
+
+"It's always Jim Clay," said Dawn in an irreverent aside; "I never
+heard of a man yet, whether he was tall or short, or squat or lean, or
+young or old, but he was like Jim Clay, if he did any good. I'm about
+dead sick of him."
+
+"You don't seem to remember Jim Clay was your grandfather," I said, as
+his relict left the room, "and that he is very dear in your
+grandmother's memory. It is pleasing how she recalls him. Wait till
+your hair is grey, my dear, and if you have some one as dearly
+enshrined in your heart it will be a good sign that your life has not
+been without savour."
+
+"Yes, of course, I do forget to think of him as my grandfather, never
+hearing of him only as this everlasting Jim Clay, and if he was like
+that red-headed fellow it would take a lot of him to be remembered as
+anything but a big pug-looking creature that I'd be ashamed to be seen
+with."
+
+This was not a propitious first impression, and as she was inclined to
+be censorious I considered it diplomatic to point out his detractions,
+knowing that the combative propensity of the young lady would then
+seek for recommendations.
+
+"Yes, he is a great, unattractive, red-headed-looking lump, isn't he?"
+
+"Oh, I wouldn't say that. He looks fine and healthy at all events, and
+I do like to see a man that doesn't make one afraid he'll drop to
+pieces if you look at him."
+
+"But he's hopelessly red-headed," I opined.
+
+"But it isn't that sandy, insipid sort of red. It's very dark and
+thick, and his skin is clear and brown, not that mangy-looking sample
+that usually goes with red hair," contended Dawn; and being willing
+that she should retain this opinion, I let the point go.
+
+There is one advantage in a heart trouble, that it often departs as
+suddenly as it attacks, and ere it was again Carry's week in the
+house, I was once more able to stroll round and depend upon Andrew for
+entertainment.
+
+He invited me to the dairy to see him turn the hand cream-separator,
+and I remained to dry the discs out of its bowl while he washed them.
+He had a conversational turn, and in his choice of subjects was a
+patriot. He never went out of his realm for imported themes, but
+entirely confined his patronage to those at hand. This day his
+discourse was of blow-flies; I cared not though it had been of manure.
+I had knocked around the sharp corners of life sufficiently to have
+got a sensible adjustment of weights and measures, refinements and
+vulgarities. Besides, I gratefully remembered the tears Andrew had
+shed during my illness, and bore in mind that many a dandy who could
+please me by his phraseology of choice anecdotes could not be more
+than "bored" though I might die in torture at his feet.
+
+"My word! I'm thankful for the winter for one thing," he began, "and
+that's because there ain't any blow-flies. They'd give you the pip in
+the summer. They used to be here blowin' everything they come across.
+They'd blow the cream if we left it a day. They'd blow you if you
+didn't look sharp. I had Whiskey taught to ketch 'em. Here, Whiskey!
+Whiskey!" and as that mongrel appeared, his master tossed him pellets
+of curds dipped in cream, and grinned delightedly as they were
+fiercely snapped. "He thinks it's blow-flies. Great little Whiskey!
+good little Whiskey, catch 'em blow-flies. By Jove! I've had enough
+of farming," continued he, "it's the God-forsakenest game, but me
+grandma won't let me chuck it. I notice no one with any sense stays
+farmin'. They all get a job on the railway, or take to auctioneering,
+or something with money in it. You're always scratchin' on a farm. You
+should have been here in the summer when the tomatoes was ripe.
+Couldn't get rid of 'em for a song--couldn't get cases enough. They
+rotted in the field till the stink of them was worse than a chow's
+camp, an' what didn't rot was just cooked in the sun. Peaches the
+same, an' great big melons for a shilling a dozen. That's farming for
+you! The only time you could sell things would be when you haven't got
+'em. Whiskey can eat melon like a good 'un, and grapes too." Andrew
+now threw out the wash-up water, pitching it on to Whiskey, who went
+away whimpering aggrievedly, much to the delight of his master, and
+illustrating that even the favourite pet of a youth has something to
+put up with in this imperfect life.
+
+
+
+
+TEN.
+
+PROVINCIAL POLITICS AND SEMI-SUBURBAN DENTISTS.
+
+
+May dawned over the world, and throughout New South Wales awoke a
+stir, reaching even to the sleepy heart of Noonoon. This was owing to
+the fact that the State Parliament was near the end of its term, and
+political candidates for the ensuing election were already in the
+field.
+
+Though not many decades settled, the country had progressed to
+nationhood, England allowing the precocious youngster this freedom of
+self-government, and sending her Crown Prince to open her first
+Commonwealth Parliament. Then the fledgling nation, bravely in the van
+of progress, had invested its women with the tangible hall-mark of
+full being or citizenship, by giving them a right to a voice in the
+laws by which they were governed; and now, watched by the older
+countries whose women were still in bondage, the women of this
+Australian State were about to take part in a political election. Not
+for the first time either,--let them curtsey to the liberality of
+their countrymen!
+
+The Federal elections, for which women were entitled to stand as
+senatorial candidates, had come previously, and though old prejudice
+had been too strong to the extent of many votes to grasp that a woman
+might really be a senatrix, and that a vote cast for her would not be
+wasted, still one woman candidate had polled 51,497 votes where the
+winning candidate had gone in on 85,387, and this had been no
+"shrieking sister" such as the clever woman is depicted by those who
+fear progress, but a beautiful, refined, educated, and particularly
+womanly young lady in the heyday of youth. The cowardly old sneer that
+disappointment had driven her to this had no footing here, as she had
+every qualification, except empty-headedness, to have ensured success
+as a belle in the social world, had she been disposed to pad her own
+life by means of a wealthy marriage instead of endeavouring to benefit
+her generation in becoming a legislator. She was a fitting daughter of
+the land of the Southern Sun, whose sons were among the first to admit
+their sisters to equal citizenship with themselves, and she
+brilliantly proved her fitness for her right by her wonderful ability
+on the hustings, which had been free from any vocal shortcoming and
+unacquainted with hesitation in replying to the knottiest question
+regarding the most intricate bill.
+
+The Federal election, however, in a sense had been farther
+away--fought at long-range, while that of the State was brought right
+to one's back door.
+
+The Federal campaign had been freer from the provincial bickering
+which was a prominent feature of the State election, and made it more
+a hand-to-hand contest, where every elector was worthy of
+consideration; and though women were debarred from entering the State
+Parliament, yet they were now beings worth fawning upon for a vote,
+and their addition to the ranks of the electors gave matters a decided
+fillip.
+
+The first intimation that the campaign had actually started reached me
+one afternoon when Dawn drove me into town to see a dentist. The whole
+Clay household had risen up against me patronising a local dentist.
+
+"They're only blacksmiths," said Andrew. "I could tinker up a tooth as
+good as they can with a bit of sealing-wax."
+
+However, I could get no doctor to give me a longer lease of life than
+twelve months, and as it was not a very important tooth, I considered
+the local practitioners were sufficient to the evil.
+
+The afternoon before, when Ernest had dropped in to see _me_, I had
+_casually_ mentioned that Dawn and I were going up town next day, so
+therefore, what more natural than, as we entered the main street, to
+see him very busily inspecting wares in a saddler's shop--articles for
+which he could have no use, and which if he had, a man of his means
+could obtain of superior quality from Sydney. I diplomatically, and
+Dawn ostentatiously, failed to notice him as we drove past to where
+was displayed the legend--S. Messre, Chemist and Dentist, late C. C.
+Rock-Snake, and where Dawn halted, saying, at the eleventh hour, "You
+ought to go to Sydney, Charlie Rock-Snake was all right, but I don't
+care for the look of this fellow."
+
+Going to Sydney, however, would not serve my ends nearly so well as
+consulting S. Messre; for while I was with him Dawn would remain
+outside, and what more certain than that Mr R. Ernest Breslaw, walking
+up the street and quite unexpectedly espying her, and being such a
+friend of mine, should dawdle with her awaiting my reappearance, while
+growing inwardly wishful that it might be long delayed.
+
+I knocked on the counter of the dusty, dirty shop, and after a time
+an extraordinary person appeared behind it.
+
+"Are you Mr Messre?"
+
+"I believe so. Hold hard a bit."
+
+Probably he went to ascertain who he really was, for I was left
+sitting alone until a splendidly muscular figure in a fashionable
+pattern of tweeds halted opposite the vehicle holding my driver. I was
+quite satisfied with Mr S. Messre's methods, though his initial, as
+Andrew averred, might very well have stood for silly.
+
+The golfing cap came off the heavy red locks, while the bright brown
+ones under the smart felt hat with the pom-poms, bobbed in response,
+and Mr S. Messre came upon me again, wiping his fingers on a soiled
+towel, and tugging each one separately after the manner of childhood.
+
+"Did you want a tooth pulled?"
+
+"Well, I wished to consult you dentally, but not in public," I said,
+as two urchins came in and listened with all their features.
+
+"Well, hold hard a bit and I'll take you inside."
+
+I held or rather sat hard on the tall hard chair, and heard Ernest
+explaining to Dawn that he had been swimming in the sun, which made
+his face as red as his hair, for he gave her to understand that such
+was not his usual complexion. His red locks, very dark and handsome,
+which lent him a distinction and endeared him to me, were such a
+sensitive point with him that his mind was continually reverting to
+them, and that audacious Dawn unkindly replied--
+
+"It wouldn't do to be all red. If my hair were red I'd dye it green or
+blue, but red I would not have."
+
+"But it's a good serviceable colour for a _man_," meekly protested the
+knight.
+
+"Perhaps for a _fighting_ man," retorted the young minx with no
+contradictory twinkle in her eye; "but I could never trust a
+red-headed person: all that I know are deceitful."
+
+I was dismayed. How would a gentle young athlete weather this? To a
+perky little man of more wits than muscle, or to a gay old Lothario,
+it would have been an incentive to the chase, but I feared Dawn was
+too horribly, uncompromisingly given to speaking what she felt,
+irrespective of grace, to expand this young Romeo to love; but much
+merciless fire will be stood from beauty, and he made a valiant
+defence.
+
+"There are exceptions to every rule, Miss Dawn. I never was known as
+deceitful; ask any one who knows me."
+
+"I don't know any one who knows you."
+
+"Ask your friend inside, I think she'll give me a good character."
+
+"Quite the reverse. If you heard what she says about you, you'd never
+be seen in Noonoon again;" but this assertion was made with such a
+roguish smile on eye and lip that Ernest took up a closer position by
+stepping into the gutter and placing one foot on the step of the sulky
+and a corresponding hand on the dashboard railing; and in that
+position I left them, with yellow-haired Miss Jimmeny from the corner
+pub. walking by on the broken asphalt under the verandahs, and casting
+a contemptuous and condemnatory glance at the forward Dawn who
+favoured the men.
+
+Mr S. Messre led the way to a place at the back of the shop which was
+layered with dust and strewn with cotton-wool and dental appliances,
+some of them smeared from the preceding victims, evidently. He did not
+seem to know how to dispose of me, so I placed myself in the
+professional chair and invited him to examine the broken molar.
+
+"The light is bad here," he remarked, fumbling with my head, and
+making towards my face with one of the soiled instruments.
+
+"That is not my fault," I replied.
+
+"This is him!" he further remarked, tapping my cheek with a finger.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"He wants patching."
+
+"So _he_ leads me to imagine."
+
+"The nerve would want killing."
+
+"Quite so, and to attend to its wants I'm here."
+
+"I'd take eight shillings to kill the nerve."
+
+"Would you use them as an apparatus to execute it?"
+
+"Then I'd take twelve or thirteen shillings to fill it," he continued.
+
+I was interested in the uniqueness of his methods.
+
+"Would you purpose to powder the shillings or use them whole--I would
+have thought an alligator's or shark's tooth would scarcely require
+that quantity of material?"
+
+Mr Messre stared at me in a dazed manner.
+
+"I wouldn't touch the tooth under that," he continued.
+
+"Is there another tooth under it? then extract this one and give the
+other a fair chance."
+
+"It would be a lot of trouble," he kept on, without specially replying
+to my remark.
+
+"Perhaps so; when one comes to think of it, teeth, I suppose, are not
+filled without some exercise on the part of the dentist."
+
+"I wouldn't think of touching that tooth for less than a guinea; why
+it would take at least an hour to do it."
+
+"This is the first intimation I've had that dentists calculated to
+mend teeth without spending any time on them," I said.
+
+Mr Messre didn't seem to grasp the drift of my remarks, and as I felt
+unequal to maintaining the conversation for a more extended period, I
+announced my intention of thinking about what he had said. He said it
+would be as well, and I emerged to find Ernest had so far progressed
+as to be seated in the sulky holding my parasol over Dawn.
+
+Youth and beauty is privileged to command an athlete to hold its
+sunshade, while old age has difficulty in finding so much as a small
+boy to carry its basket across the street. Mayhap this is why it is
+largely the elderly and frequently the unattractive people who fight
+for honest rights for their class and sex, while it is from pretty
+young women's lips issues most of the silly rubbish anent it being
+entirely women's fault that men will not conform to their "influence"
+in all matters. Only a very small percentage can regard conditions
+from any but a selfish point of view or conceive of any but their own
+shoe-pinch.
+
+"I happened to see Miss Dawn here and waited to ask you how you are,"
+said Ernest.
+
+"Just what you should have done," I replied; "and now if you can wait
+till I investigate another dentist I want your opinion on a purchase I
+am making."
+
+"Oh, certainly," he hastened to reply; "I'm doing a loaf this
+afternoon. I thought I heard my oar crack this morning, so came for
+some leather to tack round it."
+
+This in elaborate explanation of his presence there.
+
+The second dentist proved the antithesis of his contemporary, being
+short, pleasant, and bright.
+
+"I'll tell you what," he said, laughing engagingly, "the best thing to
+be done with that tooth is to dress it with carbolic acid. Now this is
+a secret."
+
+"One of those that only a few don't know, I suppose."
+
+"Perhaps so," he said, laughing still more pleasantly.
+
+"You can do this tooth just as well as I can. Get three penno'worth of
+acid and put some in once or twice a-day and the nerve will be dead in
+two or three days, and I'll do the rest."
+
+As he proved such an amiable individual, though probably an
+exceedingly suburban dentist, I got rid of half an hour in desultory
+chat, as I could see from the window that the knight and the lady, if
+not progressing like a house on fire, were at least enjoying
+themselves in a casual way.
+
+"Did you have only one tooth to be attended to?" inquired Dawn when I
+appeared.
+
+"Yes; and I fear that it will be one too many for Noonoon dentists," I
+replied. I could think of nothing upon which to ask Ernest's advice,
+so I feigned that I was not feeling well enough for any further worry
+that afternoon, but would command his services at a future date.
+
+I now held the pony while Dawn disappeared into a shop and reappeared
+with an acquaintance who invited us to attend a political meeting that
+night. The electors, alarmed at the prodigal propensities of the
+sitting government, were forming an Opposition League to remedy
+matters, and the first step was to choose one of the two candidates
+offering themselves as representatives of this party for Noonoon. The
+first one was to speak that night in the Citizens' Hall, and by paying
+a shilling one could become a member of the League, and vote for this
+candidate or the other.
+
+"Oh, if I only had a vote!" regretfully exclaimed Dawn.
+
+"He's a young chap named Walker, from Sydney,--very rich, I believe.
+Do you know him?" Mrs Pollaticks inquired of me.
+
+"I've heard of him," I said, exchanging glances with Ernest, "and
+should like to hear him, if convenient."
+
+"I'll drive you in," volunteered Dawn.
+
+"If you're around you might act as groom," I suggested to Ernest, and
+he gladly responding, it was agreed that we should begin
+electioneering that night.
+
+"I knew Ernest would be delighted to be with us, he takes great
+pleasure in my company," I remarked with assumed complacence as we
+drove home; and I watched Dawn smile at my conceit in imagining any
+one took pleasure in my company while she was present, and that any
+normal male under ninety should do so would have been so phenomenal
+that she had reason for that derisive little smile.
+
+"You said he was hopelessly red-headed," she remarked; "why, I think
+he has a handsome kind of red hair. I never thought red hair could be
+nice, but Mr Ernest's is different."
+
+I smiled to myself.
+
+"I never thought much of men, but this one is different," has been
+said by more than one bride; and, "I never could suffer infants, but
+this kid is different to all I've seen," is an expression often heard
+from proud young fathers.
+
+"His young lady thinks so at all events," I innocently remarked, and
+we fell into silence complete.
+
+
+
+
+ELEVEN.
+
+ANDREW DISGRACES HIS "RARIN'."
+
+
+The silence that fell upon Dawn and myself was unbroken when we went
+to tea and seemed to have affected the whole company, or else it was
+the conversational powers of Andrew, who was absent, which were
+wanting to enliven us.
+
+"He ought to be home," said grandma. "He's got no business away, and
+the place can't be kep' in a uproar for him when the girls want to go
+out."
+
+The old lady had determined to take a vigorous interest in politics,
+and spoke of going to hear the meetings later on herself.
+
+It presently transpired that Andrew had not been looking to his
+grandma for all that went into his "stummick" so religiously as he
+should have been. Just as he was under discussion he made a dramatic
+entry, and fell breathlessly in his grandma's arm-chair near the
+fireplace. The usual occupant glared at him in astonishment and
+demanded "a explanation," which came immediately, but not from Andrew.
+Instead there was a loud and imperative knocking at a side door, and
+when Carry, after cursing the white ants which had made the door hard
+to open by throwing it out of plumb with their ravages, at last got
+it open, there appeared an irate old man carrying a stout stick. It
+was plain that he too had been running,--in short, was in pursuit of
+Andrew, who had quite collapsed in the chair.
+
+"I've come, missus, to warn you to keep your boy out of my orange
+orchard," he gulped. "Six or seven times I've nearly caught him an'
+young Bray in it, but to-night I run 'em down, an' only they escaped
+me I'd have give 'em the father of a skelpin'. If I ketch them there
+again I'll bring 'em before the court an' give 'em three months; but
+you being a neebur, I'd like to give you a show of keepin' him out
+first."
+
+The old dame, _a la_ herself, had been in the act of pouring milk and
+sprinkling sugar on some boiled rice which frequently appeared on the
+menu during Carry's week in the kitchen, previous to handing it to
+Miss Flipp, but she waved her hand, thereby indicating that in so dire
+an extremity we were to be trusted with the sugar-basin ourselves,--in
+fact, that any laxity in this item would have to be let slide for
+once.
+
+After the manner of finely-strung temperaments with the steel in them,
+which wear so well, and to the last remain as sensitive as a youth or
+maiden, Mrs Martha Clay then rose from her seat, visibly trembling,
+but with a flashing battle-light in her eyes.
+
+"What have you got to say to this?" she demanded, turning on her
+grandson.
+
+"I never touched none of his bloomin' old oranges. It was Jack Bray,
+it wasn't me."
+
+"Yes," said she; "and if you was listening to Jack Bray it would be
+you done it all, an' he who never done nothink. What's the charge, and
+what damages have you laid on it?" she demanded of the accuser,
+fixing him with a fiery glance.
+
+"I ain't goin' to lay any damages this time, I only thought you'd
+rather me warn you than not; I know I would with a youngster. I
+suppose after all he ain't done no more than you an' me done in our
+young days, an' my oranges bein' ripe so extra early was a great
+temptation," familiarly said the man.
+
+"Well, I don't know what _you_ done in your young days, but I know I
+never took a pin that didn't belong to me, none of me children or
+people neither; and as for Jim Clay, he wouldn't think of touchin' a
+thing--he was too much the other way to get on in the world. An' it
+ain't any fault of my rarin' that me grandson is hounded down a
+vagabond," said the old lady in a tragic manner.
+
+Seeing her fierce agitation, the lad's pursuer was alarmed and sought
+to pacify her by further remarking--
+
+"He ain't done nothink out of the way, an' I admit the oranges was a
+great temptation."
+
+The old lady snorted, and the colour of her face heralded something
+verging on an apoplectic seizure.
+
+"Temptation! If people was only honest and decent by keepin' from the
+things that ain't any temptation, we'd be all fit for jail or a
+asylum. Pretty thing, if he's only to leave alone that which ain't any
+temptation to him! You could put other people's things before me, I
+wouldn't take 'em, not if me tongue was hanging out a yard for 'em.
+That's the kind of honesty that I've always practised to me neighbours
+and rared into any one under me, and that's the only kind of honesty
+that is honesty at all," she splendidly finished. "An' I'm very
+thankful to you for informin' me. I wish you had caught him an'
+skelped the hide off of him. It's what I'll do meself soon as I sift
+the matter."
+
+The old man bade good-night and departed with his stick.
+
+"He's always sneakin' about the lanes, an' only poked his tongue out
+at me w'en I wanted to know where he was," maliciously said Uncle Jake
+in reference to his grand-nephew.
+
+"Mean old hide, always likes to sit on any one when they're down,"
+whispered Dawn and Carry to each other. "A pity Andrew hadn't two
+tongues to stick out at him."
+
+Miss Flipp was too dull to be aroused by even this disturbance. The
+only time she showed any feeling was when her "uncle" paid her
+clandestine visits. Her life seemed to be in a terrible tangle--more
+than that, in a syrtis,--but I did not take a hand in further crushing
+her. She had been kind to me during my indisposition, and except in
+extreme cases, "live and let live" was an axiom I had learned to
+carefully regard. Knowledge of the slight chance of circumstances or
+opportunity--which too frequently is the only difference between a
+good person and a bad one, success and failure--reminds one to be very
+lenient regarding human frailty.
+
+"Now, me young shaver! I'll deal with you," said grandma, turning to
+Andrew, in whom there appeared to be left no defence. Never have I
+seen so old a woman in such a towering rage, and rarely have I seen
+one of seventy-five with vigour sufficiently unimpaired to feel so
+extremely as she gave evidence of doing.
+
+"This is the first time anythink like this ever happened in my family,
+and if I thought it wouldn't be the last I believe I'd kill you where
+you are."
+
+Andrew emitted no sound, he had given himself up with that calmness
+one evinces when the worst is upon them--when there is nothing further
+beyond.
+
+"Go off to bed as you are without a bit to eat," she continued,
+plucking at her little collar as though to get air. "To-morrow I'll
+see the Brays about this, and I'll skelp the skin off of you. I'd do
+it now, only there's no knowing where I'd end, I feel that terrible
+upset. What would Jim Clay think now, I wonder? You God-forsaken young
+vagabond, bringin' disgrace upon me at this time of me life. I'd be
+ashamed to walk up town and give me vote as I was lookin' forward to,
+and me grandson nearly in jail for stealing. _Stealing_! It's a nice
+sounding word in connection with one of your own that you've rared
+strict, ain't it? You snuffed up mighty smart when I asked you your
+doings, now it comes out why you couldn't account for 'em. 'Might as
+well be in a bloomin' glass case as have to carry a pocket-book round
+an' make a map of where he's been,' sez he. It appears a map of your
+doin's wouldn't pass examination by the police. How would you have
+been makin' a honest way in the world if I wasn't here to be
+responsible for you?"
+
+"Oh, grandma!" said Dawn, seeking to calm her, lest the excitement
+would be too much. "After all it mightn't be so bad. Lots of boys take
+a few paltry oranges out of the gardens and no one makes such a fuss
+but that old creature. He just wants to be officious." This was an
+injudicious attempt at peace.
+
+"Is that you speakin', Dawn? '_Lots of boys do it._' Perhaps you will
+also say, 'Lots of girls come home with a baby in their arms.' Once
+you get the idea in your head that there's no harm because lots do it,
+you're on a express train to the devil. Lots of people do things and
+some don't, and that's the only difference between the vagabonds I've
+never been, and the decent folk I'd cut me throat if I wasn't among.
+An' you're the last person I ever would have thought would have upheld
+a _thief_!"
+
+"Well, grandma!" protested Dawn, "I don't uphold him. I'm ashamed to
+be related to him, but don't make yourself ill now. Sleep on it, and
+to-morrow give him rats."
+
+"Remember this," continued grandma, "an' carry the knowledge through
+life with you, that I can't make your character for you. Each one has
+to make their own, but seeing the foundation you've been give, makes
+you a disgrace to it. It takes you all your time for years an' years
+puttin' in good bricks to make a good character, but you can get rid
+of it for ever in one act, don't forget that; an' remember that
+belongin' to a respectable family won't stop you from bein' a thief.
+You are very quick to talk about some of these poor rag-tag about
+town, an' I suppose you an' Jack Bray thought you couldn't be the
+same, but you've found out your mistake! Go to bed now, and I'll
+leather you well to-morrer," she concluded encouragingly; and Andrew
+lost no time in taking this remand, looking, to use his own
+expression, as though he had the "pip."
+
+"Dear me!" sighed the old lady, "them as has rared any boys don't know
+what it is to die of idleness an' want of vexation. If it ain't
+somethink beyond belief, one might be that respectable theirself they
+could be put in a glass case, an' yet here would be a young vagabond
+bringin' them to shame before the whole district."
+
+"But I don't see that he has done anything very terrible," hazily
+interposed Miss Flipp.
+
+"Good gracious! If he had been cheekin' some one or playin' a
+far-fetched joke, I might be able to forgive him, but there must be
+reason in everythink, an' to go an' meddle with other's property is
+carryin' things too far. 'Heed the spark or you may dread the fire,'
+is a piece of wisdom I've always took to heart in rarin' _my_ family,
+and I notice them as are inclined to look leniently on evil, no matter
+how small, never come out the clean potato in the finish," trenchantly
+concluded the old woman; and Miss Flipp was so disconcerted that she
+immediately retired to her room, but noticed by no one but me.
+Probably the poor girl, if gifted with any capacity for retrospection,
+wished that she had heeded the spark that she might not now be in
+danger of being consumed by the fire.
+
+
+
+
+TWELVE.
+
+SOME SIDE-PLAY.
+
+
+As Andrew was banished, and grandma determined to retire to ponder
+upon his sin, she waived it being Carry's week in the kitchen and
+consequently her duty to prepare supper coffee, and suggested that we
+younger women should all go to the meeting, but Miss Flipp refused on
+the score of a headache.
+
+"Poor creature!" observed grandma, "I think she's afraid of a attack
+of her old complaint, she looks that terrible bad, and don't take
+interest in anythink. She wants rousin' out of herself more. She ain't
+a girl that will confide anythink to one, but her uncle is comin' up
+again to-morrer, an' I think I'll speak to him."
+
+When Carry, Dawn, and I arrived at the Citizens' Hall, Ernest was
+already waiting to act groom, while Larry Witcom also accidentally
+hovered near. He quite as casually took possession of Carry, so there
+was nothing for a common individual like myself but to become
+extremely self-absorbed, so that my keen observation might not be an
+interception of any interest likely to circulate between the knight
+and the lady. The latter seemed to be in one of her contrary moods, so
+attached herself to me like a barnacle, settled me in a seat one from
+the wall, and peremptorily indicating to Ernest that he was to take
+the one against it, put herself carefully away from him on the
+outside. A wag would have arranged the party to suit himself, but that
+was beyond Ernest. He meekly sat down beside me, with a helplessness
+possible only to the sturdiest athlete in the room when in the hands
+of a fair and wilful maid. I could have come to his rescue, but deemed
+it wiser not to thrust him upon Dawn for the present. We had arrived
+very early, so there was time for conversation. Encouraged by me,
+Ernest leant forward and addressed a few remarks to Dawn, which she
+received so coolly that he distraitly talked to me instead, and as
+people began to gather, above the majority towered the fair head and
+striking profile of him I had first seen dealing in pumpkins, and who
+was colloquially known as "Dora" Eweword. Dawn beckoned him to the
+seat beside her, which he took with alacrity, a rollicking laugh and a
+crimsoning face, which, in conjunction with a double chin, bespoke the
+further partnership of a large and well-satisfied appetite.
+
+"I haven't seen you for an age," said Dawn with unusual graciousness.
+
+"Are you sure you wanted to see me?" he inquired, with an amorous
+look.
+
+Dawn used her bewitching eyes of blue in a laughing glance.
+
+"You know you only have to give me the wink and you'll see me as often
+as you want," straightforwardly confessed "Dora"; but Dawn having
+encouraged him to a certain distance, had a mind to bring him no
+nearer.
+
+"I don't care if I never saw you again," she said bluntly, "but
+grandma likes yarning with you, that's why I inquired."
+
+"Dora" looked very red in the face indeed.
+
+"How's Miss Cowper?" mercilessly pursued Dawn, going to the point
+about which she was curious, as is characteristic of swains and maids
+of her degree. "I hope she's well."
+
+"So do I," said Eweword.
+
+"You used to ask after her health about twice a-day. I thought you
+would be taking her to Lucerne Farm to relieve your anxiety;" and in
+response to this "Dora" sealed his fate, as far as my feeling any
+compunction whether he singed his wings or not in the light of Dawn's
+bright candle, for he said with a touch of bravado--
+
+"Oh, I was only pulling her leg."
+
+To do the man justice he did not seem down to the full unmanliness of
+this statement; it appeared more one of those nasty and idle remarks
+to which all are prone when in a tight corner, and speaking on the
+spur of the moment.
+
+"Oh, was that all!" said Dawn mockingly. "It was very nice of you. Are
+you always so kind and thoughtful?"
+
+"I'm thinking of clearing out to Sydney in a day or two, I've spent
+enough time loafing. The only thing that has kept me here so long is
+that I wanted to hear how Les. got on in his maiden speech. We're not
+much to each other, but when a fellow has no one belonging to him he
+feels a claim on the most distant connection," said Ernest on the
+other side of me. His interest in Leslie Walker's maiden speech had
+been developed as suddenly as his opinion that he had spent enough
+time in a boat on the river Noonoon.
+
+The connection he mentioned between himself and the candidate about to
+speak was that old Walker, whose only son the latter was, had married
+a widow with one son, by name Ernest Breslaw. Both these parents were
+now dead, leaving the step-brothers as their only offspring. The lads
+had been reared together, and though of utterly different tastes and
+callings, a mutual regard existed between them. Walker had passed his
+examinations at the bar, and Breslaw had been trained to electrical
+engineering, but both being wealthy, neither followed their
+professions except in a nominal way. Walker had put in his time in
+society, motoring, flirting, travelling, dabbling in the arts, and
+building a fine town mansion, while Ernest had spent all his time in
+athletic training, with the result that Walker had fallen a prize in
+the marriage arena, while Ernest was yet in full possession of his
+bachelorhood.
+
+Any further conversation was out of the question, as the candidate--a
+smart, clean-shaven man with clearly cut features--now appeared, and
+announced himself by removing his new straw "decker," and calling
+out--
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen, before we begin I would like to follow the
+democratic principle of asking you to choose a chairman from among
+yourselves."
+
+"We propose Mr Oscar Lawyer!" called several voices, naming a popular
+townsman, and this being seconded, the candidate and the people's
+chairman, two very gentlemanly-looking men for the hustings, ascended
+to the stage side by side.
+
+The chairman took up a position behind a little red table supporting a
+water-bottle and smudgy tumbler, while Leslie Walker sat on another
+chair at the end of it.
+
+Many members of parliament, having risen to their position from
+coal-heaving or hotel-keeping, when going on the war-path a second
+time, take great pains to get themselves _up_ in accordance with
+their idea of the dignity of their office. Many old fellows, roaring
+"Gimme your votes, I'm the only bloke to save the country and see you
+git yer rights," dress this modest _role_ in a long-tailed satin-faced
+frock-coat, a good thing in the trouser line, and a stylish
+button-hole; but Leslie Walker, one of the champagne set, had made
+equally palpable efforts to dress himself _down_ to his present
+_debut_.
+
+For sure! his suit, which comprised an alpaca coat with a crumpled
+tail, must have been the shabbiest he had, while the glistening new
+white sailor hat had probably been procured at the last moment in the
+vain imagination that, dress as he would, it was not evident at a
+first glance that he had had the bread-and-butter problem solved for
+him by a provident parent before his birth, and that he had lived what
+is designated the cultured life, far and autocratically above sympathy
+with the vulgar and despised herds, upon whose sweat his class build
+the pretty villas fronting the harbour, charge haughtily along the
+roads in automobiles, and sail the graceful yachts on the idyllic
+waters of Port Jackson.
+
+"By Jove! Les. has different ambitions from mine," said Ernest. "I'd
+rather have to stand up to a mill with the champion pug. than face
+what he's on for to-night. Doesn't he look a case in that get up?
+Supposing he gets in, what the devil good will it do then, and it
+takes such crawling to get into parliament nowadays. There are too
+many at the game. I could never face the way one has to flatter some
+of these old creatures for their vote. I'd rather plug them under the
+jaw."
+
+Mr Oscar Lawyer having introduced the speaker, he came forward, and
+after explaining it was his first appearance in politics, charmingly
+proceeded, "I hope I shall not bore you with my remarks as I
+endeavour to outline the various planks in the platform of the party
+to which I have the honour to belong."
+
+Quite superfluous for him to explain that he was a new chum in
+politics. Only a fledgling from a Brussels or Axminster carpeted
+reception-room would stand on the hustings and publish a fear that he
+might be boring his audience. One familiar with the trade of
+electioneering, as it has always been conducted by men, would strut
+and shout and brag, never for a moment worrying whether or not he came
+anywhere near the truth or feeling the slightest qualm, though he
+deafened his hearers with his trumpeting or bored them to complete
+extinction, and would refuse to be silenced even by "eggs of great
+antiquity."
+
+"Les. ought to stick to society," observed his step-brother; "flipping
+around a drawing-room and making all the girls think they were equally
+in the running was more in his line."
+
+"He's a nice, clean, good-looking young fellow at any rate, and
+doesn't look as if he gorged himself--hasn't that red-faced, stuffed
+look," said Dawn. "If I had a vote I'd give it to him just for that,
+as I'm sick of these red-nosed old members of parliament with
+corporations."
+
+"He's the real lah-de-dah Johnny, isn't he?" laughed "Dora" Eweword.
+
+"Don't you say he's any relation of mine," said Ernest. "It would give
+me away, and he thinks I'm in Melbourne. I told every one that's where
+I was bound. I hope he won't catch sight of me."
+
+There was little fear of this; one has to be accustomed to facing a
+crowd before they can distinguish faces.
+
+After the meeting, which dispersed early, Ernest and I hurried out
+into the galvanised iron-walled yard, in which those coming from a
+distance put their horses and vehicles.
+
+Having noted the disconsolate manner in which a pair of dark eyes
+below a thatch of generous hue surreptitiously glanced towards a
+tormentatious maiden with ribbons of blue matching her eyes and
+fluttering on her bosom, I thought it time to come to his rescue.
+
+"If you would care to talk to your friend, he can drive you home while
+I walk with 'Dora'; he says he has something to say to me," said Dawn
+in an aside.
+
+"Are you sure you want to hear it?" I asked.
+
+"How could I tell until I hear it?"
+
+"That is not a fair answer, Dawn."
+
+"Well, it wasn't a fair question," she pouted.
+
+"Very well, I will not press you more, but you'll tell me of it after,
+will you not?"
+
+"Well, what would you like me to do?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, I'd like you to be naughty. Mr _Dora's_ complacence inspires me
+to inveigle him into having to drive me home while you walk with some
+one else."
+
+"Very well, anything for fun," she responded with dancing eyes; and as
+Ernest had the horse in I got into the sulky and said--
+
+"There is room for three here, Mr Eweword, and we would be glad of you
+to put the horse out when we get home."
+
+He took the reins and a seat, and moved aside to make room for the
+loitering Dawn, but she said--
+
+"No, I'll walk; I must keep Carry company, and she doesn't want to
+come just yet."
+
+"Drive on," I commanded, and there was nothing for the entrapped
+"Dora" to do but obey.
+
+I saw Carry go on with another escort. "Will you permit me to see you
+to your gate?" I heard Ernest saying as we went, and Dawn asserting
+that it was unnecessary.
+
+It was a beautiful starry night, with a prospect of a slight frost, as
+we turned down the tree-lined streets of the friendly old town, whose
+folk on their homeward way dawdled in knots to discuss the
+interposition of the women's vote.
+
+"Now the women will do strokes," said one.
+
+"The men have things in such a jolly muddle it will take a long time
+to improve them," another retorted.
+
+"The women will make bloomin' fools of themselves!"
+
+"Couldn't be worse than the men!"
+
+"The women'll all go for this chap because he's good-looking."
+
+"Just as good a reason as going for another because he shouted grog
+for you," and similar remarks, drifted to my ears, but "Dora's" mind
+did not seem to be running on politics.
+
+"Who was that red-headed fellow sitting the other side of you?" he
+inquired.
+
+"Which one?"
+
+"A short block of a fellow with a clean face."
+
+"Oh, he's a man I know."
+
+"Pretty cool of us leaving Dawn. The old dame won't like it."
+
+"She won't mind, considering Dawn has about the most reliable escort
+procurable."
+
+"I suppose it's all right if you know him, but to me he looked like a
+bagman or bike-rider or something in the spieler line."
+
+"Oh no," and pulling my boa about me I smiled to think of the chagrin
+of Dora. He was so beautifully transparent too, but to do him justice
+did not seem to resent the scurvy trick I had played him, as soon his
+equanimity was restored, and we laboured cheerfully but unavailingly
+to promote a conversation.
+
+"Do you really like farming--take a pleasure in it?" I inquired.
+
+"When I'm knocking a decent amount of money out of it I do. There's
+not much fun in anything when it doesn't pay."
+
+"Quite true."
+
+"There might be a frost to-night, but they're nothing here--always
+disappear as soon as the sun is up. Great Scott! aren't these roads?
+The council want stuffing in the Noonoon. It would be an all right
+place only for the roads."
+
+This brought us to Clay's gate, and no further conversational effort
+was necessary. I lingered outside till Eweword had disposed of the
+pony and trap, and by that time Ernest and Dawn, bearing evidence of
+quick walking, appeared, and we went into grandma and Uncle Jake in a
+body.
+
+"The women are going to form a committee to work for Mr Walker if he's
+selected," announced Dawn, "and I want to join it, grandma. I am not
+old enough to vote, but I'd like to work for Mr Walker. He looks worth
+a vote. He's nice and thin, and speaks beautifully without shouting
+and roaring,--not like these old beer-swipers who buy their votes with
+drink."
+
+"He is a decent-looking fellow," said Eweword.
+
+"Oh, well, he'll go in then; that's all the women will care about,"
+said Uncle Jake in one of his half-audible sneers.
+
+"Well," contended Dawn, "men always sneer at women for doing in a
+small degree what men do fifty times worse. If a pretty barmaid comes
+to town all the men are after her like bees, and if a pretty woman
+stood for parliament the men would go off their heads about her, and
+yet they get their hair off terribly if a woman happens to prefer a
+nice gentlemanly man to a big, old, fat beer-barrel, with his teeth
+black from tobacco and his neck gouging over his collar from eating
+too much. Can I join the committee, grandma?"
+
+"If it's proper, and he's my man, you can, an' work instead of me, but
+I must hear them both first."
+
+"If Walker could get you to make a speech for him, we'd all vote for
+him in a body," laughed Eweword; but Dawn replied--
+
+"Oh, you, I suppose you say that to every girl."
+
+Eweword sizzled in his blushes, while Ernest's face slightly cleared
+at this rebuff dealt out to another.
+
+Grandma brought in the coffee and grumbled to Dawn about Carry's
+absence.
+
+"That Larry Witcom ain't no monk, and while a girl is in my house I
+feel I ought to look after her. I believe in every one having liberty,
+but there's reason in everythink."
+
+The girl did not appear till after the young men had gone and Dawn and
+I had withdrawn, but we heard grandma's remonstrance.
+
+"That feller, I told you straight, was took up about a affair in a
+divorce case, an' it would be as well not to make yourself too cheap
+to him. I don't say as most men ain't as bad, only they're not caught
+and bowled out; but w'en they are made a public example of, we have to
+take notice of it. Marry him if you want--use your own judgment; he'll
+be the sort of feller who'll always have a good home, and in after
+years these things is always forgot, and it would be better to be
+married to a man that had that against him (seein' they're all the
+same, only they ain't found out) and could keep you comfortable, than
+one who was _supposed_ to be different an' couldn't keep you. But if
+you ain't goin' to marry him, don't fool about with him. An' unless he
+gets to business an' wants marriage at once, don't take too much
+notice to his soft soap, as you ain't the only girl he's got on the
+string by a long way."
+
+"He acknowledges about the fault he did in his young days, and he says
+it's terribly hard that it's always coming against him now," said
+Carry.
+
+"Well, if a woman does a fault she has to pay for it, hasn't
+she?--that's the order of things," said grandma.
+
+"But this was when he was young and foolish," continued Carry.
+
+"Yes, the poor child, he was terribly innocent, wasn't he? an' was got
+hold of by some fierce designing hussy--they always are--and it was
+all her fault. It always is a woman's fault--only for the women the
+men would be all angels and flew away long ago," said grandma
+sarcastically. "They'll give you plenty of that kind of yarn if you
+listen to 'em; an' if you are built so you can believe it, well an'
+good, but the facts was always too much of a eye-opener for me," and
+with that the contention ended.
+
+"Yes, Carry's the terriblest silly about that Larry Witcom," said
+Dawn; "she swallows all he says. She said to me yesterday, 'He seems
+to be terribly gone on me.' 'Yes,' I said. 'You keep cool about his
+goneness. Wait till he gets down on his knees and bellows and roars
+about his love, and take my tip for it he could forget you then in
+less than a week.' I've seen men pretending to be mad with love, and
+the next month married to some one else. Men's love is a thing you
+want to take with more discount than everything you know. You might be
+conceited enough to believe them if you went by your own lovers, but
+you want to look on at other people's love affairs, and see how much
+is to be depended on there, and measure your own by them, and it will
+keep your head cool," said this girl, who had the most sensible head I
+ever saw in conjunction with her degree of beauty.
+
+She had contracted the habit of slipping into my room for a talk
+before going to bed, and as her bright presence there was a delight to
+me, I encouraged her in it. The gorgeous kimono was a great
+attraction; she loved it so that I had given it her after the first
+night, but did not tell her so, or she would have carried it away to
+her own room, where I would have been deprived of the pleasure of
+seeing it nightly enhance the loveliness of her firm white throat and
+arms.
+
+"How did you and Dora get on together?" she presently inquired.
+
+"Well, you see we didn't elope; how did you and Ernest manage?"
+
+"Well, you see we didn't elope," she laughed.
+
+"No, but you might have arranged such a thing."
+
+"Arranged for such a thing!" she said scornfully. "I'm not in the
+habit of trucking with other people's belongings."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"It was you who said something about his young lady this afternoon--as
+far as I can see he doesn't behave much as if he had one."
+
+So it was my chance remark that had run her wheel out of groove during
+the last few hours!
+
+"Does he not?" I replied. "I think he appears more as though he has a
+young lady now than he did during my previous knowledge of him."
+
+"Well, I don't know how you see it," she said, as she tore down her
+pretty hair.
+
+"What!" I ejaculated in feigned consternation. "He has not been making
+love to you, has he, Dawn? I always had such faith in his manliness."
+
+"Well, he doesn't _say_ anything," said Dawn, with a blush. "But he
+glares at me in the way men do, and when I mention anything I like or
+want, he wants to get it for me, and all that sort of business."
+
+"Perhaps he's falling in love unawares. Young men are often stupid,
+and do not recognise their distemper till it is very ripe. He ought to
+be removed from danger."
+
+"Well, if I ever had a lover, and he liked another girl better, I'd be
+pretty sure he hadn't cared for me, and would not want him any more,"
+she said off-handedly.
+
+"But would it not be better to let him go away and be happy with the
+maid who loves him than to spoil his life by wasting his affection on
+you, when you only think him a great pug-looking creature that you'd
+be ashamed to be seen with?"
+
+"Yes, I don't care for him," she said still more off-handedly; "but he
+doesn't look so queer now I've got used to him. I suppose any one who
+liked him wouldn't think him such a horror."
+
+"No; I for one think him handsome."
+
+"Handsome?"
+
+"Yes, _handsome_."
+
+"Well, I'll go to bed after that and think how some people's tastes
+differ."
+
+"Well, take care you don't think about Ernest."
+
+"Thank you; I don't want the nightmare," she retorted, tossing her
+head.
+
+
+
+
+THIRTEEN.
+
+VARIOUS EVENTS.
+
+
+The following day was eventful. To begin with, after Andrew had
+discharged his early morning duties, he was to appear before his
+grandma for the execution of the sentence she had passed upon him the
+night before. I was assisting him to dry the parts of the
+cream-separator, a task which had become chronic with me, when Carry
+shouted from the kitchen, where she was putting in her week--
+
+"Your grandma says not to be long; she's waiting for you."
+
+Andrew unburdened his soul to me.
+
+"Lord, ain't I just in for it! I'll hear how me grandma rared me since
+I was born! I'm dead sick of this born and rared business. It would
+give a bloke the pip. I didn't make meself born, nor want any one else
+to do it; there ain't much in bein' alive," he said with that
+pessimism which, like measles and whooping-cough, is indigenous to
+extreme youth.
+
+"How could I help being rared? I didn't ask 'em to rare me. I didn't
+make meself a little baby that couldn't help itself, and they needn't
+have rared me unless they liked. Goodness knows, I'd have rather died
+like a little pup before his eyes were opened," he continued so
+tragically that I took the opportunity of smiling behind his back as
+he threw out the dish-water.
+
+"Hurry up! your grannie is waiting!" called Carry once more.
+
+"Blow you! you'll have to wait till I'm done," retorted the boy in a
+tone the reverse of genial.
+
+"People is always chuckin' at their kids how much they owe them. I'm
+blowed if ever I can see it. I didn't want 'em to have me, and don't
+see why it should be everlasting threw at me."
+
+It is a wise provision that youth cannot see what it owes the previous
+generation. This is a chicken that comes back to roost in heavier
+years.
+
+"I wish I had a grandma like Jack Bray's ma. He nicked over to me w'en
+I was after the cows, an' Mrs Bray ain't goin' to kick up any row
+about the oranges. She says she never knew of a boy that didn't go
+into orchards in their young days, and that his dad did, and people
+don't think no more of a boy pickin' up a little fruit than they do of
+pickin' up a stick. Yet grandma will tan the hide off of me. She done
+it once before, and I was stiff for a week."
+
+"Take a tip from me, Andrew! March into your grandma bravely; she's
+the best woman I've seen; you ought to be proud to have such a
+grandma! She's in the right and Mrs Bray's in the wrong. Let her
+hammer you for all she's worth, and every whack you get feel proud
+that she's able to give it at her time of life, and I bet when you're
+a man you'll be telling every one that you had a grandma who was worth
+owning. When she leaves off tell her that this is the last time she'll
+ever have to do it for anything like that, and see if you don't feel
+more a man than you ever did before. Promise me that's what you'll
+do."
+
+"Is that what _you'd_ do if you was me?" he inquired with surprise.
+
+"That's what you'd do if you were me," I replied with a smile. "Just
+try that. Never mind if your grandma does go for you hot and strong."
+
+Andrew wiped the table, wrung out his dishcloth in the back-handed
+manner peculiar to his sex, hung it on a nail behind the door, dried
+his hands on his trousers, which for once were not "busted up," and
+with a less rueful expression than he had exhibited for several hours,
+went forth to meet his grandma.
+
+About ten minutes later he returned blubbering, but it was a sunshiny
+shower, and I did not despise the lad for his tears, for he had a soft
+nature, and was quite a child despite his big stature and sixteen
+years.
+
+"Well?" I inquired, recognising that he was anxious to relate his
+experience.
+
+"She banged away with the strap of the breechin' till she was winded,
+and then I said I hoped she'd never have to beat me again for acting
+the goat in other people's gardens that didn't concern me, an' she
+didn't beat me no more then, but I had plenty as it was," he said,
+rubbing his seat and the calves of his legs.
+
+"Well done, stick to that, and be thankful for such a grandma!"
+
+"She ain't a bad old sort when you come to consider," he said with
+that patronage, also an attribute of extreme youth or unsubdued
+snobbishness, and when compared, snobbishness and youth have some
+similar characteristics.
+
+Next item on the programme was Mr Pornsch, whom grandma invited to
+remain to midday dinner, and the old lady being sufficiently human to
+denounce a swell far more fiercely behind his back than to his face,
+in consideration of this one's presence, once more entrusted us to
+sugar our own puddings, regardless of consequences.
+
+After luncheon she interviewed him about his niece's health. Mr
+Pornsch seemed really concerned, and said perhaps she needed to be
+diverted, and that he would see about a further change, which might
+prove beneficial. He then put up his eyeglass to inspect Dawn's
+beauty, and ogling her, attempted to engage her in conversation; but
+the girl didn't seem at all attracted by him or thankful for the
+favours he brought her in the form of an exquisite box of bonbons and
+the latest song.
+
+"I don't accept presents, thank you," she said uncompromisingly.
+
+"Do you never make exceptions?"
+
+"Only from people I like _very_ much."
+
+"Well, I trust I may some day be among the exceptions," he said, in a
+gruesome attempt to be ingratiating; but the girl replied--
+
+"Then you hope for impossibilities."
+
+Somewhat disconcerted though not the least abashed, Mr Pornsch
+persevered by asking if she ever went to Sydney, and stated the
+pleasure it would be to him to provide her with tickets for any of the
+plays; but even this could not overcome her unconquerable horror of
+the various intemperances suggested by his person, so he had to
+retreat.
+
+Dawn's grandmother remonstrated with her afterwards.
+
+"You ought to be a little more genteeler, Dawn, and you could refuse
+presents just as well. Even if he isn't the takin'est old chap, that
+is not any reason for you to be ungenteel."
+
+"Well, I don't care," replied Dawn, whose exquisitely moulded chin,
+despite an irresistible dimple, was expressive of determination. "If I
+was a great old podge and had a blue nose from swilling and gorging,
+and was fifty if I was a day, and then went goggling after a young
+fellow of eighteen, he wouldn't be very civil to me, or be lectured if
+he spoke to me the way I deserved, and I think these old creatures of
+men ought to be discouraged by all the girls. What's sauce for the
+goose is the same for the gander."
+
+Mr Pornsch had not long departed when Mrs Bray favoured us with a
+call, so grandma was spared a pilgrimage to her house. She and Carry
+exchanged a stiffly formal greeting, but the visitor beamed upon the
+remainder of us and seated herself in our midst.
+
+"Oh, I say, ain't it a blessed nark to the men us going to have a
+vote? He! he! Ha! ha! It fairly maddens 'em to see us getting a bit of
+freedom--makes 'em that wild they don't know how to be sneerin' an'
+nasty enough. Every one of us will just roll up an' use our power now
+we've got it,--they've kep' our necks under their heel long enough."
+
+"I wasn't thinkin' of the vote at present," said Grandma Clay. "I was
+just off to see you about what our noble nibbs have been doin' in that
+old Gawling's orchard; but I beat Andrew already in case. What did you
+think of 'em?"
+
+Mrs Bray put back her handsome head, decorated by an extremely
+fashionable hat, and laughed boisterously.
+
+"Fancy the old toad runnin' 'em down,--gave 'em a bit of a scare,
+didn't it? Old mongrel, to kick up a fuss over a few paltry oranges!
+As if we don't all know what boys is; why, there'd be no chance of
+rarin' them without touchin' nothing, unless you carted them off to
+the back-blocks where there wasn't no one within reach. I told him
+what I thought of him. 'How dare you!' says I. 'Bring witnesses of
+this,' said I."
+
+Grandma Clay arose.
+
+"Well, if that's your idea of rarin' a family, it ain't mine. Why,
+can't you hear the parson's everlastin' preaching and giving examples
+how taking a pin has been the start of a feller coming to the gallows;
+and this is a much worse beginning than a pin! If the only way of
+rarin' them not to steal was to put 'em where there was no possibility
+of stealing nothink, a pretty sort of honesty that would be; you might
+as well say the only way to rare a girl modest was to let her never
+have a chance of being nothink else. Some people, of course, has
+different views, but I believe in holding to mine; they've brought me
+up to this time very well."
+
+"Oh, you are terrible strict; you wouldn't have no peace of your life
+rarin' boys if you cut things so fine as that. Now w'en women gets the
+rule it might become the fashion for men to be more proper. Look here,
+the men are that mad--"
+
+Uncle Jake here interrupted her by appearing for four o'clock tea.
+
+"Well, Mr Sorrel, now the women has come to show you how to do things,
+there might be something done in the country."
+
+"Nice fools they'll make of themselves," he sneeringly replied.
+
+"They couldn't make no greater fools of themselves than the men has
+always done,--lying in the gutter an' breakin' their faces," said Mrs
+Bray.
+
+"Wait till the women go at it, they'll fight like cats," continued
+Uncle Jake, whose power to annoy depended not so much upon what he
+said as his way of saying it.
+
+Dawn chipped into the rescue at this point.
+
+"I'm dead sick of that yarn about women fighting. It's a mean lie.
+They never fight half as much as men; and girls always love each other
+more, and are more friendly together than men. The only women who
+fight with their own sex and call them cats are a few nasty things who
+are trying to please men by helping them to keep women down and make
+little of them; and the fools! that sort of meanness never pleases any
+men, only those that are not worth pleasing."
+
+"Well, now that women has the vote they ought to plough, an' drive the
+trains, and let the men sit down inside," continued Jake. But Mrs Bray
+descended upon him.
+
+"Yes; an' the men ought to come inside an' sweep, an' sew, and have
+their health ruined for a man's selfishness, an' be tied to a baby and
+four or five toddlers from six in the mornin' till ten at night, day
+in and day out, like the women do. What do you think, Mr Eweword?" she
+inquired of this individual, who had joined the company and awaited
+the conclusion of her remarks ere he greeted us.
+
+"I think the women ought to vote if they want to. There's nothing to
+stop 'em voting and doing their housework as well; and the Lord knows
+it doesn't matter who they vote for, as all the members are only a
+pack of 'skytes,' after a good billet for themselves. Think I'll have
+a go for it to see if it would pay better than farmin'," he said, with
+his mouth extended in a laugh that redeemed the weakness of this
+feature by exhibiting the beauty of a perfect set of teeth.
+
+"What about women havin' to keep theirselves in subjection?" persisted
+Uncle Jake. This subject apparently lay near his heart.
+
+"I always think that means for them to take care of themselves, and
+not bust over the hard dragging work that men were meant for," said
+Mrs Bray; "for I've always noticed that any man who puts his wife to
+man's work never comes to no good in the finish. If a man can't float
+his own boat, and thinks a woman can keep his and her own end up at
+the same time, she might as well fold her hands from the start, as the
+little she can do will never keep things goin' and only pave the way
+for doctors' bills."
+
+"You might try to argue it, but if you believe the Bible you can see
+there in every page that women ain't meant only to be under men," said
+the gallant Jake.
+
+"It ain't a case of not believin' the Bible, it's only that we ain't
+fools enough to believe all the ways people twists it to suit
+theirselves; men as talks that way is always the sort would be in a
+benevolent asylum only for some woman keepin' 'em from it," said
+grandma, coming to the rescue. "Cowards always drag in the Bible to
+back theirselves up far more than proper people does; and there's
+always one thing as strikes me in the Bible, an' that is w'en God was
+going to send His son down in human form. He considered a woman fit to
+be His mother, but there wasn't a man livin' fit to be His father. I
+reckon that's a slap in the face from the Almighty hisself that ought
+to make men more carefuller when they try to make little of women."
+
+Even Uncle Jake collapsed before this, and Mrs Bray ceased contention
+and veered her talk to gossip.
+
+"Young Walker has been chose by the Opposition League in Noonoon, an'
+we're goin' to form a committee at once and work for him. Ada
+Grosvenor is goin' to form a society for educating women how to vote."
+
+"Ada Grosvenor!" exclaimed grandma. "I thought she would be too much a
+upholder of the men to be the start of anythink like that."
+
+"I don't see how educating one's self how to vote would be making them
+a putter down of the men," said Dawn.
+
+"Well, it's much the same thing," said Mrs Bray. "For if a woman
+educates herself on anything it will show her that a lot of the men
+want puttin' down--a long way down too. You'll see the men will think
+it's against 'em, and try to squash her and her society, for they're
+always frightened if you begin to learn the least thing you will find
+out how you're bein' imposed upon; but they don't care how much you
+learn in the direction of wearin' yourself out an' slavin' to save
+money for them to spend on themselves."
+
+"Oh, come now," laughed "Dora"; "we're not all so bad as that!"
+
+"Not at your time of life w'en you're after the girls and pretendin'
+you're angels to catch 'em; it's after you've got 'em in your power
+that things change," said Mrs Bray.
+
+The company was now further enlarged by the arrival of Ernest, soon
+followed by a young lady I had not previously met--a tall brown-eyed
+girl, with pleasant determination in every line of her well-cut face,
+and who proved to be the young lady under discussion--Miss Ada
+Grosvenor, daughter of the owner of the farm adjoining Bray's and
+Clay's.
+
+Her errand was to invite Dawn to join the society she was promoting.
+
+She explained it was not for the support of a party, but for the
+exchange and search of knowledge that should direct electresses to
+exercise their long-withheld right in a worthy manner. I listened with
+pleasure to the thoughtful and earnest ideals to be discerned
+underlying the girl's practically expressed ideas, and delighted in
+the humorous intelligence flashing from her clear eyes, and was
+altogether favourably impressed with her as a type of womanhood--one
+of the best extant.
+
+She conversed with the elder members of the party and Ernest, and this
+left "Dora" Eweword in charge of Carry and Dawn. His giggle was much
+in evidence. Between blasts of it he could be heard inviting the girls
+to a pull on the river, and they presently set off round the corner of
+Miss Flipp's bedroom leading to the flights of wooden steps down to
+the boats under the naked willows. The nature of the one swift glance
+that travelled after them from Ernest's eyes did not escape my
+observation, so I suggested that he, Miss Grosvenor, and myself should
+follow a good example, and we did. I knew it would be a relief to him
+to overtake Eweword, pull past him with ease, and leave him a speck in
+the distance, as he did. I felt a satisfaction in noting Dawn watch
+his splendid strokes, and Miss Grosvenor's animated conversation with
+him and enthusiastically expressed admiration of his rowing. She was
+not so exacting in the matter of detail as Dawn, and red hair did not
+prevent her from enjoying the company of a splendid specimen of the
+opposite sex when she had the rare good fortune of encountering him.
+
+"That's a fine stamp of a girl," he cordially remarked as, having at
+her request pulled the boat to the edge of the stream, she landed and
+sprang up the bank for ferns; but not by any inveiglement could I
+induce him to give an opinion of Dawn, which was propitious of her
+being his real lady. When we pulled down stream again between the
+fertile farm-lands spread with occasional orange and lemon groves,
+beautiful with their great crops of yellowing fruit, we found that the
+other party were already deserting their craft.
+
+"We had to give it best. Mr Eweword soon got winded. I never saw any
+one pull a boat so splendidly as you do, Mr Ernest," called the
+outspoken Carry, who had not acquired the art of paying a compliment
+to one member of a party without running _amok_ of the feelings of
+another. Eweword, despite his shapely and imposing bulk, had not
+developed his athletic possibilities so much as those of the gourmand,
+and, reddening to the roots of his stubbed hair, he looked the reverse
+of pleased with the tactless young woman,--an expression usually to be
+found on the countenance of one or more members of a company following
+the publication of her opinions.
+
+Miss Grosvenor and Ernest continued to chat with such apparent
+enjoyment that Dawn said pointedly--
+
+"Pooh! there's no art in pulling a boat; any galoot with a little
+brute force can do that,"--a remark having the desired effect, for the
+young Breslaw feigned not to hear, his face rivalled the colour of
+"Dora's," and his remarks grew absent.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," persisted Carry, "I know plenty of
+galoots,--they're the only sort of men there are in the Noonoon
+district, and they can't row for sour apples."
+
+Dawn singled out "Dora" Eweword, and went up the bank with him,
+leaving the remainder of us together. Miss Grosvenor favoured us with
+a cordial invitation to partake of the hospitality of her home during
+the following evening; and delighted with the intelligence and go of
+the girl, I was pleased to accept. Ernest said he would be delighted
+to escort me, but Carry said she had her work to do, and had no time
+to run about to people's places. Miss Grosvenor received this with a
+merry twinkle in her eye, and said to me--
+
+"Well, Dawn will come to show you the way. It is an uncomfortable path
+if you don't know it;" and with this she bade good afternoon and ran
+around the orchard among the square weed and wild quince, across an
+area abounding in lines of barbed-wire.
+
+Ernest too departed in a triangular direction leading to the curious
+old bridge spanning the stream.
+
+"What makes him hang about here so long?" asked Carry. "Has he a girl
+in the district? Do you think he seems gone on Dawn?"
+
+"Perhaps it's Carry?"
+
+"No such luck. I wish he were. I suppose he has money. They say over
+where he boards he has a set of rooms to himself, and is very liberal.
+What would he be doing up here so long?"
+
+"He doesn't publish his business. Perhaps he's staying in this nice
+quiet nook to write a book or something," I said idly, by way of
+accounting for his idleness, or the curious might have set to work to
+discover more of his doings than he wished to get abroad just then.
+
+"He doesn't look much like the fools that write books, but every one
+is writing one these days. I know of five or six about Noonoon even;
+it seems to be a craze."
+
+"Perhaps a cycle!"
+
+"I often wonder who is going to read 'em all and do the work."
+
+This brought us to Clay's, Carry supporting me on her arm, and thus
+ended her discourse.
+
+Dora stayed for tea, but it was a dull meal, as Dawn now appeared
+desirous of repelling him.
+
+Andrew, who on account of his drubbing had been very subdued during
+dinner, had regained his usual form, and when Uncle Jake, to whom the
+freeing of women seemed an unabating irritation, remarked--
+
+"Who's this young Walker? All the women will be mad for him because
+he's good-looking and got a soft tongue. They ought to stick to the
+present member who is known, this other fellow hasn't been heard of;"
+his grand-nephew replied--
+
+"Like Uncle Jake; he's been in the municipal council fifteen years and
+never got heard of; he ought to put up an' see would the women go for
+him, because he's never been heard of an' is a bit good-lookin'."
+
+"Well, there's one thing to his credit, an' that is, he's lived over
+sixty years an' never been heard of stealing fruit out of people's
+gardens, an' as for looks--'Han'some is who han'some does,'" said
+grandma, which effected the collapse of Andrew. In the Clay household
+there were ever current reminders of the truth of the old proverb,
+warning people in glass-houses to abstain from stone-throwing.
+
+Dawn did not appear before me that night until I opened my door and
+called--
+
+"Lady Fair, the kimono awaits thy perfumed presence!"
+
+"I don't want to come to-night; I feel as scotty as a bear with a sore
+head."
+
+"But I want you--youth must ever give way to grey hairs."
+
+With that she appeared, and throwing herself backward on my bed,
+thrust her arms crossly above her head amid a tumble of soft bright
+hair.
+
+"Youth, health, beauty, and lovers not lacking, what excuse have you
+for being out of tune? I want you to pilot me to tea at Grosvenor's
+to-morrow evening. Miss Grosvenor has invited you, Ernest, and
+myself."
+
+"She just wants Ernest--she's terribly fond of the men."
+
+"Well, did you ever see a normal girl who wasn't, and Mr Ernest is a
+man worth being fond of--I dearly love him myself."
+
+"Pooh! I don't see anything nice about him," said Dawn aggressively.
+
+"But you'll come to tea, won't you?"
+
+"No, I can't. I never go to Grosvenors. Grandma doesn't care for them.
+She says he was only a pig buyer, and settled down there about the
+time she came here, and now they try to ape the swells and put on
+airs. They only come here to try to get on terms with some of the
+swell men. I wouldn't take him over there to please her if I were
+you."
+
+"That's where you and I differ. I would just like to please them, and
+I'm sure it will do Ernest good to be in the company of such a
+pleasant and sensible girl as Ada Grosvenor."
+
+"Yes, he'd want something to do him good, if I'm any judge."
+
+Dawn's pretty mouth and chin were so querulous that I had to turn away
+to smile.
+
+"So you won't come to tea?"
+
+"I can't; I'd like to please you," she said somewhat softening, "but
+I've promised 'Dora' Eweword I'll go out rowing with him again
+to-morrow. He says he has something to say to me."
+
+"He's been going to say this something a long time."
+
+"Yes, but I stave him off. I know what it is right enough, and I don't
+want to hear it; but I suppose I had better please grandma."
+
+"So you like him?"
+
+"No, I detest him, and feel like smacking him on the mouth just where
+his underlip sticks out farther than the top one, every time he
+speaks; but what am I to do? I'd never be let go on the stage, and I
+might as well marry him as any one."
+
+"Why marry any one? At nineteen, or ninety for that matter, there is
+no imperative hurry. To marry a man you dislike because you cannot
+attain your ambition is surely very silly indeed. Would you not love
+'Dora' if you could go on the stage?"
+
+"I wouldn't be seen in a forty-acred paddock with him. I'd like some
+man who had travelled, not an old Australian thing just living about
+here. I'd like an Englishman who'd take me home to England."
+
+"You mustn't disparage your countrymen while I'm listening, as you'll
+find no better in any country or clime. Always remember they were
+among the first to enfranchise their women, and thus raise them above
+the status of chatteldom and merchandise."
+
+"They only gave us the vote because they had to. Women have had to
+crawl to them for it, and pretend it was a great privilege the sweet
+darling almighties were allowing us, when all the time it has been our
+right, and they were selfish cowards who deserve no thanks for
+withholding it so long. And they gave it that grudgingly and are that
+narked about it, it makes me sick."
+
+"Of course, when the matter is stripped to bare facts, the truth of
+your remarks is irrefutable, but we must gauge things comparatively,
+and remember how many other nations won't even grudgingly free their
+women. If you don't like Eweword I can't see any pressing necessity to
+think of marriage at all."
+
+"Oh, well, I'd have it done then and wouldn't be everlasting plagued
+on the subject," she said with the unreasonableness of irritability.
+
+"Would it not be better though to wait a little while in hopes of a
+better choice?"
+
+"But I suppose it will always be the same. Any man at all worth
+consideration is sure to be married or at any rate is engaged."
+
+Here was the clue to her irritation. It was that imaginary young lady
+of Ernest Breslaw's. Had she been a man, ere this she would have
+plunged into vigorous attempt to dislodge that or any other rival, no
+matter how assured his position, but being a woman and compelled to
+await "The idiot Chance her imperial Fate," the effect of such
+suppression on so robust and strenuous a nature was this form of
+hysteria.
+
+"Well, what about a struggle for the desire of your heart? Undoubtedly
+you have, if well trained, sufficient voice to be a great asset on the
+stage, but it would take at the very least two years' hard work under
+a good master before it would be in the least fit for public use."
+
+"I'd be twenty-one then."
+
+"You are just at a good age to stand vigorous training."
+
+"But what's the use of talking," she said hopelessly, "you don't know
+how mad grandma is against the stage. She says she'd rather see me in
+my grave, and I feel I'd never prosper if I went against her."
+
+"Very likely her point of view is founded on hard facts, but training
+your voice isn't going on the stage, and in two years, if you are able
+to sing decently, perhaps no one will be so anxious as your grandma
+that you should be heard,--I've heard of such a case before;" and I
+didn't add that two years was a long way ahead for an old woman of
+seventy-six, and also for a girl to whom study was not quite a fetich,
+and ample time for the or some knight to have come to the rescue.
+These thoughts were not for publication, as they might have made me
+appear a traitor to the prejudices of one party and the desire of the
+other, whereas I was loyal to them both.
+
+"It would be lovely if you could get on the soft side of grandma, but
+I'm afraid it's impossible. Fancy being able to sing and please
+people, and travel about in nice cities away from dusty, dreary, slow
+old Noonoon," said the girl, the crossness melting from her pretty
+face and giving place to radiance.
+
+She toyed with some silk scarves of mine, and between whiles said--
+
+"Isn't it funny some people think one thing good and others don't. No
+one around here wants to be on the stage but me, or seems to
+understand that actresses are made out of ordinary people like you and
+me. 'Dora' doesn't know anything about the stage, but Mr Ernest does.
+He doesn't think them terrible women, and says that his best woman
+friend was an actress once. If you thought grandma could be brought
+round at all I wouldn't go out with Dora to-morrow, I'd go with you to
+get out of it. Mr Ernest seemed to be very pleased with Ada
+Grosvenor; is she the same style as his young lady?"
+
+This question wasn't asked because Dawn was transparent, but because I
+had led her to believe I was dense.
+
+"No, not at all," I replied.
+
+"What is she like?"
+
+"She's about five feet five, and has a plump, dimpling figure. Her
+hair is bright brown, and her nose is an exquisitely cut little
+straight one. (Here I observed Dawn casting surreptitious glances in
+the mirror opposite.) Her eyes are bright blue with long dark lashes,
+and she has a mouth too pretty to describe, fitted up with a set of
+the loveliest natural teeth one could see in these days of the
+dentist; it is so perfect that it seems unnatural and a sad pity that
+it should sometimes be the outlet of censorious remarks about less
+beautiful sisters, but its owner is very young and not surrounded by
+the best of influences at present, and no doubt will have better sense
+as she grows older."
+
+"What's her name?"
+
+"Now you want to know too much, but I never knew another girl with
+such a beautiful one."
+
+"She must be a beauty altogether," said Dawn rather satirically.
+
+"She would be if she would only guard against being cross at times,
+but you must not breathe this to a soul as I'm only going on
+supposition. Young Ernest isn't engaged to her, but I've seen him with
+her once or twice, and he looked so pleased that I suspected him of
+kind regards, as no man could help admiring her."
+
+"Is that all?" she said in a tone of relief; "he mightn't care for
+her at all. Just walking about with her and looking happy isn't any
+criterion. Men are always doing that with every girl."
+
+"Dora didn't look happy with me to-night then--how do you account for
+that?"
+
+She accounted for it with a merry laugh, as curled in the silk kimono
+she remained in possession of my nightly couch.
+
+I was espousing this girl's cause because I could not bear to see her
+honest, wholesome youth and beauty making fuel for disappointment and
+bitterness as mine had done. There had been no one to help me attain
+the desire--the innocent, just, and normal desire of my girlhood's
+heart,--no one to lend a hand, till my heart had broken with slavery
+and disappointment, and at less than thirty-five all that remained for
+me was a little barren waiting for its feeble fluctuating pumping to
+cease.
+
+The girl presently fell asleep, so I covered her, kimono and all, and
+extinguishing the light, lay down beside what had once been a tiny
+baby, whose feeble life opening with the day had been nurtured on the
+milk of old Ladybird, the spotted cow with a dew-lap and a crumpled
+horn. She was now, I trusted, enjoying the reward of her earthly
+labours in that best of heavens we love to picture for the dear
+animals that have served us well, and but for whose presence the world
+would be dreary indeed, while the sleep of her beautiful
+foster-daughter had advanced to hold dreams of jewelled gowns,
+thrilling solos, travel, and splendid young husbands who could do no
+wrong, but she knew no room for thought of "Dora," who on the morrow
+was to row her on the Noonoon. He might as well have relinquished the
+chase, for his chances here had grown as faint as those of pretty Dora
+Cowper--whose leg he classically stated he had pulled--had grown with
+him.
+
+Ah, well, there is a law of retribution in all things, direct or
+indirect, visible or invisible.
+
+I lay awake a long time contemplating the best way of approaching
+Grandma Clay in regard to Dawn's singing lessons. One by one the
+passenger trains streamed into Noonoon, halted a panting five minutes
+at the station, then rumbled over the strange old iron-walled bridge,
+slowed down again to the little siding of Kangaroo on the other side,
+from whence up, up, the mountain-sides above the fertile valley,
+leaving the peaceful agriculturists soundly asleep after their toil.
+The heavy "goods" lumbered by unceasingly, the throbbing of their
+great engines, their signalling, shunting, and tooting proving a
+perennial delight to me, comforting me with the knowledge that I still
+could feel a pulsation from the great population centres where my
+fellows congregate.
+
+It had lulled me to doziness, when I was aroused by the electric alarm
+bell, the purpose of which was to warn folk when a train neared the
+bridge. A very necessary device, as there was but one bridge for all
+traffic, it being cut into two departments by three high iron walls
+that shut out an exquisite view of the river, and confined and
+intensified the rumble of trains in a manner well calculated to
+inspire the least imaginative of horses with the fear that the powers
+of evil had broken loose about them. The alarm-bell was humanly
+contrary in the discharge of its duty, and rang long and loudly when
+there was no train, and was not to be heard at all when they were
+rushing by in numbers. On this occasion, there being no train to drown
+its blatant voice, it so disturbed me that I was keenly alive to a
+dialogue that was proceeding in Miss Flipp's room.
+
+"You must go away, I tell you," said Mr Pornsch. "A nice thing it
+would be if a man in _my_ position were implicated."
+
+"I didn't think a man of _your_ class would be so cruel," sobbed the
+girl.
+
+In rejoinder the man admitted one of the truths by which our
+civilisation is besmirched.
+
+"There's only one class of men in dealing with women like you."
+
+Then fell a silence, during which Dawn turned in her sleep, and I
+placed her head more comfortably lest she should awake and hear what
+was proceeding.
+
+Not that it would in any way have sullied her, for her virtue, by
+sound heredity and hardy training, was no hothouse plant, liable to
+shrivel and die if not kept in a certain temperature, but was a sturdy
+tree, like the tall white-trunked young gums of her native forests, on
+which the winds of knowledge could blow and the rains of experience
+fall without in any way mutilating or impairing its reliability and
+beauty. It was for the sake of our poor sister wayfarer who was on a
+terrible thoroughfare, amid robbers and murderers, but who did not
+want her plight to be known, that I did not wish Dawn to awake.
+
+
+
+
+FOURTEEN.
+
+THE PASSING OF THE TRAINS.
+
+
+Next morning, when Andrew and I had finished the separator, grandma
+came over to inspect the work. She sniffed round the dishes and cans,
+which barely passed muster, and then descended upon the table by
+running her slender old forefinger along the eaves, with the result
+that it came up soiled with the greasy slush that careless wiping had
+left there.
+
+"Look at that, you dirty good-for-nothink young shaver; if the
+inspector came round we'd most likely lose our licence for it, an'
+it's no fault of mine. If a great lump your age can't be depended on
+for nothink, I don't know what the world is coming to. I have to be
+responsible for everythink that goes on your back and into your
+stummick, and yet you can't do a single thing. You think I'm
+everlastin' joring, but I have to be. Some day, if ever you have a
+house of your own, you'll know how hard it is."
+
+"I'm goin' to take jolly fine care I never have no house of me own.
+The game ain't worth the candle," responded Andrew; "I reckon them as
+comes and lives in the place, like some of them summer-boarders, and
+orders us about as if they was Lord Muck an' we wasn't anybody, has
+the best of it."
+
+"That ain't the point. I'm ashamed of that table. W'en I was young no
+one ever had to speak to me about things once, before I knew. Once I
+left drips round the end of my table, and me mother come along and
+'Martha,' says she--"
+
+"It's a wonder the wonderful Jim Clay didn't say it," muttered the
+irreverent representative of the degenerate rising generation _sotto
+voce_.
+
+"'If that's the way you wash a table,' says she, 'no blind man would
+choose you for his wife,' for that was the way they told if their
+sweetheart was a good housekeeper, by feelin' along the table w'en
+they was done washin' up."
+
+"An' what did you say?" interestedly inquired Andrew.
+
+"I didn't say nothink. In them days young people didn't be gabbing
+back to their elders w'en they was spoke to, but held their mag an'
+done their work proper," she crushingly replied.
+
+"But I was thinkin'," said Andrew quite unabashed, "that you was a
+terrible fool to be took in with that yarn. For who'd want to be
+married by a blind man, an' I reckon that blind men oughtn't be let to
+marry at all, and I think anyhow he ought to have been glad to get any
+woman, without sneakin' around an' putting on airs about being
+particular," he earnestly contended.
+
+"But that ain't the point, anyhow," said she.
+
+"Well, what did you tell it to me for, grandma?"
+
+"Hold your tongue," said the old lady irately; "sometimes you might
+argue with me, but there's reason in everythink, an' if you don't
+have that table scrubbed and cleaned proper by the next time I come
+round you'll hear about it."
+
+With this she walked farther on towards the pig-sty and cow-bails, and
+considering this a good opportunity for private conversation I went
+with her, remarking in a casual manner--
+
+"Your granddaughter has a very good voice."
+
+"Yes; a good deal better than _some people_ that think they can sing
+like Patti, and set theirselves up about it."
+
+"Yes; but she badly needs training."
+
+"She sings twice as well as some that has been trained and fussed
+with."
+
+"Probably; but she requires training to preserve the voice. She
+produces it unnaturally, and in a few years the voice will be cracked
+and spoilt."
+
+"All the better, an' then she'll give up wanting to go on the stage
+with it."
+
+"Is there anything frightful in that?" I said gently. "A great many
+mothers would give all they possessed to get their daughters on the
+stage. It is an exploded idea to think the stage a bad place."
+
+"A lot is always tellin' me that, an' I believed them till I went to
+see for meself, and the facts was too much of a eye-opener for me.
+I'll keep to me own opinions for the future. It will be three years
+ago this month, Dawn prevailed upon me to go to a play there was a lot
+of blow about, an' I was never so ashamed in me life. I didn't expect
+much considerin' the way I was rared regardin' theayters, but it beat
+all I ever see."
+
+"What was it?"
+
+"I don't know the name, but it was a character of a play. There was
+women in it must have been forty by the figure of them, and they had
+all their bosoms bare, and showed their knees in little short skirts.
+They stood in rows and grinned--the hussies! They ought to have set
+down an' hid theirselves for shame! I thought we must have made a
+mistake and got into a fast show, but we read in the paper after that
+among the audience was all the big bugs, an' they seemed to be
+enjoyin' theirselves an' laughing as if it was a intellectual,
+respectable entertainment. I wanted to get up an' leave, but Dawn
+coaxed me an' I give in, an' thought the next might be better, but it
+was worse. I give you my word for it, there was hussies there on that
+stage, before respectable people's eyes, trying all they knew to make
+men be bad. They was fast pure and simple, just the same as some Jim
+Clay told me about once when he went to Sydney on his own. The way he
+described their carryin's on was just like them actresses on the
+stage, an' me a respectable married woman who's rared a family, havin'
+paid to look at them! I was ashamed to hold me head up after it for a
+long time. 'It's only actin', grandma,' says Dawn, but to think that
+people would act things like that; no good modest woman would ever do
+it, an' the Bible strictly warns us to abstain from the appearance of
+evil. An' even that wasn't all; they come out an' kissed one
+another--married women supposed to be kissing other men. What sort of
+a example was that to be setting other men an' women? It was the
+lowerin'est thing I ever see. I told Dawn she was not to breathe where
+we had been, an' from that day to this I never would have a actor or a
+actress in my house. I'd just as soon have a _real_ loud woman as one
+who gets out on a stage where every one is lookin' at her and
+pretends to be one. She'd have no shame to stand between her and the
+bad. Oh no! there must be reason in everythink. I was prepared for a
+terrible lot of fools and rot, but that I should be so lowered was a
+eye-opener."
+
+"I feel exactly the same in regard to the stage, Mrs Clay, but I like
+concerts, when the singers just come out and sing--do you not?"
+
+"That ain't so bad, I admit."
+
+"You would not object to Dawn singing on a platform, would you?"
+
+"No; doesn't she often sing on the platform in Noonoon? They're always
+after her for some concert or another. It's a bad plan to sing too
+much for them. They don't thank you for it. They'd only say we're
+tired of him or her, and the one who'd be sour an' wouldn't sing often
+would be considered great."
+
+"Well, let her have lessons, so she could sing with greater ease at
+these concerts."
+
+"She can sing well enough for that. It would be throwing away money
+for nothink."
+
+"But if trained she could sometimes command a fee."
+
+"I've got plenty to keep her without that," said the old lady,
+bridling, "and it might give her stronger notions for the stage."
+
+I was thankful that I had never published my calling.
+
+"I had me own ideas of them before--walkin' about, and everythink they
+do or say they're wonderin' what people is thinkin' of them, and if
+they're observin' what great bein's they are. An' I've seen 'em
+here--goin' in fer drink an' all bad practices, and w'en I remonstrate
+with 'em, 'It's me temperament,' says they, an' led me to believe by
+the airs of them that this temperament makes 'em superior to the likes
+of ordinary human bein's like me an' you; an' this temperament that
+makes 'em not fit to do honest common work, but is makin' 'em low
+crawlers, is the thing that at the same time makes 'em superior. I
+don't see meself how the two things can be reconciled. There must be
+reason in everythink."
+
+"If you want to turn your granddaughter from the stage, let her start
+vocal training. You'll see that before twelve months she'll have
+enough of it. It would keep her content for the present, and in the
+meantime she might marry," I contended.
+
+"If I could be sure she wouldn't come in contact with them actin' and
+writin' fools; if she was to marry one of them it would be all up with
+her. Do you know anythink about teachers?"
+
+"Yes; I would be only too pleased to see to that part of it. Your
+granddaughter is a great pleasure to me. She gives me some interest in
+life which, having no relations and being unfit for permanent
+occupation, I would otherwise lack."
+
+"Well, I'm sure Dawn would interest anybody, and I think you're a good
+companion for her. She seems to have took up with you, and you've
+evidently been a person that's seen somethink, an' can tell her this,
+that, an' the other, but as for that she don't want no tellin' to be
+better than most. _Some people!_--" Grandma always worked herself up
+to a pitch of congested choler when these unworthy individuals were
+mentioned.
+
+"I'll think about the singin' lessons if they ain't beyond reason.
+She's been terrible good lately, and deserves somethink. Here's Larry
+Witcom arrove, an' there's Carry gone out to him. I want to see him
+meself; he's been a little too strong with his prices lately, but he's
+the obliginest feller in many ways. I don't hear anythink about it not
+bein' Carry's week in the kitchen w'en Larry comes. She's always ready
+to give Dawn a hand then. But we was all young once; I can remember
+w'en I worked a point, whether it was me turn or not, to get near Jim
+Clay."
+
+"Dawn, I think the battle for the singing lessons is half won," I said
+to that individual when I met her privately a few minutes later.
+
+"Really, it can't be true!" said the girl with an intonation of
+delight, as she drew a tea-towel she had been washing through her
+shapely hands and wrung it dry.
+
+Uncle Jake then entered, and cut short further private discussion.
+
+"There, Dawn!" he said, tossing a pair of trousers on the
+kitchen-table, "the seat of them is out, an' I want to put 'em on to
+do a little blacksmithin'--they're dirty."
+
+"That's easy to be seen and known too, as some people's things are
+always dirty," said she. "When do you want them?"
+
+"At once."
+
+"At once! You'd come in the middle of cooking some pastry and want a
+woman to put patches on a dirty old pair of trousers, and then want to
+know why the dinner wasn't up to tick; and besides, it's Carry's week
+in the house."
+
+For Dawn's sake I would have offered to do the patching, but feared
+Uncle Jake might suspect me of matrimonial designs upon him, such
+being the conceit of old men.
+
+"I never go to Carry," he snapped, "an' it's a pity your mother
+wasn't alive instead of you, she could put a patch on in five minutes
+any time you asked her, but she never spent her time in roarin' and
+bellerin' round after a vote;" and so saying Uncle Jake disappeared,
+leaving his grandniece with her pretty pink cheeks deepened to
+scarlet, and a spark in her blue eyes.
+
+"The old dog! if he wasn't grandma's brother I'd hate him. It's always
+these crawling old things who can do nothing themselves, and have to
+be kept by a woman, who are always the worst at trying to make women's
+position lower, and talk about them as inferior. He's always after a
+woman to do this and to do that, and comparing her--I'd like to see
+the woman, mother or father--who could put a patch on those pants in
+five minutes."
+
+"There's one way it could be done in the time," I said, calling to
+mind a prank related by a gay little friend--"clap it on with
+cobbler's wax."
+
+Dawn's eyes danced, and the irritation receded from the corners of the
+pretty mouth as, procuring a piece of cloth and a lump of cobbler's
+wax, she did the deed in less than five minutes, and Uncle Jake
+contentedly received his trousers, while I departed to put in some
+more time with my friend Andrew, without telling her there might be a
+sequel to patching trousers with cobbler's wax.
+
+"Well, Andrew, how goes the scrubbing?"
+
+"Oh, great! Look at that!" said he, drawing back to exhibit a really
+clean table; and as it would not have conduced to our friendship had I
+pointed out that it had been arrived at at the expense of slushing the
+lime-washed wall and the stand of the separator, I wisely kept
+silent.
+
+"There! I reckon me grandma nor Jim Clay neither never done a table
+better," he said with enviable self-appreciation. "You know I reckon
+them old yarns about the people bein' so good w'en they was young is a
+little too thin to stand washin'--don't you? You've only got to take
+the things the wonderful Jim Clay and me grandma done w'en they was
+courtin',--you get her on a string to tell you,--an' if Dawn done the
+same with any of the blokes now, she'd jolly soon hear about it; an'
+as for old Jake there, I reckon I'd be able to put him through meself
+at his own age--don't you? Anyhow, I'm full of farmin'. It's only
+fools an' horses sweat themselves, all the others go in for
+auctioneering, or parliament, or something, and have a fine screw
+comin' in for nothing."
+
+"But think of those water-melons," I said; for as a subject of
+conversation he most frequently and most lovingly referred to these.
+
+"But I could buy a waggon-load of 'em for one day's pay, an' not have
+any tuggin' and scratchin' with 'em. Melons ain't too stinkin', but
+lor', tomatoes is a stunner! They rotted till you couldn't stand the
+smell of them, and it would give a billy-goat the pip to hear them
+mentioned. There was no sale, and the blow-flies took to 'em. One man
+down here had thirty acres. I'm goin' to be somethink, so I can make a
+bit of money. No one thinks anythink of you if you ain't got plenty
+money. You know how you feel if a person has plenty money, you think
+twice as much of him as if he hasn't any. There's nothink to be made
+at farmin', delvin' and scrapin' your eyeballs out for no return,"
+said this youngster, who did barely enough to keep him in exercise,
+who had been fed to repletion, and comfortably clothed and bedded all
+his sixteen years.
+
+Luncheon or dinner was enlivened by an altercation between Dawn and
+her uncle.
+
+The blacksmithing to which he had referred was the act of sitting down
+beside the forge, where he had grown so warm that the sequel to
+mending trousers with cobbler's wax had eventuated. The melted wax had
+attached the garment to the old man's person, and he had sat--his
+sitting capacity was incalculable--until it had cooled again, and on
+rising suffered an amount of discomfort it would be graceful to leave
+to the imagination. Uncle Jake however was not so considerate, and
+aired his grievance in a manner too brutally real for imagination.
+
+To do her justice Dawn did not think of the joke going thus far, so I
+attempted to take the blame, but she would not have this.
+
+"I want him to think I knew how it would turn out. I'd do it to him
+every day if I could."
+
+Grandma fortunately took her part, and the mirth of Andrew and Carry
+was very genuine.
+
+"I reckon I was as smart as my mother that time," giggled Dawn, as she
+carried in the dinner.
+
+"It would have been a funny joke if you played it on some
+good-humoured young feller," said grandma, "but Jake there is entitled
+to some kind of consideration, because he is old and crotchety."
+
+"I'd play it on 'Dora' Eweword," said Dawn, "only that he might stick
+here so that he'd never move at all if I didn't take care."
+
+The first moment we had in private she took opportunity of saying--
+
+"I think I'll go over to Grosvenor's with you this evening, but not
+to tea. I'll go over to bring you home, if you'll help me make some
+excuse to get out of going rowing with 'Dora.'"
+
+"Why not come to tea? that would be sufficient excuse."
+
+"Oh, but they try to ape the swells, and grandma doesn't like them;
+but I'll be sure to go for you after it, and that will save Mr Ernest
+coming round with you."
+
+I thanked her, though her escort was not at all necessary, seeing that
+instead of saving Ernest it would only make his presence surer. There
+being nothing else to do during the afternoon, I awaited the time of
+setting out for the Grosvenor's, who tried to ape the swells--the
+swells of Noonoon! These being, as far as I could gather, the doctors,
+the lawyer, a couple of bank managers on a salary somewhere about L250
+per annum, the Stip. Magistrate, and one or two others--surely an
+ordinarily harmless and averagely respectable section of the
+community, in aping whom one would be in little danger of being called
+upon to act up to an etiquette as intricate and tyrannous as that in
+use at court.
+
+In the old days the town had been the terminus of the train, and it
+had squatted at the foot of the mountains, while strings of teams
+carried the goods up the great western road out to Bathurst and
+beyond, to Mudgee, Dubbo, and Orange. Nearly all the old
+houses--grandma's and Grosvenor's among them--had been hotels in those
+days, when the miles had been ticked off by the square stones with the
+Roman lettering, erected by our poor old convict pioneers, who blazed
+many a first track. Every house had found sufficient trade in giving
+D.T.'s to the burly, roystering teamsters who lived on the roads,
+dealt in no small quantities, and who did not see their wives and
+sweethearts every week in the year.
+
+As the afternoon advanced, true to appointment, "Dora" Eweword arrived
+to take Dawn for a row. His chin was red from the razor, and he looked
+well in a navy-blue guernsey brightened by a scarlet tie knotted at
+the open collar, displaying a columnar throat which, if strength were
+measured by size, announced him capable of supporting not only a Dawn,
+but a Sunset. He sat on an Austrian chair, for which he was some sizes
+too large and too substantial, and reddened as he laughed and talked
+with Carry, till I appeared and spent some time in talking and
+admiring his appearance until Dawn came upon the scene.
+
+"Well, Dawn," he said, "I'm waiting for this row; are you ready?"
+
+Dawn glanced at me.
+
+"Dawn has promised to chaperon me to-night," I said. Dawn decamped.
+
+"Miss Grosvenor has invited Mr Ernest and me to tea, and to go without
+a representative of Mrs Grundy, I believe, is not correct in the
+social life of Noonoon."
+
+Eweword laughed; but his face fell, and his reply showed him less
+obtuse than he appeared on the surface, seeing he was the first and
+only person to see through my matchmaking tactics.
+
+"Touting for the red-haired bagman," he said, as Ernest could be seen
+swinging up the path.
+
+"Supposing I am, what then?" I asked, regarding him with a level
+glance, and feeling more respect for his intelligence than I had
+heretofore experienced.
+
+"Oh, well, I suppose all is fair in some things."
+
+He would not say _love_, as that would have admitted too much, and a
+lover admitting his passion and a drunkard confessing his disease are
+exceptions that prove the rule.
+
+His remark was uttered with a broad good nature that would lead him to
+do and leave undone great things. In a desire to please the present
+girl he was not above saying he had been "pulling the leg" of the one
+absent, but he would also be capable of standing aside when he felt
+deeply--as deeply as he could feel--to allow a better man sea-room;
+and he was further capable of sufficient humility to think there could
+be a better man than himself, or so I adjudged him, and being the only
+narrator of this, the only history in which he is likely to receive
+mention, this delineation of his character will have to remain
+unchallenged.
+
+Ernest had a geranium in his button-hole, and looked more immaculately
+spruce than ever, and even his red hair could not obliterate the fact
+of his being a goodly sight, and as such grandma recognised him.
+
+"That's a fine sturdy chap," she afterwards observed. "It's a pity he
+ain't got somethink to do to keep him out of mischief. Is he a
+unemployed? He don't look like one of these Johnnies that has nothink
+to do but hang around a street corner and smoke a cigarette."
+
+The two young men measured glances every whit as critically as girls
+do under similar conditions, and then equally as casually made
+reference to the weather. Ernest was somewhat overshadowed by Eweword,
+as the latter was superior in size and cast of features, being fully
+six feet, while Ernest was not more than five feet nine inches; but as
+a girl very rarely, if she has a choice, cares most for the handsomest
+of her admirers, I was not in the least cast down about this.
+
+When it was time for me to depart, Ernest rose too, but not Dawn.
+Ernest's face went down, Eweword's brightened.
+
+"Miss Dawn is not coming over now, but later on," I said.
+
+The men's glances reversed once more. As the former and I
+departed--Ernest carrying a wrap for me--I heard Eweword say--
+
+"Well, come on, Dawn, you're not going to Grosvenor's after all. It
+seems that old party was only pulling my leg."
+
+Ernest good-naturedly struggled to talk with me, but I spared him the
+ordeal, and, arrived at Grosvenor's, interestedly studied them to
+discover what manner of procedure "trying to ape the swells" might
+be--the swells of Noonoon--the doctor who thought I might "peg out"
+any minute, and the bank managers and the parsons.
+
+The only difference to be observed between the tea-table at Clay's and
+Grosvenor's was that at the latter the equivalents of Uncle Jake and
+Andrew did not appear in a coatless condition, were treated to the
+luxury of table-napkins, and Mrs Grosvenor, who served, attended to
+people according to their rank instead of their position at the table,
+and entrusted them with the sugar-basin and milk-jug themselves.
+Farther than this there was no distinction, and this was not an
+alarming one. Certainly Miss Grosvenor, who had not enjoyed half
+Dawn's educational advantages, did not as glaringly flout syntax, and
+slang was not so conspicuous in her vocabulary. She and Ernest got on
+so well that none but my practised eyes could detect that as the
+evening advanced his brown ones occasionally wandered towards the
+entrance door, which showed that much as Miss Grosvenor had got him
+out of his shell, she had not obliterated Dawn.
+
+That young lady arrived at about a quarter to ten, and we started
+homewards, determining to go a long way round, first by way of the
+Grosvenor's vehicle road to town, by this gaining the public highway,
+along which we would walk to the entrance to grandma's demesne. This
+was preferable to a short-cut and rolling under the barbed-wire
+fencing in the long grass sopping with dew, which at midnight or
+thereabouts would stiffen with the soft frosts of this region that
+would flee before the sun next morning.
+
+Dawn's cheeks were scarlet from rowing on the river with "Dora"
+Eweword, and she spoke of her jaunt as soon as we got outside,
+apparently pregnant with the knowledge innate in the dullest of her
+sex, that the most efficacious way of giving impetus to the love of
+one lover is to have another.
+
+This, however, is another art which, like good cooking, must be "done
+to the turn," and in this instance there was danger of it being done
+too soon, as Ernest's amour had not taken firm root yet; and a man,
+unless he be either of gigantic pluck or no honour at all, will not
+hurry to interfere with the secured property of another man.
+
+They chatted in a desultory fashion while I manoeuvred to relieve
+them of my presence. The night was lit by a million stars, paling
+towards the east, where behind the hills a waning moon was putting in
+an appearance. The electric lights of the town scintillated like
+artificial stars, and away down the long valley could be seen here and
+there the twinkle of a farmhouse light, showing where some held mild
+wassail or a convivial evening; for there were not many of the
+agriculturalists, tired from their heavy toil, who were otherwise out
+of bed at this ungodly hour of the night.
+
+The crisp winter air agreed with me, and I felt unusually well.
+
+"Let me walk behind, this night is too glorious to waste in talking
+politics, so you young people get out of my hearing and thresh out
+your candidate's merit and demerit and leave me to think," I said, for
+politics were in the air and they were touching upon them. They obeyed
+me, and soon were lost to view in the dark of the osage and quince
+hedges grown as breakwinds on the west of Grosvenor's orangery. Soon I
+could not hear their footfalls, for I stood still to watch the trains
+pass by. 'Twas the hour of the last division of the Western passenger
+mail, bearing its daily cargo of news and people to the great plains
+beyond the hills that loomed faintly in the light of the half moon.
+Haughtily its huge first-class engine roared along, and its carriage
+windows, like so many warm red mouths, permitted a glimpse of the folk
+inside comfortably ensconced for the night. It slowed across the long
+viaduct approaching the bridge, and crossed the bridge itself with a
+roar like thunder, then it swerved round a curve to Kangaroo till the
+window-lights gave place to its two red eyes at the rear. As it
+climbed the first spur of the great range, and all that could be seen
+was a belch of flame from the engine-door as it coaled, something of
+the old longing awoke within me for things that must always be far
+away. The throbbing engines spoke to my heart, and forgetting its
+brokenness, it stirred again to their measure--the rushing, eager
+measure of ambition, strife, struggle! I was young again, with youth's
+hot desire to love and be loved, and as its old bitter-sweet
+clamourings rushed over me I rebelled that my hair was grey and my
+propeller disabled. The young folks ahead had put me out of their life
+as young folks do, and, measuring the hearts of their seniors by the
+white in their hair and the lines around their eyes, would have been
+incredulous that I still had capacity for their own phase. Only the
+royalty of youth is tendered love in full measure; those who fail to
+attain or grasp it then find this door, from which comes enticing
+perfume and sound of luring music, shut against them for all time, and
+no matter how appealingly they may lean against its portals, it will
+rarely open again, for they have been laid by to be sold as remnants
+like the draper's goods which have failed to attract a buyer during
+the brief season they were displayed. I stood under the whispering
+osage and listened to the now distant train puffing its way over the
+wild mountains, also to be crossed by the great road first cut by
+those whose now long dead limbs had carried chains--members of a
+bygone brigade as I was one of a passing company. But probably they
+each had had their chance of love, and the old bitterness upsprung
+that mine had not fallen athwart my pathway. Fierce struggle had
+always shut me away from similar opportunity to that enjoyed by the
+young people ahead.
+
+"Put back your cruel wheel, O Time!" I cried in my heart, "and give me
+but one hour's youth again--sweet, ecstatic youth with the bounding
+pulse, led by the purple mirage of Hope, whose sirens whisper that the
+world's sweets are sweet and its crowns worth winning. Let me for a
+space be free from this dastard age creeping through the veins,
+dulling the perspective of life and leadening the brain, whose carping
+companions draw attention to the bitters in the cups of Youth's
+Delights, and mutter that the golden crowns we struggle for shall
+tarnish as soon as they are placed on our tired brows!" Suddenly my
+bitter reverie was broken by the knight and the lady calling in
+startled tones. I replied, and presently they were upon me, Dawn very
+much out of breath.
+
+"Oh, goodness, we thought you were ill again. You have given us such a
+shock. You should not have been left behind. I was a terrible brute
+that I didn't harness the pony and drive over for you;" and Ernest
+came in a slow second with--
+
+"You should have taken my arm," and he wrapped my cloak about me with
+the high quality of gentleness peculiar to the best type of strong
+man.
+
+Despite my assurance that I never had felt better, they insisted upon
+supporting me on either side; so slipping a hand through each of the
+young elbows conveniently bent, I playfully put the large hand on the
+right of me over the dimpling one on the left.
+
+"There!" I said, taking advantage of the liberties extended a probable
+invalid, "I've made a breastwork of the hands of the two dearest young
+friends I have, so now I cannot fall;" and seeing I put it at that, at
+that they were content to let it remain, and the big hand very
+carefully retained the little one, so passive and warm, in its shy
+grasp. At the gate I dismissed Ernest, and Dawn condescended to remark
+that he wasn't _quite_ such a fool as usual, which interpreted meant
+that he had not been so guardedly stand-off to her as he sometimes
+was.
+
+The trains once more entertained my waking hours that night. Under
+Andrew's tutorage I had learned to distinguish the rumble of a "goods"
+from the rush of a "passenger," a two-engine haul from a single, and
+even the heavy voice of the big old "shunter" that lived about the
+Noonoon station had grown familiar; but the haughtiest of all was a
+travelling engine attended only by its tender, and speeding by with
+lightsome action, like a governor thankfully free from officialdom
+and hampered only by a valet.
+
+Musing on what a little time had elapsed since the work of the
+passenger trains had been done by the coaches with their grey and bay
+teams of five, swinging through the town at a gallop, and with their
+occupants armed to the teeth against bushrangers, I dozed and dreamt.
+I dreamt that I was in one of the sleeping-cars which had superseded
+Cobb & Co.'s accommodation for travellers, and that from it I could
+see in a bird's-eye view not only the magnificent belt of mountains,
+the bluest in the world, but whirling down their westward slopes with
+a velocity outstripping the scented winds from sandal ridges and myall
+plains, I slid across that great western stretch of country where a
+portion of the railway line runs for a hundred and thirty-six miles
+without rise or fall or curve in the longest straight ribbon of steel
+that is known. But ere I reached its end I wakened with a start
+through something falling in Miss Flipp's room.
+
+Surely I had not slept for more than half an hour, because the light
+which had shone in the adjoining room as we returned from Grosvenor's
+was still burning. Presently Miss Flipp put it out, and closing her
+door after her, stealthily made her way from the house. She trod
+cautiously and noiselessly, but her gown caught on the lower sprouts
+of the ragged old rose-bushes beside the walks, and though she took a
+long time to open the little gate opening towards the wharves and the
+narrow pathway running along the river-bank to the bridge, it creaked
+a little on its rusty hinges, so that I heard it and fell to awaiting
+the girl's return.
+
+I waited and waited, and beguiled the time by counting the trains that
+passed with the quarter hours. There were so many that I soon lost
+count. This line carried goods to the great wheat and wool-growing
+west and brought its produce to the city. Many of the noisy trains
+were laden with "fifteen hundred" and "two thousand" lots of "fats,"
+and the yearly statistics dealing with the sales at Homebush
+chronicled their total numbers as millions. From beyond Forbes,
+Bourke, and Brewarrina they came in trucks to cross the bridge
+spanning the noble stream at the mountain's base, but they never went
+back again to the great plains where they had basked in plenty or
+staggered through droughts as the fickle seasons rose and fell. The
+voracious, insatiable maw of the city was a grave for them all, and
+the commercial greed which falls so heavily on the poor dumb beasts in
+which it traffics, caged them so tightly for their last journey that
+by the time they reached Noonoon they were bruised and cramped and not
+a few trodden under foot. The empty trucks going west again made the
+longest trains, as they could be laden with nothing but a little
+wire-netting for settlers who were fighting the rabbits, and were
+easily distinguishable from other "goods," as when they clumsily and
+jerkily halted the clanking of their couplings and the bumping of
+their buffers could be heard for a mile or more down the valley. The
+splendid atmosphere intensified all sounds and carried them an unusual
+distance, and many a time at first I was wont to be aroused from sleep
+in the night with a notion that the thundering trains were going to
+run right over the house.
+
+On the night in question I had not heard Miss Flipp return from her
+midnight tryst, though all the luggage trains had passed and it neared
+the time of the first division of the up or citywards mail from the
+west, which was the earliest train to arrive in town from the country
+daily. It passed Noonoon in the vicinity of 4 A.M.--a radiant hour in
+the summer dawn, but then in winter, the time when bed is most
+alluring, when the passengers' breath congeals on the window-panes,
+they complain that the foot-warmers have got cold, and give yet one
+more twist to their comforters and another tug at their 'possum or
+wallaby rugs. This train passed with its shaking thunder, drew into
+Noonoon for refreshments, then on and on with noisy energy, but still
+Miss Flipp did not return.
+
+I concluded that she must have decided to leave us in this fashion, or
+that I had missed her entry during the rumble of a passing train, or
+mayhap I had snoozed for a moment, or perhaps an hour, as the
+unsympathetic heavy sleepers aver the insomnists must do; and ceasing
+to be on the alert any longer, I really slept.
+
+
+
+
+FIFTEEN.
+
+ALAS! MISS FLIPP!
+
+
+I hastened to appear at the half-past seven breakfast, as no excuse
+for non-appearance was taken, and the only concession made to Miss
+Flipp, who had not been present at it for some time, was that she
+could make herself a cup of cocoa when she chose to rise. For this
+meal grandma ladled out the porridge and flavoured it with milk and
+sugar in the usual way.
+
+"I say, Dawn, which of them blokes, Ernest or Dora, is the best
+boat-puller?" inquired Andrew as he received his portion. "You were
+mighty stingy with the sugar, grandma!"
+
+"Dora isn't in it," responded Carry. "Mr Ernest could get ahead of him
+every time."
+
+"So he ought!" said Dawn. "His ears are the size of a pair of sails,
+and would pull him along."
+
+Thus was published another defect in my knight, till I feared that it
+must be only my partial gaze that discerned a knight at all.
+
+"Dear me," interposed grandma, "a man can't look or speak or walk but he's
+this, that, and the other. Things weren't so in my day. Of course there
+were some things that were took exception to, but there must be reason in
+everythink, an' I don't see what difference a man's ears being a little big
+makes. My father's ears--your great-grandfather's--was none too small, an'
+he was always a good kind man."
+
+"I don't care if my own ears were big, it wouldn't make me like them,"
+said the irrepressible Dawn; and grandma had just finished what she
+termed "dosing" the last plate of porridge, when we were interrupted
+by the appearance of policeman Danby at the French Lights. There was
+nothing strange in this appearance of the embodiment of the law, even
+at that early hour of the morning; for the huge young man with the
+rollicking face and curly hair, though a good officer in attending to
+his work, was a better in admiring a girl, which, after all, taking
+matters at the base, is the chief and most vital business of life, as,
+were it neglected, there would be no police or populace.
+
+Well, as I said, policeman Danby knew a pretty girl when he saw one,
+and there being two at Clay's, that household, in the way of the law,
+was very well looked after indeed; and for the purpose of escaping the
+annual registration fee, Andrew's little dog, "Whiskey," had remained
+a puppy as long as some young ladies tarry under thirty.
+
+Carry on rising to admit the caller had the usual tussle with the
+door, while grandma reiterated uncomplimentary remarks about the
+"blessed feller" who should some time since have effected repairs, and
+Danby upon entering wore an extremely grave face, looked neither at
+Dawn nor Carry, but addressed himself straight to Mrs Martha Clay.
+
+"I have to trouble you about a very unpleasant matter," he said, and
+cruelly all eyes went to poor Andrew, as it was but recently he had
+to be chased home for breaking the law.
+
+"Yes," said grandma, rising actively, and though a flurried colour
+came to the old withered cheek, the spark of battle flashed in the
+stern blue-grey eye.
+
+"Could I see you privately?" said Danby.
+
+"Certainly," said Mrs Clay: "but I'm not fond of secrecy; things is
+better open, and this is the first time in my life I've had to be seen
+secret by the police. Come this way."
+
+We said nothing, but dropped our feeding tools and waited in suspense,
+till in less than a minute grandma thrust her head in the dining-room
+door.
+
+"For mercy's sake, Dawn, look in Miss Flipp's room and see is she
+there."
+
+Dawn rose in a hurry and boxed Andrew's ears as she passed, because he
+too rose and tumbled over his chair in her way.
+
+"Some people ought to tie themselves up to be out of the way," she
+ejaculated.
+
+"Miss Flipp is not in her room," she presently called, "and her bed is
+smooth and made up."
+
+"God save us, then! Mr Danby says she's drownded in the river,"
+exclaimed her grandma. "What's to be done?"
+
+"We'll spare you all the trouble possible, Mrs Clay," said the man,
+with the respect always tendered the old dame; "but I'm afraid it's a
+suicide. Some men going to work on the new viaduct just noticed her
+clothes sticking up as they crossed the bridge at daylight and
+reported it, and I was sent down. We've taken the body to Jimmeny's
+pub., and sent for the coroner, at all events."
+
+Dawn and Andrew howled together in a frightened manner, while the
+sensible Carry, who never lost her head, admonished them--
+
+"Don't be jackdaws. That won't mend matters. Perhaps it isn't half as
+bad as some make out. Things never are when you get the right hang of
+them."
+
+"Things are bad enough anyhow, but the way to mend 'em ain't to be
+snivelling," rapped out grandma, giving Dawn and Andrew a shaking that
+braced them up.
+
+Things were indeed bad enough, and nothing could mend them. They had
+gone beyond repair. It transpired that my senses had been correct, and
+poor Miss Flipp had _not_ returned that moonlit night as I lay
+listening to the passing trains. She had ended her ruined life by
+weighting her feet and dropping into the pretty stretch of water under
+the bridge, where the locomotives rushed by like thunder, and from
+where could be seen the twinkling electric lights of one of the oldest
+towns in Australia.
+
+The inquest, at which we all had to appear, elicited information that
+fairly stood poor grandma's hair on end. It was a great blow to find
+that she had been harbouring a woman who was not as Caesar's wife, and
+that it was fear of the penalty of her divergence from what is
+accepted as virtue, had driven her to take her life ere she had
+transmitted the tribulation of being to a nameless child.
+
+Nothing was cleared up regarding her antecedents. The person by whom
+she was supposed to be recommended to Mrs Clay knew of no such
+individual, and no one came to claim her.
+
+Her uncle, it was discovered, had a day or two previously sailed for
+America on urgent business, and after the girl's death an affectionate
+letter for her arrived from him. She had left nothing to fix the blame
+where it belonged, but with a misdirected loyalty so common in her
+sex had paid all the debt her frail self.
+
+The post on the day of her death brought me a pathetic little note, in
+which she stated that she wished to bear the whole blame; a woman
+always had to in any case, and as she could not face it she had
+decided upon death. She had written this to me because she felt I had
+had an inkling of how matters had been with her, and she thanked me
+that I had kept silent, in conjunction with the observation that it
+was not usual for such as she to meet with forbearance from those who
+had had sense to preserve their respectability. Ah, the regret that
+consumed me that I had not risked the unpopularity of interference and
+sought her confidence. I might have been able to have saved her from
+such an end!
+
+I kept my knowledge to myself. It would scarcely have hurt Mr Pornsch.
+Under the British Constitution property is far more sacred than women.
+But having a fatality in belief that there is a law of retribution in
+all things, I hoped to be able to sheet this crime home to its
+perpetrator in a way that should put him to confusion when he least
+expected it.
+
+There was ample money for burial among the girl's belongings, which
+were taken in charge by the police, and there let the cruelly common
+incident rest for the present.
+
+The affair so upset Dawn that she refused to occupy her usual room any
+longer, and at her suggestion she and I determined to occupy a big
+upstairs room, up till that time filled with rubbish. This being
+agreed upon we forsook the apartments opening into the river garden,
+and betook ourselves to an altitude from which we had even a better
+view of the valley, river, and trains.
+
+Dawn so perceptibly went "off colour" that I persuaded her
+grandmother to let the singing lessons begin by way of diverting her
+mind.
+
+The old lady would not contemplate paying more than two guineas per
+quarter, so I saw a six guinea teacher, arranged with him to take the
+pupil at four, two of which I privately paid myself, and Dawn at last
+set out for the city for her first lesson in the arduous and
+unattractive boo-ing and ah-ing that lie at the foundation of a
+singer's art.
+
+
+
+
+SIXTEEN.
+
+ADVANCE, AUSTRALIA!
+
+
+In the career of a prodigy there invariably comes a time when it is
+compelled to relinquish being very clever for a child, and has to
+enter the business of life in competition with adults.
+
+This crisis had arrived in the career of the prodigy Australia.
+
+It is at the time of electing new or re-electing old representatives
+of the people to the legislature that the state of a country's affairs
+is more prominently before the public than at any other, and preceding
+the State election in which Grandma Clay was to exercise the rights of
+full citizenship for the first time, it was a lugubrious statement.
+
+That the country had gone to the dogs was averred by each candidate
+for the three hundred a-year given ordinary State members, and each
+described himself as the instrument by which it could be restored to a
+state of paradisaical prosperity.
+
+This is an old bogey, unfailingly revived at elections. The
+Ministerialists invariably roar how they have improved the public
+finances, while the Opposition as blatantly tries to drown them by
+bellowing that the retiring government has damned the country, and
+that the Opposition has the only recipe of satisfactory
+reconstruction, but in spite of this threadbare election scare the
+Commonwealth remained the freest and one of the wealthiest
+abiding-places in the world.
+
+Just then its business affairs were undoubtedly badly managed, and
+mismanagement, if continued, inevitably leads to bankruptcy. Undeniably
+there was an unwholesome percentage of unemployed--inexcusable when there
+abounded vast areas of fertile territory quite unpeopled, mines as rich as
+any known to history all untouched; the sugar, grape, timber, and other
+industries crying aloud for further development, and countless resources on
+every hand requiring nothing but that these and men should meet on healthy
+and enterprising business terms. The population, instead of gaining in
+numbers, was foolishly leaving the country, like over-indulged, spoiled
+children, imagining themselves ill-treated, while others hesitated to come
+in because the Australian trumpet was not blown loudly enough nor in the
+right key.
+
+The administration, like a young housewife tossed into an overflowing
+storehouse, had spent lavishly, but the bank of a multi-millionaire
+will come to an end in time, and so with the play-days of Australia.
+
+The hour had arrived for her to be up and doing, to marshal her
+forces, advertise her wares, and take her place as a worker among the
+nations.
+
+There are always old bush lawyers and city know-alls beside whom
+Chamberlain and Roberts are but small tomahawks as empire-builders,
+and these now were predicting that to make a nation of her Australia
+needed war and many other disasters to harden her people from the
+amusement-loving, sunny-eyed folk they were; but this was an
+extremist's outlook. She was in greater need of a land law that would
+sensibly and practically put the right people on the soil, and entice
+population of desirable class--independent producers--so that the
+development of the industries would follow in natural sequence. In
+short, Australia was languishing for a few patriotic sons with strong,
+clear, business heads to apply the science of statecraft, as
+distinguished from the self-seeking artifices of the mere job
+politician at present sapping her vitals, and all the elements for
+success were within her gates.
+
+I had long had an eye open for the discernment of such an embryo
+statesman, and looked forward with interest to the study of the
+present crop of political candidates.
+
+As soon as Leslie Walker--Ernest Breslaw's step-brother--had been
+elected as the Opposition candidate for Noonoon, canvassing,
+"spouting," war-whooping, and all manner of "barracking" began with
+such intense enthusiasm that fortunately Miss Flipp's sad fate was
+speedily driven out of our thoughts.
+
+Dawn and Mrs Bray were on Walker's committee, and nearly every night
+there was an advocate of one party or the other gasconading in
+Citizens' Hall.
+
+To Noonoon residents it became what the theatre is to city patrons of
+the drama, and more, for this was invested with the dignity of a
+certain amount of reality. To women being in the fray many attributed
+the unusual interest distinguishing this campaign, but the real cause
+was that public affairs had come to such a deadlock that legislature,
+as the medium through which they might be moved, had become a vital
+question to the veriest numskull, and all were mustering to ascertain
+who put forth the most favourable policy.
+
+With politics and her newly started singing lessons, Dawn was too
+thoroughly engrossed for thought of any knight to pierce her armour of
+indifference, which was the outcome of full mental occupation. I
+invested in a nice little piano, that was carried upstairs to our big
+room, and had undertaken to superintend her practising, but she was a
+more enthusiastic politician than a vocal student, as I pointed out to
+her grandmother's satisfaction. These happenings had eventuated during
+the first fortnight of May, and in the third week of this month Leslie
+Walker imported a couple of experienced ranters to renew the attack
+and denounce the villainy of the present government in loud and
+blustering vote-catching war-whoops.
+
+In the town itself, nearly every third person was employed on the
+railway, and their only care in casting their vote was to secure a
+representative who would not in any way reduce the expenditure of the
+railways. Thus a parliamentary candidate in Noonoon had to trim his
+sails to catch this large vote or be defeated. It was the same with
+other factions: any man with a common-sense platform, impartially for
+the good of the State at large, might as well have sat down at home
+and have saved himself the labour of stumping an electorate and
+bellowing himself hoarse for all the chance he had of being returned.
+
+We turned out _en masse_ from Clay's to hear the second speech of
+young Walker, assisted by two M.P.'s belonging to his party. Grandma
+and I drove in the sulky, while the girls and Andrew walked ahead, the
+latter under strict orders to behave with reason, and not make "a fool
+of hisself with the larrakins."
+
+It was well we arrived early, as there was not sitting room for half
+the audience, though more than half the hall being reserved for the
+ladies, we got a front seat, and long before the time for the speakers
+to appear every corner was packed, and women as well as men were
+standing in rows fronting the stage. A great buzz of conversation at
+the front, and stampeding and cat-calling among the youths at the
+back, was terminated by the arrival of the three speakers of the
+evening, who were received amid deafening cock-a-doodling, cheering,
+stamping, and clapping. An old warrior of the class dressed _up_ to
+the position of M.P. sat to one side, and next him was the barrister
+type so prolific in parliament, who had himself dressed _down_ to the
+vulgar crowd, while third sat Leslie Walker.
+
+Surely not the first Leslie Walker who had appeared a week or two
+previously! His bright, restless eye, though too sensitive for that of
+an old campaigner, now took in the crowd with complete assurance, and
+there was no hint of hesitation discernible. Having once smelt powder
+he was ready for the fray.
+
+"By Jove! hasn't Les. bucked up!" whispered Ernest, who sat on one
+side of me, where he had landed after an ineffectual attempt to sit
+beside Dawn.
+
+"Yes; if he can only roar and blow and wave his arms sufficiently he
+may have a chance."
+
+"But he's still nervous," said the observant Andrew from the rear.
+"You watch him go for that flea in the leg of his pants!"
+
+Sitting in full view of a "chyacking" audience is a severe ordeal to
+an inexperienced campaigner with a sensitive temperament, and this
+action, indeed peculiarly like an attempt to detain an annoying insect
+in a fold of his lower garment, was one of those little mannerisms
+adopted to give an appearance of ease.
+
+Behind the speakers came, as chairman, one of the swell class almost
+extinct in this region, and he, too, had rather an effete attitude and
+physique, as he took up his position behind the spindley table
+weighted by the smeared tumblers and water-bottle. He rose with the
+intention of flattering the speakers and audience in the orthodox way,
+but the electors, among whom a spirit of overflowing hilarity was at
+large, took his duties out of his mouth.
+
+"Don't smoodge, old cockroach, let the other blokes blaze away, as we
+(the taxpayers) are paying dear for this spouting."
+
+The barrister man M.P. burst upon them first with the latest trumpet
+blare with which speeches were being opened. Having been primed as to
+the magnitude of the railway vote in Noonoon, first move was to throw
+a bone to it, and, metaphorically speaking, he got down on his knees
+to this section of the electors, and howled and squealed that all
+civil servants' wages would be left as they were.
+
+He took another canter to flatter the ladies regarding the remarkably
+intelligent vote they had cast in the Federal elections, and asserted
+his belief that they would do likewise in the present crisis, and
+introduce a nobler element into political life.
+
+Creatures, a few months previously ranked lower than an almost
+imbecile man, and with no more voice in the laws they lived under than
+had lunatics or horses--it was miraculous what a power they had
+suddenly grown! The man at the back saw the point--
+
+"Blow it all, don't smoodge so. It ain't long since you was all rared
+up on yer hind legs showin' how things would go to fury if wimmen had
+the vote."
+
+Having got past this prelude, he proceeded with a vigorous volley of
+abuse against the sitting government, and showed how Walker, the
+Opposition candidate, was the only man to vote for. He shook his
+fists, stamped and raved, and illustrated how much a voice could
+endure without cracking, the back people carefully waiting till he had
+to pull up to take a drink out of one of the glasses on the spindley
+table, when they got in with--
+
+"You're mad! Keep cool! You'll bust a blood-vessel! When are you going
+to give Tomato Jimmy a show to blow his horn?" This being a reference
+to the calling of the other speaker, who was a middleman in the
+vegetable and fruit-market. The first speaker, however, was not nearly
+exhausted yet--he had to thump his fists on the unfortunate spindley
+table, and work off several other oratorical poses and a deal of
+elocutionary voice-play, ere he was finished. I fairly rolled with
+enjoyment of the wonderful wit and humour of the crowd at the back,
+which, unless it be put down as the critical faculty, is an
+inexplicable phenomenon. Not one of the interrupters, if drafted on to
+the hustings, could have given a lucid or intelligent statement of his
+views, or indication that he was furnished with any, and yet not one
+slip on the part of a candidate, one inconsistent point, personal
+mannerism or peccadillo, but was remarked in an astonishingly humorous
+and satirical style.
+
+The barrister man having finished "spouting," the common-sense
+individual, who always sits half-way down the hall, and who, when he
+asks a question, has to face the double ordeal of the crowd and the
+candidate, said--
+
+"The speaker has shown us all the things the other fellows _can't do_,
+we'd like another speech now stating what _he can_ do." The chairman
+rose to say this was out of order, but his voice was lost in the din.
+
+"You sit down, old chap, we can manage this meetin' ourselves."
+
+"But out of respect to the ladies present!"
+
+"We'll look after the ladies too," was the good-humoured rejoinder.
+"Why, they're enjoyin' it as much as we are. They've got a vote now,
+you know, and are going to use it in an intelligent manner."
+
+"Did you know Queen Anne was dead?" said another.
+
+"The ladies won't be harmed. Any one that disrespects the ladies will
+be chucked out."
+
+The ladies had to laugh at this, and the meeting went right merrily,
+and more merrily in that half the "blowing" from the stage was drowned
+by the interjectory din from the rear of the building, where lads and
+men stood chock-a-block, the former, and the latter too, making right
+royal use of their licence to be rowdy; but such a good-natured crowd
+could not often be seen. There were no altercations, only laughter and
+the crude repartee of such a gathering.
+
+The first speaker having returned to his seat and sanity, the second
+took his place.
+
+"Hullo, Tomatoes! What's the price of onions and spuds?"
+
+"Now begin and tell the ladies how intelligent they are, so you'll get
+their vote."
+
+"Tomatoes" did butter the ladies, next yelled that the civil servants
+would not be retrenched, and then upheld the virulent attack on the
+government. Keeping in time with the utterances of "Tomato Jimmy," the
+boys at the back grew so boisterous that at one time it appeared
+inevitable that the meeting must break up in disorder. The chairman,
+the candidates, the ladies, the whole house rose, and one man towards
+the front made himself heard amid the babel to the effect that the
+ladies ought to walk out to show their resentment of the insults that
+had been offered their presence by this disorderly behaviour.
+
+"Ladies, don't go. _Dear_ ladies, don't go," called some wags. "We're
+only educatin' you in politics,--learning you how to be like your
+superiors--men."
+
+This evoked a round of laughter, and order was restored.
+
+"That's right, ladies, don't go; if you was to turn dawg on us now,
+we'd be so crestfallen we couldn't think about politics and save the
+country at all."
+
+Once more "Tomatoes" belched forth the infamy of the government, and
+louder and louder he yelled, till one marvelled at his endurance.
+Rougher and hotter grew his repartee till, by sheer abuse, he gained
+the ascendancy; but there was no sane statement of what he would
+propose as a remedy. Grandma Clay happened to rise as he neared the
+finish to see about a reticule she had dropped, and proved a target
+for those at the rear.
+
+"Hello, grandma! are you going to contradict him? Give us a straight
+tip about women's rights while you're up;" and poor grandma sat down
+very precipitately with an exceedingly deep blush.
+
+"If I could only get the chance," she gasped, "I'd give 'em a piece of
+me mind."
+
+Third on the list came Leslie Walker, whose improvement was beyond
+belief. No notes or hesitation this time. Each sentence was crisp and
+clear, and in every detail he evinced the facility for enacting his
+_role_ which is supposedly a feminine accomplishment.
+
+The chairman, in closing the meeting, rose to say--
+
+"In reference to the interjector who said the speaker was mad--"
+
+"Oh, that's what every one said about _you_ when you were in the
+council, and so you were too, and so are they all. Look at the roads
+we've got in the municipality," said a voice.
+
+So the chairman had to let the meeting terminate with the candidates
+thanking the electors for the extraordinarily good hearing they had
+been accorded; it being part of the humour of politics that the worse
+a candidate is boo-hooed the more stress he lays upon the _good
+hearing_ given him, and the more scurrilous he is regarding his
+opponent the more frantically he assures one that he is a bosom
+_personal_ friend.
+
+Andrew and I had the distinction of going home under grandma's
+tutelage, while Carry and Dawn stayed behind to go to the ladies'
+committee rooms, and Ernest lingered to escort them.
+
+"I say, grandma, are you goin' to vote for that bloke?" inquired
+Andrew.
+
+"I'm goin' to hear the other side first, and give me opinion after.
+There wasn't one of the swells there, was there?"
+
+"Dr Smalley and Dr Tinker both was."
+
+"Yes; but I mean the wimmen: an' how on earth did old Tinker ever get
+away from Mrs Tinker for that length of time? You'll never see one of
+them kind of wimmen at anythink that makes for progress. That's the
+way they make theirselves superior to the likes of you an' me--by
+never doin' nothink only for theirselves. 'Oh, we've got all we want
+as it is, an' don't want the vote; a woman's place is home,' they say
+if you ask 'em. It's all very fine for them as has a man to keep them
+like in a band-box; they would have found it different if they had to
+act on their own like me. I'm sick of this intelligence in women they
+make a fuss about all of a sudden. I've rared a family and managed me
+business better than a man could; and what's there been all along to
+prevent a woman from stroking out a name on a paper I never could see.
+And it never seems to me much difference which name was struck out,
+for they're mostly a lot of impostors that only think of featherin'
+their own nests. You'll always hear of wimmen not bein' intelligent
+enough to do this and that, and these things is only what men like
+doin' best theirselves, and the things they make out God intended
+women to do is them the men don't like doin'. You don't ever hear of
+them thinkin' women ain't intelligent enough to do seven things at
+once." Grandma was in great form that night, and not only led but
+maintained the conversation.
+
+"I rather like this young feller, but he ain't no sense much either.
+All he thinks of is buttoning for the railway people, and it's the
+people on the land that ought to be legislated for first. They are the
+foundation of everythink; other things would work right after. Every
+one can't live in Sydney, an' that's what they're all makin' for now.
+Every one is getting some little agency--parasite business. They've
+got sense to see the people on the land is the most despised and sat
+upon. You don't hear no squallin' about they'll protect the farmer.
+No, he's a despised old party that them scuts of fellers on the
+railway would grin at and think theirselves above, and scarcely give
+him a civil answer if he asked a question about his business what he's
+payin' them fellers there to do for him, and which only for the
+prodoocers wouldn't be there at all. Things is gettin' pretty tight on
+farms now. It means about sixteen hours hard graft a-day to make not
+half what a railwayman makes in eight hours. If you happen to have
+grapes or oranges, if they manage to escape the frost, an' hail, an'
+caterpillar, then the blight ketches 'em, or there's a drewth, and
+there ain't none; an' if there's any, there's so much that there ain't
+no sale for 'em; and the farmer's life I reckon ought to be stopped as
+gamblin', for a gambler's life ain't one bit more precarious."
+
+"Then why the jooce do you want me to go on the land?" said Andrew.
+
+"That ain't the point."
+
+"It's the most sticking out point to me," protested the lad. "I reckon
+bein' on the land is a mug's game; scrapin' like a fool when a feller
+could be sittin' in an office an' gettin' all they want twice as
+easy."
+
+"Here, you don't know what's good. It's more respectabler bein' on the
+land. You get the pony out, an' make the coffee, an' hold your
+tongue."
+
+Andrew and I had undertaken to make the coffee for supper, and thus
+give Carry, whose week in the kitchen it was, a chance to go to the
+meeting.
+
+They all arrived from it after a time--Dawn and the knight together,
+Carry and Larry Witcom following. Oh, where was "Dora"?
+
+"Who's that with you, Carry?" asked Andrew. "There was a young lady
+named Carry, who had a sweetheart named Larry; at the gate they often
+would tarry, to talk about when they would marry."
+
+But this remark of Andrew's to parry, Dawn good-naturedly plunged into
+an account of the meeting.
+
+"What did they do?" asked grandma.
+
+"Do?--they only blabbed. Mr Walker was there to-night. We asked that
+Jimmeny girl from the pub. to join, and she delivered a great parable
+at us, looking round all the time to see if the boot-licking tone of
+it was pleasing the men. She said that women ought to bring up their
+children to respect them--"
+
+"The most commonest idea some people has of bringin' up their children
+to respect them," grandma chipped in, "is to let youngsters make
+toe-rags of their mother; and boys only as high as the table think
+they can cheek their mother because she's only a woman an' hasn't as
+much right to be livin' in the world as them, and when they are
+twenty-one the law confirms this beautiful sentiment. Leastways, until
+just lately," she concluded.
+
+"And this Jimmeny piece," continued Dawn, "said women ought to treat
+their husbands decently, and she thinks a woman disgraces her sex by
+getting up on a platform to speak. I asked her if she thought they did
+not disgrace themselves and the other sex too by standing behind a bar
+and serving out drinks and grinning at a lot of goods that ought to be
+at home with their families,--and that was a bit of a facer. Then she
+said it was only the ugly old women who wanted to shriek round and get
+rights,--that men would give the young pretty ones all they wanted
+without asking! Of all the old black gin ideas, I always think that
+the terriblest. A nice state of affairs, if people couldn't get honest
+civilised rights without being young and pretty; and _the fools_!"
+said the girl heatedly, "can't they look round and see how long the
+beauty and youth business will work! 'Men,' she says, 'ought to rule;
+they're the stronger vessel.'" And Dawn gave inimitable mimicry of
+Miss Jimmeny of the pub. "If you take my tip for it, those girls that
+sing out that men are the stronger vessel are the sort that have a
+dishcloth of a husband, and never let him off a string."
+
+This attitude of mind was one of Dawn's distinctive characteristics.
+Having that beauty, which in the enslaved condition of women has
+always been an unfair asset to the possessor, to the exclusion of
+worthier traits, she was not like most beauties, content to sit down
+and trade upon it, but had wholesomer, honester, workaday ideals in
+regard to the position of her sex.
+
+She was going to Sydney in the morning for her second singing lesson,
+and as Ernest, by a strange coincidence, happened to have business
+that would take him on the same journey by the same train, I
+accompanied him to the gate to warn him against inadvertently
+divulging that I had been an actress by trade.
+
+"I want to take you into my confidence," I said, as we passed several
+naked cedar-trees, and halted in the shelter of some fine peppers that
+grew to perfection in this valley, where I related the trouble I had
+had to bring the old lady round to the idea of Dawn's singing lessons,
+and mentioned the girl's ambition regarding the stage.
+
+"Now," I continued, "if the old dame were to discover I had been on
+the stage, she would think I was leading Dawn to the devil, and would
+not credit that no one is more anxious than I am to save her from the
+footlights, or that the best way to stave her off is this training.
+My secret ambition regarding her," I said, critically observing the
+strong knobby profile, "is that within the next five years she should
+marry some nice youngster with means to place her in a setting
+befitting her intelligence and beauty."
+
+"Have you got any one in your eye now?" he irrelevantly inquired. And,
+considering he stood where he filled my entire vision, as he rose
+between me and the light shed by the last division of the western
+passenger mail as it self-importantly crossed the viaduct, I
+answered--
+
+"Yes; I think I know a man who would just fill the bill."
+
+He did not ask for further particulars, but remarked warningly--
+
+"Decent fellows with cash are scarce. They are inclined to get into
+mischief if they have too much time and money on their hands."
+
+"That's it; and I would not like to make a mess of things now that
+I've taken up matchmaking. You'll have to advise me when matters get
+out of hand; a little practice may come in handy some day when you
+have half a dozen daughters."
+
+"It would come in still handier now."
+
+"Pshaw, now! You'd only have to ask to receive, at your time of life
+and with your qualifications."
+
+"I'm not so sure. You're the only one who has such an opinion of me,"
+he said disconsolately. "Others look upon me as a red-headed fool with
+big ears, &c.;" and thus I knew Dawn's idle words had returned to his
+ears, as these things invariably do, and had stung.
+
+"Silly-billy! I'll take you in hand when I've settled Dawn. I'm the
+one to advertise your wares, for could I turn back the wheel of time
+eight or nine years and make us of an age, I'd make it leap-year and
+propose to you myself."
+
+"I'd like to propose to you without altering the time," he gallantly
+responded, apparently not in such deadly fear of a breach of promise
+action as was Uncle Jake.
+
+"If I don't move in the matter Dawn will be marrying that Eweword, and
+though he's a most handsome and worthy--"
+
+"Soft as a turnip," contemptuously interposed Ernest; "eats too much.
+It would take twelve months hard training to make any sort of a man of
+him."
+
+"It would be a pity to see Dawn just settling down into the dull,
+drudging life of a farmer's wife, going to an occasional show or
+tea-meeting in a home-made dress, with two or three children dragging
+at her skirts and looking a perfect wreck, as most of the mothers do."
+
+"By Jove, yes!"
+
+"She has a right to be on the lawn on Cup Day or in the front circle
+on first nights. She'd surprise some of the grandees, and with her
+vivacity and courage she'd make a furore for a time."
+
+"She'd make a good sport if she were a man," assented Ernest. "No
+running stiff or jamming a jock on the post or anything like that from
+her--she'd always hit straight out from the shoulder and above the
+belt."
+
+"Yes; she has particularly infatuated me, and I'd like to save her
+from Eweword."
+
+"Marry him to the girl Grosvenor while you're about it and that will
+dispose of him and suit her, for she strikes me as anxious for
+matrimony."
+
+"She hasn't been--" I began.
+
+"Oh, no, I think she's a splendid woman in every way, but--"
+
+"_But_, even the finest and most chivalrous man, while he thinks the
+only sphere for women is matrimony, yet is shocked if a woman betrays
+in the least way that her ambitions lie in the domestic line--strange
+inconsistency. However, you will not let Dawn know my ideas of
+disposing of her;" and with the want of perspicacity of his sex, or
+else with a wonderful power of covering his thoughts excelling that of
+women, and of which women never suspect men, Ernest promised without
+sensing what I had in view.
+
+
+
+
+SEVENTEEN.
+
+MRS BRAY AND CARRY COME TO ISSUES.
+
+
+Contention arose in the Clay household next day, Dawn's singing
+lessons being at the root of the trouble. It was her week in the
+kitchen, and that she should be two days absent from the cooking,
+displeased Carry.
+
+"Well, if you don't think the place fair, you can go!" said grandma.
+"But I think you're a fool, an' you're giving me a lot of worry. It's
+all very fine in other people's places, but some day w'en you have a
+home of your own you'll know the worry of it. Next time I make a
+arrangement with a girl she'll have to take a extra day in the kitchen
+without humbuggin'."
+
+"I'll vote for me grandma on that bill," said Andrew, "for I've often
+been give the pip by who is in the kitchen an' who is out of it.
+Grandma, did you hear the latest? Young Jack Bray's been in another
+orange orchard and didn't do a get quick enough, and has got took up,
+and his father will have to pay money to keep him out of quod."
+
+The old lady bristled.
+
+"Didn't I tell you! Who knows how to receive these things best now?
+I've always believed in rarin' me family me own way, an' Mrs Bray is a
+fine woman, moral and decent, but she's got too many stones to throw
+at others and doesn't see to it sharp enough that less stones can't be
+threw at her. I thought she didn't take it serious enough. You'd have
+been in this too only for me dreadin' the spark. What are they goin'
+to do?"
+
+"Pay the money, of course; an' Mr Bray is goin' to tan the hide off
+Jack."
+
+"Some people don't get frightened of dishonesty unless it costs 'em
+something," said the old lady.
+
+"Well, I'll vote for me grandma every time," said Andrew, "and Jim
+Clay every second time," as he went out the door, "and meself the most
+times of all," he concluded in the back yard.
+
+Mrs Bray dropped in that afternoon for a chat, and grandma mentioned
+that we were without afternoon tea because Carry had "jacked up" about
+getting it, for reasons before mentioned.
+
+"Just like her!" said Mrs Bray; "she gives herself as much side as if
+she was one of us. She's the sort of girl who wouldn't think twice of
+telling you to do a thing yourself, and you've made an awful fool of
+her by making so much of her. Them things of girls _earnin' their own
+livin'_ ought to be kept in their place more," was the utterance of a
+woman who believed herself a staunch advocate for the freedom of her
+sex; but when Mrs Bray spoke of sex she meant self.
+
+"That ain't the point," said grandma; "I never think it anythink but a
+credit to a girl to be earnin' her living, an' would never be narrer
+enough to make them feel it. I always make a practice of treatin' the
+girls as near equal as within reason, for Carry's every bit as
+fine-lookin' an' good a girl as me own, an' if I wasn't here, wouldn't
+Dawn have to be foragin' for herself too? but there's reason in
+everythink, and Carry might be a bit obligin'."
+
+"Of course she ought to be; but what could you expect of her, took up
+with that Larry Witcom, an' does the ass think he really wants her?
+He's only got her on a string for his own amusement? He goes to see
+that Dora Cowper at the same time; Jack seen him there. I wonder will
+_he_ be scared off by being thought a ketch before the pot's boiled,
+so to speak. Good ketches, eh? I don't see nothing in none of them.
+They're only thought something because men is scarce here; they've all
+cleared out to the far out places, and West Australia. It's like a
+year the pumpkins is scarce, you can sell little things you'd hardly
+throw to the pigs another time, and that's the way it is with the few
+paltry fellers round here. It makes me mad to see the girls after
+them--_the fools!_ and the men grinnin' behind their backs. There's
+that Ada Grosvenor, if Eweword just calls up and talks to her she
+tells you about it as if it was something, and inviting him down
+there, an' then the blessed fellers gets to think they're gods. It
+makes me sick!"
+
+"Yes," said grandma; "I see the girls after fellers now,--there's that
+Danby for instance, he's a fine lump of a man, but w'en I was a girl I
+wouldn't have made toe-rags of a policeman."
+
+"Yes, a blessed feller strollin' up and down the street lookin' at his
+toes or runnin' in a drunk. I say, did you hear the latest about old
+Rooney-Molyneux? He didn't believe in women having the vote, didn't
+consider they had intellect to vote, so _he_ says (not as much brain
+as he has, don't you see, to marry a woman, and a baby to be coming
+and nothing to put on its back, while he strolls round and gets
+drunk), but now they've got the vote, he says (the great Lord Muck
+Rooney-Molyneux says it, remember) that it is their _duty_ to use it,
+and he intends to _make_ (mind you, _make_; I'd like to hear a man say
+he'd _make_ me do anything; I'd scald him, see if I wouldn't, and
+that's what wants doing with half the men anyhow, for the way they
+carry on to women), and he's going to _make_ his wife go round
+canvassing, _Now_! Men make me sick; w'en they're boys they're that
+troublesome they ought to be kep' under a tub, and we'n they get older
+they're that cantankerous and self-important they all want killin'
+off."
+
+"I'll bet Mrs Rooney won't be workin' for a different man to him. If
+her convictions led her that way, you'd see he'd have a flute about
+her not bein' fit to be out of her home," said grandma astutely.
+
+"Yes, that's the way with 'em; first they thought the world would
+tumble to pieces if women stirred out of the house for a minute to
+vote, and now that we've got the vote in spite of them, they'd make
+their wives walk round after votes for their side whether they was
+able or not."
+
+"They kicked agen us having the vote, and now we've got it they think
+we ought to vote with them like as if we was a appendage of theirs;
+men will be learnt different to that by-and-by, but it's best to go
+gradual; they've had as much as they can swaller for a time."
+
+"Ain't it just the very devil to them to think women is considered as
+important as themselves now, instead of something they could just do
+as they like with? Old Hollis there says he won't vote this year
+because the women have one. Did you ever hear of an insult like that?
+He says the monkeys will have a vote next, and that shows you what men
+think of women,--like as if they was some sort of animals."
+
+"Well, if you ask me," said grandma, "the monkeys have been havin' a
+vote all along in the case of old Hollis."
+
+Any further discussion in this line was terminated by the entrance of
+Carry, with her good-looking face flushed and hard set, as, rolling
+down her sleeve and buttoning it aggressively as the finishing touch
+to her toilet after completing her afternoon's work, she confronted
+Mrs Bray, on battle bent.
+
+"Well, Mrs Bray, I'd like to have given my opinion of you to your teeth
+long ago, but I held my tongue as it wasn't my house, and some people have
+different tastes and have folk around that I'd be a long time having
+anything to do with. Now, I think things do concern me, and I'm going to
+have my say; I couldn't have it sooner because I'm a _thing_ earning my
+living and had to finish my work. I haven't got a home of my own, and like
+some people, if I had, I'd be in it teaching my dirty rude brats not to be
+thieves. I wouldn't for everlasting be at other people's places
+scandalising people twice as good as myself. I didn't think Mrs Clay was
+the sort of person to go tittle-tattling--she can please herself; but it
+doesn't concern you if I do put on airs. I want to know what you mean by
+that I should be kept in my place. I'll swear I know how to carry my day as
+well as you do, and to keep in my place too well to be going round meddling
+with other people's business."
+
+"I didn't say nothing but was correct, an' what right have you to come
+bullying me? It's like your impudence--you a hussy out to work for
+your living at a few shillings a-week, and calling yourself a _lady_
+help when you're a servant, that's what you are; to bully _me_, a
+woman with a good home, and the mother of a family."
+
+Carry snorted contemptuously.
+
+"That old 'mother of a family' racket needn't be brought forward. It
+doesn't hold as much water as it used to. Women are thought just as
+much of now who are good useful workers in the world, and not tied up
+to some man and the mother of a few weedy kids that aren't any credit
+to king or country."
+
+"Mercy!" exclaimed grandma. "What am I to?"
+
+"Let 'em fight it out," I laconically advised in an aside, and she
+seemed disposed to take my advice.
+
+"You dare," blustered Mrs Bray. "And what else have you got to say?"
+
+"I want an explanation of the aspersion on my character when you said
+I had taken up with Larry Witcom. I'm not going to stand anything on
+my character in that line if I _am_ earning my living, and you _are_
+the mother of one or fourteen families, all as great a credit to you
+as the one Jack represents. And as for me earning my living, what are
+_you_ doing? If a man wasn't keeping you to suit himself, how would
+you be earning your living? I could earn my living the same way as you
+are doing to-morrow if I liked; but of the two, I think my present
+occupation is the decentest and less dependent. Apart from your
+bullying selfishness, a nice sensible way you have of talking! If you
+killed off the men, who would you have to keep you? And that's a nice
+civilised way to speak about your fellow creatures anyhow; whether
+they be men or black gins, they've just as much place in the scheme of
+creation as you have. We would have been a long time getting the vote
+or any other decent right if the men were like you. It's because you
+are the same stamp as so many of the men that we've been kept down so
+long as we have; and now, what about me taking up with Larry Witcom?"
+
+"Well, it's well known what Larry is."
+
+"Well, what is he?"
+
+"You ask him about Mrs Park's divorce case."
+
+"I hope you don't think your old man is a saint, do you? As big a fool
+as you are, you're surely not fool enough for that, are you? Perhaps
+he isn't as clean a potato as Larry if it was all brought out."
+
+"But he's a married man this many a year, with a married daughter, and
+his young days are lived down long ago."
+
+"Well, so would Larry be married many a year and have things lived
+down in time, and not as many to live down either as your husband has
+at present, if things are true; for all your everlasting shepherding
+he gets off the chain sometimes."
+
+Hoity-toity! this was putting a fuse to gunpowder.
+
+"You hussy! What have you got to say about my husband? Prove it, and
+I'd make short work of him; and if it's lies, I'll bring you into
+court for it."
+
+"I'll leave it for you to prove; you're one of those who thinks every
+yarn entertaining till they touch yourself."
+
+"Two to one on Carry every time when me grandma's the umpire," grinned
+Andrew round the corner.
+
+"Carry, you've had enough to say. I forbid any more in my house," said
+grandma, rising to order.
+
+"I declare this a drawn fight," said Andrew.
+
+"You can have it out with Mrs Bray in her own house if you want, but
+no more of it here," continued grandma.
+
+"Don't you dare come to my house," said Mrs Bray.
+
+"_Your_ house! no fear; I never associate with scandal-mongers,"
+contemptuously retorted Carry, as Mrs Bray made a precipitate
+departure, emitting something about a hussy who didn't know her place
+as she went.
+
+"I'm surprised at you!" said grandma. "Her tongue does run on a little
+sometimes, but you ought to remember she's old enough to be your
+mother, and girls do owe somethink to women with families."
+
+"And women with families and homes ought to remember they owe
+something to girls that aren't settled, because they haven't got a man
+caught yet to keep them."
+
+"Well, this ain't my quarrel, an' don't you bring it up to me again. A
+woman that's rared a family, and two of them like I have done, has
+enough with her own dissensions."
+
+It was rather a sullen party at tea that evening, so Dawn's return
+from Sydney immediately after, with her cheeks radiant from travel in
+the quick evening express, and herself brimming over with her day's
+adventures, formed a welcome relief.
+
+"I had a great time coming home," said she. "Mr Ernest and Dora
+Eweword both went to Sydney this morning, and Mr Ernest and I raced
+into a carriage to escape Dora, and we did; and he must have asked the
+guard, for he found our carriage, but he had only a second-class
+ticket, and wouldn't be let in."
+
+"And how came you to be in a first-class carriage?" inquired grandma.
+"I can't stand that; there's expense enough as it is, and your betters
+travel second."
+
+"It wasn't my fault. Mr Ernest bought the tickets like a gentleman
+should (it says in the etiquette book), and I couldn't fight with him
+there and then,--you're always telling me to be more genteel."
+
+"But I don't want strangers paying anything for my granddaughter."
+
+"You needn't mind in this instance," I interposed.
+
+"Mr Ernest probably wished to be gentlemanly to Dawn because she has
+been so good to me." Once more I saw the little derisive smile flit
+across the exquisite face, but she said--
+
+"Yes; he said that you're looking so well it must be our nursing, and
+that he will try and get grandma to take him in if he falls ill."
+
+"I wonder if he's going to get took bad--love-sick--like the other
+blokes," said Andrew.
+
+Dawn cast a murderous glance at him, and covered the remark by making
+a bustle in sitting to her tea, and in retailing minute details of her
+singing lesson.
+
+We retired early, and she produced from the basket in which she
+carried her music a most pretentious box of sweets and various society
+newspapers.
+
+"Mr Ernest said you might like some of these, and I was to have a
+share because I carried them home, though he got the 'bus and brought
+me to the door, so I hadn't to walk a step."
+
+"Good boy! What did he talk about to-day?"
+
+"I asked him about all the actresses he has seen. He's going to give
+me the autographed photos he has of them. You wouldn't think he'd like
+to part with them, but he says he's tired of them all now--they're
+nearly all married, and are back numbers. Actresses are only thought
+of for a little while, he says."
+
+"That is the natural order of things, and applies to others as well as
+actresses. Pretty young girls are not pretty for long. They should see
+to it that they are plucked by the right fingers while their bloom is
+attractive. The old order falls ill-fittingly on some, but is fair in
+the main,--we each have our fleeting hour."
+
+"Yes; but where is there a desirable plucker?" said the practical
+girl. "There are scarcely any good matches and the few there are have
+so many running after them that I wouldn't give 'em the satisfaction
+of thinking I wanted them too."
+
+True, good matches are few. In these luxurious times the generality of
+girls' ideas of a good match being very advanced--in short, a man of
+sufficient wealth to keep them in petted idleness. There can be no
+shade of reproach on women for this ambition, it is but one outcome of
+the evolution of civilisation, and is merely a species of common-sense
+on their part; for the ordinary routine of marriage, as instanced by
+the testimony of thousands of women ranked among the comfortably and
+happily married, is so trying that girls do well to try for the most
+comfortable berths ere putting their heads in the noose.
+
+"And Dora, where was he all this time?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, he brought Ada Grosvenor home; thought that would spite me. She
+was in town too, and you should just hear her after this. The silly
+rabbit can't open her mouth but she tells you what this man did and
+that one said to her, when all the time it's nothing but some ordinary
+courtesy they ought to extend to even black gins."
+
+
+
+
+EIGHTEEN.
+
+THE FOUNDATION OF THE POULTRY INDUSTRY.
+
+
+Peace was restored in the Clay household through my interviewing Carry
+and offering to teach her music and allow her the use of my piano if
+she would do some of Dawn's work for two days during every second
+week. The next irritation arose from the male portion of the family.
+
+Now, we had all been so vigorously on political entertainment bent,
+that no one had given a thought to Uncle Jake and his doings or
+political opinions, or whether he had any, but it transpired, though a
+"mere man," he had been pursuing his course with as much attention to
+electioneering technique as the most emancipated woman among us.
+
+On the afternoon following Carry's little difference with Mrs Bray,
+Ada Grosvenor called to invite us to accompany her to hear Olliver
+Henderson, the ministerial candidate, who was to address the women at
+the hall first, and the men at Jimmeny's pub. afterwards, and we all
+went. Next morning at breakfast, when we had set to work upon the
+"dosed" porridge, Andrew again catechised his grandma concerning the
+casting of her vote.
+
+"I'm goin' for young Walker of course; as for that other feller!"
+said she cholericly, "I was that sick of his stuttering and muttering,
+an' holdin' his meetin's at Jimmeny's (we all know that that means
+free drinks), an' after waitin' all my life fer it I'm not goin' to
+cast the only vote that maybe I'll live to have, for a feller that
+buys his votes with grog. There's precious little to choose between
+them. They only want the glory of bein' in parliament for theirselves,
+and for the time bein' have rose a flute about the country goin' to
+the dogs and them bein' the people to save it; but once the election's
+over that's all we'll hear of 'em, and though they'd lick our boots
+now, they're so glad to know us, they'd forget all about us then. The
+one who can blow the loudest will get in, and as it must be one it
+might as well be this feller that can talk, an' could keep up his end
+of the stick in parliament, as there's no doubt this talkin' an' blow
+has become such a great trade one has to go to the wall without it."
+
+"Well, I'm going for Walker too, because he's something to look at,"
+said Carry.
+
+"The women was goin' to put in _clean_ men an' do strokes," sneered
+Uncle Jake, "an' it turns out they'd vote for the best-lookin'
+man,--nice state of affairs that is."
+
+"Ah! it's all very fine for a man to buck w'en a thing treads on his
+own toes; it would be thought a terrible thing for a woman to vote for
+a good-lookin' man an' pass over merit, but that's what's been done to
+women all the time. The good-lookin' ones got all the honours, whether
+they deserved 'em or not, and those complainin' agen this was jeered
+at an' called 'Shrieking sisters,' but it's a different tune now."
+
+"Uncle, _darling_, who are you going to vote for?" inquired Andrew.
+
+"For Henderson, of course, an' I reckon all the women here with votes
+ought, too."
+
+"And why, pray?" asked grandma, her eyes flashing a challenge, while
+her faithful guardswomen, Carry and Dawn, suspended work to see how
+the argument ended.
+
+"For the look of the thing to start with. It don't look well to see
+the wimmen of the family goin' agen the men."
+
+"No, it don't look like Nature as men make believe it ought to be, for
+once to see a woman have a opinion of her own, and not the man just
+telling that his opinion wuz hers too, without knowing anythink about
+it, an' women having to hold their tongue for peace' sake because they
+wasn't in a position to help theirselves. An' if it seems so dreadful
+that way, you better come over to our side, as there's more of us than
+you, an' majority ought to rule."
+
+"What did you do at _your_ meeting last night, uncle?" inquired Dawn.
+
+"Old Hollis is head of the committee, an' he says the first thing for
+all the committee men to do was to see the women of the men goin' for
+Henderson was the same way," he replied.
+
+"Oh, an' so you thought you could come the Czar on us, did you? an'
+the Government, accordin' to Hollis's make out, is a fool to give
+women a vote; like in your case instead of giving me an' Carry a vote
+each, it ought to have give you three."
+
+"Oh, Mr Sorrel!" said I, "what a joke! Was he really so ignorant as
+that; surely he was joking too?"
+
+Uncle Jake had sufficient wit to take this opportunity of changing his
+tactics.
+
+"No," he said, "some people is terrible narrer; for my part I always
+believe in wimmen holdin' their own opinion."
+
+"So long as they didn't run contrary to yours," said grandma with a
+sniff. "There's heaps more like you. Women can always think as much as
+they like, an' they could get up on a platform an' talk till they
+bust, as long as they didn't want the world to be made no better, an'
+they wouldn't be thought unwomanly. It's soon as a woman wants any
+practical good done that she is considered a unwomanly creature."
+
+Uncle Jake was outdone and relapsed into silence.
+
+"An' that's just what I would have expected of old Hollis," continued
+grandma, who seemed to have a knowledge of people's doings rivalling
+that necessary to an efficient police officer. "I'll tell you what he
+is," and the old dame directed her remarks to me. "He is the old chap
+Mrs Bray was sayin' ain't goin' to vote this time because the women
+has got one and the monkeys will be havin' one next. Just what the
+likes of him would say! He's a old crawler whose wife does all the
+work while he walks around an' tells how he killed the bear, an'
+that's the sort of man who's always to be heard sayin' woman is a
+inferior animal that ought to be kep' on a chain as he thinks fit.
+You'll never hear the kind of man like Bray (who is a man an' keeps
+his wife like a princess) sayin' that sort of thing--it's only the old
+Hollises and such. I'll tell you what old Hollis is. He got out of
+work here a few years back, w'en things was terrible dull, an' so his
+wife had to keep him, and with a child for every year they had been
+married. She rared chickens an' plucked 'em and sold 'em around the
+town, an' went without necessaries w'en she was nursin' to keep him in
+tobacco. That's the kind of man _he_ is, if you want to know. Of
+course, bein' a animal twice her superior, he had to go about suckin'
+a pipe, and of course he couldn't deny hisself anythink. What do you
+think of that?"
+
+"That its pathos lies in its commonness."
+
+"I reckon you didn't hear of him goin' out an' pluckin' the fowls then
+an' sayin', 'Wife, a woman's place w'en she has a young family is in
+the house.' No fear! She worked at this poultry business, an' it was
+surprisin' how she got on--worked it up to a big poultry farm, till he
+took a hand in doin' a little of the work an' takin' _all_ the credit.
+Now they live by it altogether; an' he was interviewed by the papers a
+little while ago, and it was blew about the reward of enterprise,--how
+he had started from nothink, an' it never said a word how she started
+an' rared his babies an' done it all, an' does most now, while he
+walks about to illustrate what a superior bein' he is. That's the way
+with all the poultry industry. Women was the pioneers in it, an' now
+it's worked up to be payin', men has took it over and think they have
+done a stroke. Not so far back a man would consider hisself disgraced
+that knew one kind of fowls from another,--he would be thought a old
+molly-coddle. The women tried to keep a few hens an' the men always
+tried to kill them, an' said they'd ruin the place, an' at the same
+time they hunt them was always cryin' out an' gruntin' that there
+wasn't enough eggs to eat, an' why didn't the hens lay the same as
+they used w'en they was boys. They expected the women to rare them on
+nothink, or at odd moments, the same way as they expect them to do
+everythink else. Now, even the swells is gone hen mad, an' the papers
+are full of poultry bein' a great industry, but it was women started
+it."
+
+Upon strolling abroad that morning we found a huge placard bearing the
+advice--"Vote for Olliver Henderson, M.L.A., the Local Candidate,"
+decorating the post of the gateway through which we gained the
+highroad.
+
+Uncle Jake was credited with this erection, so Andrew made himself
+absent at a time when there was need of his presence, and thereby
+caused a deal of friction in the vicinity of grandma, but with the
+result that by midday Uncle Jake's placard was covered by another,
+reading: "Vote for Leslie Walker, the Opposition Candidate, and Save
+the Country!"
+
+At three o'clock this was obscured by a reappearance of Henderson's
+advertisement, which was the cause of Uncle Jake being too late to
+catch that evening's train with a load of oranges he had been set to
+pack. At the risk of leaving the milking late, Andrew was setting out
+to once more eclipse this by Walker's poster, only that grandma
+adjudicated regarding the matter.
+
+"Jake, you have one side of the gate, an' Andrew you take the other.
+Put up your papers side by side and that will be a good advertisement
+of liberty of opinion; an' Jake, if you haven't got sense to stick to
+this at your time of life, I'm sorry for you; and if you haven't
+Andrew at yours, I'll have to knock it into you with a strap,--now
+_mind_! An' if you don't get your work done you'll go to no more
+meetin's."
+
+"Right O! I'll vote for me grandma every time," responded Andrew.
+
+This proved an effective threat, for political meetings had become the
+joy of life to the electors of Noonoon. As a tallow candle if placed
+near can obscure the light of the moon, so the approaching election
+lying at the door shut out all other worldly doings. The
+Russo-Japanese war became a movement of no moment; the season, the
+price of lemons and oranges, the doings of Mrs Tinker, the inability
+of the municipal council to make the roads good, and all other
+happenings, became tame by comparison with politics. They were
+discussed with unabating interest all day and every day, and by
+everyone upon all occasions. Even the children battled out differences
+regarding their respective candidates on the way home from school,
+rival committees worked with unflagging energy, and all buildings and
+fences were plastered with opposing placards. This pitch of enthusiasm
+was reached long before the sitting parliament had dissolved or a
+polling day had been fixed; for this State election was contested with
+unprecedented energy all over the country, but in no electorate was it
+more vigorously and, to its credit, more good-humouredly fought than
+in the fertile old valley of Noonoon.
+
+It was the only chance the unfortunate electors had of bullying the
+lordly M.P.'s and would-be M.P.'s, who, once elected, would fatten on
+the parliamentary screw and pickings without showing any return, and
+right eagerly the electors took their present opportunity.
+
+Zest was added to the contest by both the contestants being wealthy
+men, and with youth as well as means to carry it out on expensive
+lines. They were equally independent of parliament as a means of
+living, and being men of leisure were merely anxious for office to
+raise them from the rank and file of nonentityism. Independent means
+are a great advantage to a member of parliament. The penniless man
+elected on sheer merit, to whom the country could look for good
+things, becomes dependent upon politics for a living, is often
+handicapped by a family who are loth to leave the society and comfort
+to which their bread-winner's official position has raised them, and
+he, held by his affection, is ready to sacrifice all convictions and
+principle to remain in power. To this man politics becomes a desperate
+gamble, and the country's interests can go to the dogs so long as he
+can ensure re-election.
+
+Another advantage in the Noonoon candidates which should have silenced
+the pessimists, who averred there were no good clean men to enter
+parliament, was that these men were both such exemplary citizens,
+morally, physically, and socially, that it seemed a sheer waste of
+goodness that only one could be elected.
+
+The newspapers went politically mad, and those not any hysterical
+country rags, but the big metropolitan dailies, and there was one
+thing to be noted in regard to their statements that seriously needed
+rectifying. What is the purpose of the great dailies but to keep the
+people correctly informed as to the progress of public affairs and
+events of the community at large? Most of the people are too hard at
+work to forage information for themselves, or even to be thoroughly
+cognisant of that collected in the newspapers, and therefore
+parliamentary candidates, if not correct in their figures and
+statements, should be publicly arraigned for perjury. The
+Ministerialists gave one set of figures dealing with national
+financial statistics and the Oppositionists gave widely different. How
+was an elector to act when the platform of the former contained
+nothing but a few false statements and glowing promises, and the
+policy of the latter was only a few counter-acting war-whoops, and
+there was no honesty, common-sense, or matter-of-fact business in the
+campaign from end to end?
+
+In this connection that remote rag, 'The Noonoon Advertiser,' shone as
+a reproach to its great contemporaries. Not by their grandeur and
+acclamations shall they be judged, but by the quality of their
+fruits.
+
+No bias or spleen seemed to sway the mind of this journal to one side
+or the other. It recognised itself as a newspaper, not as a political
+tout for this party or that, and so kept its head cool and its honour
+bright and shining.
+
+Three days after Leslie Walker's second speech he sent up a woman
+advocate to address _the ladies_ and start the business of
+house-to-house canvassing. This plenipotentiary, a person of rather
+plethoric appearance, made herself extremely popular by assuring every
+second _vote-lady_ she met that she was sure she (the vote-lady) was
+intended by nature for a public speaker. This worked without a hitch
+until the votresses began to tell each other what the great speaker
+had said, when it naturally followed that Mrs Dash, though she thought
+that Mrs Speaker had been discerning to discover this latent
+oratorical talent in herself, immediately had the effervescence taken
+out of her self-complacence on finding that that stupid Mrs Blank had
+been assured of equal ability.
+
+Then the Ministerialists discovered Mrs Speaker's place of abode in
+Sydney, and averred her children ran about so untended as to be
+undistinguishable from aboriginals, and that her housekeeping was
+sending her husband to perdition; and such is the texture of human
+nature unearthed at political crises, that some even went so far as to
+suggest that she was a weakness of Walker's, and sneered at the
+_ladies'_ candidate who had to be "wet-nursed" in his campaign by
+women speakers. Henderson, they averred, had not to do this, but
+fought his own battle.
+
+"Yes," said Grandma Clay; "he mightn't be wet-nursed, but he is
+bottled, _brandy_-bottled, by the men." And this could not be denied.
+
+The women rallied round Walker because he was a temperance candidate,
+whereas the tag-rag rolled up _en masse_ for Henderson, who shouted
+free drinks and carried the publican's flag.
+
+Each candidate, while praising his opponent, wound up with _but_--and
+after that conjunction spoke most damningly of his policy.
+
+Underneath the ostensible war-whoops many private and personal
+cross-fires were at work to intensify the contest. The people on the
+land quite naturally had a grudge against the railway folk, who only
+had to work eight hours per day for more than a farmer could make in
+sixteen; further, the perquisites of the railway employes were
+inconceivable. By an unwritten but nevertheless imperative etiquette,
+farmers had to render them tribute in the form of a portion of
+whatever fruit or vegetables were consigned at Noonoon, and the
+townspeople also had little to say in favour of them, averring they
+were a floating population who had no interest in the welfare of the
+town in which they resided, were bad customers--patronising the
+publicans more than the storekeepers, and by means of their connection
+with the railway were able to buy their meat and other necessaries
+where they listed--where it was cheapest, and frequently this was
+otherwhere than Noonoon, and yet they were in such numbers that they
+could rule the political market.
+
+Then the men on the Ministerial side were nearly gangrene with
+disgust, because, as one put it, "nearly all Walker's men were women,"
+and rallied round him thick and strong, and with a thoroughness and
+energy worthy of their recent emancipation.
+
+Dawn's next day for Sydney fell on another night when Leslie Walker
+was speaking, but she and I did not attend this meeting, the family
+being represented on this occasion by Andrew, and we went to bed and
+discussed the Sydney trip while waiting for his return.
+
+Ernest Breslaw, it appeared, had again had urgent business in Sydney
+that day.
+
+"Dawn," I said, "this is somewhat suspicious. Are you sure you are not
+flirting with Ernest? I can't have his wings singed; I think too much
+of him, and shall have to warn him that you are booked for 'Dora'
+Eweword." This was said experimentally, for to do Dawn justice, though
+she had every temptation, she had nothing of the flirt in her
+composition.
+
+"I can't go and say to him, 'Don't you fall in love with me,'" said
+Dawn contentiously.
+
+"Are you sure he has never in any way attempted to pay you a lover's
+attentions?"
+
+"Well, it's this way," she said confidentially--"you won't think me
+conceited if I tell you everything straight? There have been two or
+three men in love with me, and I was always able to see it straight
+away, long before _they_ knew; but with Ernest, sometimes he seems to
+be like they were, and then I'm afraid he's not,--at least not
+_afraid_--I don't care a hang, only I wonder does he think he can
+flirt with me, when he is so nice and just waltzes round the subject
+without coming up to it?"
+
+Ah! ha! In that _afraid_, which she sought to recover, the young lady
+betrayed that her affections were in danger of leaving her and
+betaking themselves to a new ruler, and this sudden inability to see
+through another's state of mind towards her was a further sign that
+they were not secure.
+
+We are very clear of vision as to the affection tendered us, so long
+as we remain unmoved, but once our feelings are stirred, their
+palpitating fears so smear our sight that it becomes unreliable.
+
+"Oh, well, it does not matter to you," I said; "you are not likely to
+think of him, he's so unattractive, but I must take care that he does
+not grow fond of you. If I see any danger of it, I'll tell him
+something about you that will nip his affections in the bud. You won't
+mind me doing that--just some little thing that won't hurt you, but
+will save him unnecessary pain?" And to this she replied with seeming
+indifference--
+
+"I wish you'd tell Dora Eweword something that would shoo him off that
+he'd never come back, and then I would have seen the last of him,
+which would be a treat."
+
+After this we were silent, and I thought she had gone to sleep, for
+there was no sound until Andrew came tumbling up the stairs leading
+from his room.
+
+"I say!" he called, "have you got any more of that toothache stuff
+from the dentist?"
+
+"Come along," I answered, "I'll put some in for you."
+
+"I think it's the oranges that's doin' it, I eat nearly eight dozen
+to-day."
+
+"Enough to give you the pip; you ought to slack off a little," I said,
+extending him the courtesy of his own vernacular.
+
+"I bet I'd vote for Henderson after all if I could," he continued, in
+referring to the meeting, "only I'll gammon I wouldn't just to nark
+Uncle Jake. Henderson is the men's man, that other bloke belongs to
+wimmen. You should have heard 'em to-night! The fellers behind was
+tip-top, and made such a noise at last that Walker could only talk to
+the wimmen in the front. We gave him slops because he gets wimmen up
+to speak for him, an' we can't give _them_ gyp. One man asked him was
+he in favour of ring-barkin' thistles, and another wanted to know was
+he in favour of puttin' a tax on caterpillars. He thinks no end of
+himself, because he's one of these Johnnies the wimmen always runs
+after," gravely explained Andrew, aged sixteen.
+
+"We cock-a-doodled and pip-pipped till you couldn't hear your ears.
+Half couldn't get in, they was climbed up an' hangin' in the
+windows--little girls too along with the boys. I suppose now that
+they're as near got a vote as we have, they'll be poked everywhere
+just the same as if they had as good a right as us," said the boy with
+the despondence of one to whom all is lost.
+
+"It's a terrible thing they can't be made stay at home out of all the
+fun like boys think they ought to be. No mistake the woman having a
+vote is a terrible nark to the men--almost too much for 'em to bear,"
+said Dawn, whom I had thought asleep.
+
+"I reckon I'm goin' to every meetin', they're all right fun,"
+continued Andrew. "At the both committee room they're givin' out
+tickets with the men's names on, an' whoever likes can get them an'
+wear 'em in their hats. Me an' Jack Bray went to this Johnny Walker's
+rooms and gammoned we was for him, an' got a dozen tickets, an' when
+we got outside tore 'em to smithereens; that's what we'll do all the
+time."
+
+After this Andrew disappeared down the stairs, spilling grease, and
+being admonished by Dawn as he went as the clumsiest creature she had
+ever seen.
+
+Silence reigned between us for some time, and in listening to the
+trains I had forgotten the girl till her voice came across the room.
+
+"I say, don't tell that Ernest anything not nice about me, will you?
+I'll take care not to flirt with him, and I wouldn't like him to think
+me not nice. I wouldn't care about any one else a scrap, but he's such
+a great friend of yours, and as I hope to be with you a lot, it would
+be awkward; and you know he has _said_ nothing, it might only be my
+conceit to think he's going the way of other men. He took me to
+afternoon tea to-day at such a lovely place,--he said he wanted to be
+good to your friends, that's why he is nice to me. I don't suppose he
+ever thinks of me at all any other way," she said with the despondence
+of love.
+
+So this had been chasing sleep from Beauty's eyes, as such trifles
+have a knack of doing!
+
+"Very likely," I said complacently, and smiled to myself. The only
+thing to be discovered now was if the young athlete's emotions were at
+the same ebb, and then what was there against plain sailing to the
+happy port where honeymoons are spent?
+
+Fortune favours the persevering, and next afternoon an opportunity
+occurred for procuring the desired knowledge.
+
+Ernest and Ada Grosvenor came in together, and to the casual observer
+seemed much engrossed with each other, but I noticed that Dawn could
+not speak or move, but a pair of quick dark eyes caught every detail.
+So far so good, but it was necessary for Dawn to think the prize just
+a little farther out of reach than it was to make it attractive to her
+disposition, so I set about attaining this end by a very simple
+method.
+
+Miss Grosvenor had called to invite us to a meeting she had convened,
+to listen to a public address by a lady who was going to head a
+deputation to Walker afterwards, and we had decided to go. Mrs Bray's
+husband also dropped in, and to my surprise proved not the hen-pecked
+nonentity one would expect after hearing his wife's aggressive
+diatribes, but a stalwart man of six feet, with a comely face
+bespeaking solid determination in every line. And when one comes to
+think of it, it is not the big blustering man or woman that rules, but
+the quiet, apparently inane specimens that look so meek that they are
+held up as models of propriety and gentleness. Miss Grosvenor
+immediately nailed him for her meeting, and politics being the only
+subject discussed, he aired his particular bug. This was his disgust
+at the top-heaviness of the Labour party's demands, and the railway
+people's easy times as compared with that of the farmer.
+
+"I believe," said he, "in every man, if he can, working only eight
+hours a-day--though I have to work sixteen myself for precious little
+return, but these fellows are running the country to blazes. The rules
+of supply and demand must sway the labour or any other market all the
+world over, and they'll have to see that and haul in their sails."
+
+"Who are you going to vote for?" inquired Andrew.
+
+"I'm goin' for Henderson, and the missus for Walker."
+
+"It's a wonder you don't compel Mrs Bray to vote for your man."
+
+"No fear; I'm pleased she's taken the opposite chap, just to
+illustrate my opinion on what liberty of opinion should be; but I
+won't deny," he concluded, with a humorous smile, "that I mightn't be
+so pleased with her going against me if I was set on either of them,
+but as it is neither are worth a vote, so that I'm pretty well
+sitting on a rail myself."
+
+"I thought your first announcement almost too liberal to be true,"
+laughed Miss Grosvenor.
+
+"No, I will say that Mr Bray is a man does treat his women proper, and
+give 'em liberty," said grandma.
+
+"An' a nice way they use it," sniffed Carry _sotto voce_.
+
+As we set out to the meeting Miss Grosvenor mentioned to me that she
+was endeavouring to find suitable speakers to address her association,
+and asked did I know of any one. Here was an opening for a thrust in
+the game of parry I was setting on foot between Dawn and Ernest
+Breslaw.
+
+"Ask my friend Mr Ernest to deliver an address: 'Women in Politics,'"
+I said, "that is his particular subject. He is a most fluent speaker,
+and loves speaking in public, nothing will delight him more."
+
+"I'll ask him at once," said she.
+
+This was as foundationless a fairy-tale as was ever spun, for Ernest
+could not say two words in public upon any occasion. That he was
+usually tendered a dinner and was called upon to make a speech, he
+considered the drawback of wresting any athletic honours. Whether
+women were in politics or the wash-house was a sociological abstrusity
+beyond his line of thought, and not though it cost him all his fortune
+to refuse could he have decently addressed any association even on
+beloved sporting matters. Hence his consternation when Miss Grosvenor
+approached him. At first he was nonplussed, and next thing, taking it
+as a joke on my part, was highly amused. Miss Grosvenor, on her side,
+thought he was joking, with the result that there was the liveliest
+and most laughable conversation between them.
+
+Dawn did not know the reason of it. She could only see that Ernest and
+Miss Grosvenor were engrossed, and at first curious, a little later
+she was annoyed with the former.
+
+"I think," she whispered to me, "it's Mr Ernest you'll have to see
+doesn't flirt with every girl he comes across."
+
+"Perhaps he isn't flirting," I coolly replied.
+
+"Not _now_, perhaps," she said pointedly; "perhaps he's in earnest
+with one and practises with others."
+
+Arrived at the hall, we found the women swarming around Walker like
+bees.
+
+"Good Lord! Look what Les. has let himself in for," laughed Ernest; "I
+wouldn't stand in his shoes for a tenner."
+
+"Go on! Surely you too are partial to ladies?"
+
+"Yes; but--"
+
+"But there must be reason in everythink," I quoted. He laughed.
+
+"Yes; and reason in this sort of thing to suit my taste would be a
+small medium. But what a fine old sport the old dame Clay would have
+made--no danger of her not standing up to a mauling or baulking at any
+of her fences, eh?"
+
+Dawn would not look at Ernest after the meeting and deputation came to
+an end, but walked home with "Dora" Eweword, laughing and talking in
+ostentatious enjoyment; while Ernest and the Grosvenor girl were none
+the less entertained.
+
+"'Pon my soul, I couldn't make a speech to save my life," he
+reiterated. "My friend only laid you on for a lark, did you not?" he
+said, turning to me, whom he gallantly insisted upon supporting on his
+arm--that splendid arm in which the muscles could expand till they
+were like iron bands.
+
+"Don't you believe him, Miss Grosvenor," I replied; "he's a born
+orator, but is unaccountably lazy and vain, and only wants to be
+pressed; insist upon his speaking, he's longing to do so." And then
+his merry protesting laugh, and the girl's equally happy, rang out on
+the crisp starlight air, as they went over and over the same ground.
+
+As we neared Clay's I suggested that he should see Miss Grosvenor
+home, while I attached myself to Dawn and "Dora"; and I invited him to
+come and sing some songs with us afterwards, for the night was yet
+young.
+
+To this he agreed, and supposed to be with the other young couple, I
+slipped behind, and could hear their conversation as they progressed.
+
+"You're not struck on that red-headed mug, are you?" said Eweword, for
+general though political talk had become, there was still another
+branch of politics more vitally interesting to some of the electors.
+
+"I'm not the style to be struck on a fellow that doesn't care for me."
+
+"But he does!"
+
+"Looks like it, doesn't it?" she said sarcastically.
+
+"Yes, it does, or what would he be hanging around here so long for?"
+
+"Perhaps to see Ada Grosvenor; I suppose she'd have him, red hair and
+all."
+
+"Pooh! he never goes there; but he comes to your place though, too
+deuced often for my pleasure."
+
+"He comes to see the boarder--he's a great friend of hers."
+
+"Humph! that's all in my eye. He'd be a long time coming to see her
+if you weren't there, if she was twice as great a friend. What sort of
+an old party is she? Must have some means."
+
+"Oh, lovely!"
+
+"I suppose the red-headed mug thinks so too, as she is touting for
+him."
+
+"For him and Ada Grosvenor."
+
+"Have it that way if you like it, but you know what I mean all right."
+
+"I don't."
+
+"Oh, don't you! I say, Dawn, just stop out here a moment will you? I
+want to tell you something else, I mean."
+
+"Oh, tell it to me some other time," said she, "it's too beastly cold
+to stay out another minute. Come and tell it to me while we are having
+supper round the fire."
+
+"I'd have a pretty show of telling it there. I don't want it put in
+the 'Noonoon Advertiser,' but that's what I'll have to do if you won't
+give me a chance. If you keep pretending you don't get my letters,
+I'll write all that I put in them to your grandma, and tell her to
+tell you," he said jokingly; but the girl took him up shortly.
+
+"If you dare do that," said she, aroused from her indifference, "I'd
+never speak to you again the longest day I live, so you needn't think
+you'll get over me that way. You'd better tell Uncle Jake and Andrew
+too while you're about it, and Dora Cowper might be vexed if you don't
+tell her."
+
+"Well, I bet you'd listen to what the red-headed mug said quick
+enough," replied "Dora" Eweword in an injured tone.
+
+"The red-headed mug, as you call him--and his hair isn't much redder
+than yours, and is twice as nice," she retaliated, "he would be a
+gentleman anyhow, and not a bear with a scalded head."
+
+By this time they had reached the gate, and Dawn was carelessly
+inviting him to enter, but he declined in rather a crestfallen tone.
+
+"Better invite red-head, not me, if you won't listen to what I say,
+and pretend you never received my letters."
+
+"Thank you for the good advice. I hope he'll accept my invitation,
+because he is always pleasant and agreeable," she retorted.
+
+
+
+
+NINETEEN.
+
+AN OPPORTUNELY INOPPORTUNE DOUCHE.
+
+
+It was just as well that "Dora" Eweword had been too chopfallen to
+come in, for we found the place in what grandma termed "a uproar."
+
+As we had gone out Mrs Bray had arrived to relate her speculations in
+regard to Mrs Rooney-Molyneux. Mrs Bray did not live a great distance
+from the latter's cottage, and as she had not seen her about during
+the day, wondered had she come to her travail.
+
+Andrew decided the matter when he came home by relating what he had
+heard when passing the cottage; and he supplemented the statement by
+the deplorable information that "the old bloke is up at Jimmeny's
+tryin' if he can get a free drink."
+
+"I must go to her," said grandma, rising in haste.
+
+"I wouldn't if I was you," said Mrs Bray. "You don't never get no
+thanks for nothing like that, and might get yourself into a mess; I
+believe in leaving people to manage their own affairs."
+
+Carry sniffed in the background.
+
+"I'll risk all that," said grandma. "For shame's sake an' the sake of
+me daughters, an' every other woman, I couldn't leave one of me sex in
+that predicament."
+
+"Oh, well, some people is wonderful strong in the nerve that way,"
+said Mrs Bray, and Carry interjected in an aside--
+
+"And others are mighty strong in the nerve of selfishness."
+
+"Of course nothing would give me greater pleasure than to go,"
+continued Mrs Bray, "but I would be of no use. I'm so pitiful,
+sensitive, and nervous that way."
+
+"It's a grand thing, then, that some are hard and not so sensitive, or
+people could die and no one would help 'em," said Carry, no longer
+able to contain her measure of Mrs Bray.
+
+Uncle Jake had the sulky in readiness, and grandma with a collection
+of requisites appeared with a great old shawl about her, Irish
+fashion.
+
+"Come you, Dawn, I might want your help, I'm not as strong as I was
+once; and Andrew, you come too, you'll do to send for the doctor; an'
+who'll take care of the pony?"
+
+I volunteered, and though a rotten stick to depend on, was accepted,
+and we three women rode in the sulky while Andrew ran behind. Having
+arrived at the little cottage half-way between Clay's and town, we
+found it was too sadly true that the poor little woman was alone in
+her trouble, and worse, she had not had the means to prepare for it,
+while most ghastly of all, there was no trace of her having had any
+nourishment that day.
+
+These are the sad cases of poverty, when the helpless victim is not of
+the calibre which can beg, and suffers an empty larder in silence and
+behind an appearance of respectability.
+
+The capable old grandmother had prepared herself for this possibility,
+and from under her capacious shawl produced a bottle of broth which
+she set about warming. She may not have been at first-hand acquainted
+with the few silk-wrapped lives run according to the methods scheduled
+in first-class etiquette books, but she had a very resourceful and
+far-seeing grip of that style of existence into which, regardless of
+inclination or capability, the great majority are forced by
+domineering circumstance; and being competent to grapple with its
+emergencies, she took hold of this case without humbug and with the
+fortitude and skill of a Japanese general.
+
+As though the main trouble were not enough, the poor little wife was
+further smitten with the two-edged mental anguish which is the
+experience of sensitive women whose husbands neglect them at this
+crisis of the maternal gethsemane. Doctor Smalley, who soon appeared
+after receiving Andrew's message, was not sufficiently finely strung
+to fully estimate the evil effect of Rooney-Molyneux's behaviour at
+this juncture; but not so the fine old woman of the ranks, with her
+quick perceptions and high and sensitive sentiment regarding the
+bed-rock relations of life. Calling the doctor out during an interval
+she discussed the matter within my hearing.
+
+"Poor little thing, she's just heart-broke with the way her husband's
+carryin' on. I wish I could deliver him up to Mrs Bray to scald; he's
+one of 'em deserves it, pure an' simple! If Jim Clay had forsook me
+an' demeaned me like this I would have died, but he was always
+tenderer than a mother. Somethink will have to be done. I'll send
+Andrew to Jimmeny's with the sulky to get him; he can get Danby to
+help him if he can't manage him hisself, and take the old varmint down
+to my place and keep him there secure. Tell Jake there it's got to be
+done, an' I'll make up a yarn to pacify the poor thing;" and
+returning to her patient, to the old dame's credit, truthful though
+she was, I heard her say--
+
+"Your husband's been fidgeting me, an' I never can stand any one but
+the doctor about at these times, so I bundled him off down to stay
+with Jake, and gave him strict instructions not to poke his nose back
+here till he's sent for."
+
+What diplomat could have made it more kindly tactful than that?
+
+"Quite right too," said the doctor, upholding her. "When I see it's
+going to be a good case like this, I always banish the man too."
+
+"But I could have seen him, and the poor fellow I'm sure is
+overwhelmed with anxiety," said the hapless little martyr in the brave
+make-believe that is a compulsory science with most women.
+
+"Well, _we_ ain't so anxious about him as we are about you," said the
+valiant old woman. "You're the chief person now. He ain't no
+consideration at all, an' can go an' bag his head for all we care,
+while we get you out of this fix."
+
+I sat upon the verandah until Andrew passed, taking home with him the
+noble Rooney-Molyneux, lordly scion of an ancient and doubtless effete
+house, and then the doctor banished Dawn from the house, giving her
+into my charge, with instructions to take her home and calm her down.
+
+Had she been the heroine of a romance she would have been a born
+nurse. Without any training or experience she could have surpassed
+Florence Nightingale, but, alas! she was merely an everyday girl in
+real life, and this being her first actual experience of the tragedy
+of birth, and the terror of it being intensified and aggravated by the
+pitiable surrounding circumstances, she was beside herself. She clung
+to me, choked with a flood of tears, and palpitating in an unbearable
+tumult of emotion.
+
+This case, so pathetically ordinary that most of us are debased by
+acquaintance with similar, to this girl was fresh, and striking her in
+all its inexcusable barbarity without any extenuating gloze, made her
+furious with pained and righteous indignation.
+
+I led her about by devious ways that her heart might cool ere we
+reached Clay's.
+
+The cloudless, breezeless night, though not yet severely cold, was
+crisp with the purity of frost and sweet with the exquisite scent of
+flowering loquats. The only sounds breaking its stillness were the
+trains passing across the long viaduct approaching the bridge, and the
+rumble of the vehicles as they ground their homeward way along the
+stony road, their lights flashing as they passed, and snatches of the
+occupants' conversation reaching us where we walked on a path beside
+the main thoroughfare. The heavens were a spangled glory, and the dark
+sleeping lands gave forth a fresh, pleasant odour. Man provided the
+only discordant note; but for the jarring of his misdoings there would
+have been perfect peace.
+
+Oh, the hot young heart that raged by my side! I too had forded the
+cruel torrent of facts that was torturing her mind; I knew; I
+understood. By-and-by she would arrive at my phase and have somewhat
+of my calmness, but to tell her so would merely have been the
+preaching so deservedly and naturally abhorred by the young, and
+except for holding her hand in a tight clasp, I was apparently
+unresponsive.
+
+As she grew quieter I steered for home, and eventually we arrived at
+the door of the kitchen and found there Jake, Andrew, and the
+Rooney-Molyneux--a small man with a large beard and the type of
+aristocratic face furnished with a long protruding nose and a narrow
+retreating forehead. Carry, up aloft like the angels, could be heard
+practising on my piano, and the soiled utensils scattered on the table
+illustrated that the gentlemen had had refreshments.
+
+It being Dawn's week in the kitchen, she set about collecting the cups
+in the wash-up dish, and presently some maudlin expression of
+sentiment on the part of the Rooney-Molyneux reopened the vials of her
+indignation.
+
+"I'm naturally anxious that it may be a son," he drivelled, "as there
+are so few male representatives of the old name now."
+
+"And the sooner there's none the better. There is no excuse for the
+likes of you being alive. I'd like to assist in the extermination of
+your family by putting you in the boiling copper on washing day. That
+would give you a taste of your deserts," raged the girl.
+
+She was speaking without restraint in the light of the high demands of
+crude, impetuous, merciless youth. I had once felt as she did, but now
+I could see the cruel train of conditions behind certain characters
+forcing them into different positions, and in place of Dawn's
+wholesome, justifiable, hot-headed rage against the likes of
+Rooney-hyphen, I felt for him a contempt so immeasurable that it
+almost toppled over and became pity.
+
+Seeing the little sense of responsibility that is inculcated regarding
+the laws of being, instead of being shocked at the familiarity of the
+Rooney-Molyneux type of husband and father, I gave myself up to
+agreeable surprise owing to the large number of noble and worthy
+parents I had discovered.
+
+    "The world does soil our minds and we soil it--
+    Time brings the tolerance that hides the truth,"
+
+but Dawn had not yet sunk to the apathy engendered by experience and
+familiarity. She adjudged the case on its merits, as it would be
+handled by an administrator of the law--the common law we all must
+keep. She did not imagine a network of exculpatory conditions or go
+squinting round corners to draw it into line as an act for which
+circumstances rather than the culprit were responsible; she gazed
+straight and honestly and saw a crime.
+
+"Dawn, you shameless hussy, you ought to be ashamed of yourself," said
+her uncle.
+
+"Oh yes, I'm well aware that any girl who says the straight truth
+about the things that concern them most in life, _ought_ to be ashamed
+of herself. They should hold their tongues except to flatter the men
+who trample them in the dust,--that's the proper and _womanly_
+attitude for a girl, I know," she said desperately.
+
+"I'm sure this is uncalled for," simpered the hero of the act, rising
+and showing signs of looking for his hat.
+
+"You'd better run and tell your wife you've been insulted, poor little
+dear!" said Dawn.
+
+"Look!" said Andrew to me uneasily, "tell Dawn to dry up, will you;
+she'll take no notice of me, an' if that feller goes home actin' the
+goat I'll get the blame, an' he ain't drunk enough to be shut up. Blow
+him, I say!"
+
+"I'm sure," said Mr Rooney-Molyneux, who apparently had various things
+mixed with politics, "that some men, though the women have taken the
+votes and their manhood, still have some rights; bless me, it _must_
+be acknowledged they have some rights in creation!"
+
+Here he made an ineffectual grab for his hat and a sprawling plunge
+in the direction of the door, saying, "I've never been so insulted!"
+
+"Blow you! Sit down, Mr Mooney-Rollyno, or whatever you are," said
+Andrew, "you've got to stay here; and Dawn, hold your mag! You'd give
+any one the pip with your infernal gab."
+
+"I'm sure it must be conceded that men have some rights?" Mr
+Rooney-Molyneux appealed to me. I was the most responsible person
+present, Uncle Jake did not count, the other three were children, and
+so it behoved me to take a grip of the situation.
+
+"Rights in creation! I should rather think so! In creation men have
+the rights, or perhaps duties, of gods--to protect, to nurture, to
+guard and to love, and when as a majority men rise to them we shall be
+a great people, but for the present the only rights many of them wrest
+and assert by mere superior brute force are those of bullies and
+selfish cowards. Sit down immediately!"
+
+He sat without delay.
+
+"All that Dawn says of you is deserved. The least you can do now to
+repair matters is to swallow your pill noiselessly and give no further
+trouble until you are called upon to obstruct the way again in
+semblance of discharging responsibilities of which a cat would be
+twice as capable."
+
+"Yes," said Dawn, "if you dare to talk of going home to worry your
+wife I'll throw this dish of water right on you, and when I come to
+think of things, I feel like throwing a hot one on every man."
+
+As she said this she swirled her dishcloth to clean the bowl, and
+turning to toss the water into the drain outside the door, confronted
+Ernest Breslaw.
+
+Quite two hours had elapsed since he had parted from us to conduct
+Miss Grosvenor to her home, where he had been long delayed in argument
+concerning whether he could or could not address a public meeting. I
+discovered later that an opportunity to gracefully take his leave from
+Grosvenor's had not occurred earlier, and that he had quite
+relinquished hope of calling at Clay's that night, but to his
+surprise, seeing the place lighted as he was passing, he came towards
+the kitchen door.
+
+Dawn was doubtless piqued that he should have spent so much time with
+Miss Grosvenor, which, considering his previous attentions to her, and
+the rules of the game as observed in this stratum of society, gave him
+the semblance of flirting--perfidious action, worthy of the miscreant
+man in the beginning of a career which at a maturer stage should cover
+cruelty and cowardice equalling that of Rooney-Molyneux! Dawn lacked
+restraint in her emotional outbursts; the poor girl's state of
+nervousness bordered on hysteria; the water was nearly out of her hand
+in any case, and with a smack of that irritated divergence from lawful
+and decorous conduct of which the sanest of us are at times the
+victim, she pitched the dish of greasy, warm water fairly on the
+immaculate young athlete, accompanying the action with the
+ejaculation--
+
+"That's what you deserve, too!"
+
+"I demand--" he exclaimed, but further utterance was drowned by a
+hearty guffaw from Andrew which fully confirmed the outrageous insult.
+
+"Just what I should expect of you," sneered Uncle Jake, while Mr
+Rooney-Molyneux, his attention thus diverted from his own affairs,
+gazed in watery-eyed surprise at a second victim of the retributive
+Dawn.
+
+"Well, that's about what you'd expect from a _thing earning her
+living_, but never of a young lady in a _good_ home of her own and
+living with _the mother of a family_," said Carry, appearing in time
+to witness the accident.
+
+I said nothing to the white-faced girl, for there was more urgent work
+to be done in repairing the damage. Hurrying through the house, and
+reefing my skirts on the naked rose-bushes under Miss Flipp's window,
+where the dead girl's skirts had caught as she went out to die, I
+gained a point intercepting Ernest as he strode along the path leading
+to the bridge.
+
+"Ernest!"
+
+"You must excuse me to-night," he said, showing that my intervention
+was most unwelcome.
+
+"Ernest, if you have any friendship for me, stop. I must speak to you,
+and I'm not feeling able for much more to-night."
+
+Thus did I make a lever of my invalidism, and in the gentleness of his
+strength he submitted to be detained.
+
+Some men would have covered their annoyance with humorous satire, but
+Ernest was not furnished with this weapon. He only had physical
+strength, and that could not avail him in such an instance. I placed
+my hand on his arm, ostensibly for support, but in reality to be sure
+of his detention, and found that he was saturated. Not a pleasant
+experience on a frosty night, but there was no danger of it proving
+deleterious to one in his present state of excitement. Being one of
+those natures whose emotions, though not subtle, make up for this
+deficiency in wholesome thoroughness, he was furious with the rage of
+heated youth not given to spending itself on every adventitious excuse
+for annoyance, and debarred by conditions from any sort of
+retaliation. In addition to being bitterly wounded, his sporting
+instinct was bruised, and he chafed under the unfairness of the blow.
+
+The beauty of the cloudless, breezeless night had been supplemented by
+a lop-sided moon, risen sufficiently to show the exquisite mists
+hanging like great swathes of white gossamer in the hollows, and to
+cast the shadows of the buildings and trees in the silent river, at
+this time of the year looking so cold and treacherous in its
+rippleless flow. The wet grass was stiffening with frost, and the only
+sounds disturbing the chillier purity of advancing night were the
+erratic bell at the bridge and the far-off rumble of a train on the
+mountain-side. Man still afforded the discordant note, and the only
+heat in the surroundings was that in the burning young heart that
+raged by my side.
+
+Oh, youth! youth! You must each look back and see for yourselves, in
+the aft-light cast by later experience, the mountains and fiery
+ordeals you made for yourselves out of mole-hills in the matter of
+heart-break. We, whose hair is white, cannot help you, though we have
+gone before and know so well the cruel stretches on the road you
+travel.
+
+Ernest waited for me to take the initiative, and as everything that
+rose to my lips seemed banal, we stood awkwardly silent till he was
+forced into saying--
+
+"I'm afraid you are overdoing yourself. Can I not help you to your
+room? You will be ill."
+
+"The only thing that would overdo me is that you should be upset about
+this. It must not make any difference."
+
+"Difference between you and me?--nothing short of an earthquake could
+do that," he replied.
+
+"I mean with Dawn. It must not make any difference with her. It was
+only a freak."
+
+"Certainly; I would be a long time retaliating upon a _lady_, no
+matter what she did to me; but when--when--" (he could not bring
+himself to name it, it struck him as so disgraceful)--"she intimates
+to me, as plainly as was done to-night, that she disapproves of my
+presence in her house, well, a fellow would want pole-axing if he
+hadn't pride to take a hint like that."
+
+"She did not mean anything. She will be more hurt than you are."
+
+"Mean anything! Had it been a joke I could have managed to endure it,
+or an accident about which she would have worried, I would have been
+amused, but it was deliberate; and if it had been _clean_ water--but
+ugh! it was greasy slop-water, to make it as bad as it could be; and
+if a man had done it--"
+
+The muscles of his arm expanded under my interested touch as he made a
+fist of the strong brown hand.
+
+"But being a girl I can only put up with it," he said with the
+helplessness of the athlete in dealing with such a delinquent.
+
+"Did you hear what she said too? Great Scott! it is not as though I
+had done her any harm! I merely came here to see a friend, and made
+myself agreeable because you said she was good to you; and, dear me!"
+His voice broke with the fervour of his perturbation. He had been
+wounded to the core of his manly _amour propre_; and to state that he
+was not more than twenty-five, gives a better idea of his state of
+mind than could any amount of laborious diagnosis.
+
+"What can I have done?" he further ejaculated. "Can some one have told
+her falsely that I'm a cad in any way? She might have waited until
+she proved it. _I_ would not have believed bad any one spoken badly of
+_her_." (Here an inadvertent confession of the growing affection he
+felt for her.) "Even if I were deserving of such ignominy, it was none
+of her business. I only came to see you,--she had nothing to do with
+me."
+
+Then I took hold of this splendidly muscular young creature wounded to
+the quick. I determinedly usurped a mother's privilege in regard to
+the situation, and glancing back over my barren life I would that I
+had been mother of just such a son. What a kingdom 'twould have been;
+and, in the order of things, being forced to surrender him to
+another's keeping, I could not have chosen a better or more suitable
+than Dawn. Entering his principality to reign as queen, while his
+manhood was yet an unsacked stronghold, she was of the character and
+determination to steer him in the way of uprightness to the end.
+
+Wistfulness upsprung as I reviewed my empty life, but rude reality
+suddenly uprose and obliterated ideality. It put on the scroll a
+picture of motherhood, and mother-love wantonly squandered, trodden in
+the mire, and, instead of being recognised as a kingdom, treated only
+as a weakness, and traded upon to enslave women. I turned with a sigh,
+and we walked round a corner of the garden where, in one recent
+instance, appallingly common, a poor frail woman had crept out in the
+dead of night to pay alone the penalty of a crime incurred by two--one
+foolish and weak, the other murderously selfishly a coward.
+
+I addressed Ernest Breslaw regarding the painful effect this tragedy
+had produced on the mind of Dawn, and how it had been further
+overstrung by the later one, and concluded--
+
+"Had I expressed my inward feelings in outward actions at Dawn's age,
+and being armed with a dish of water, to have thrown it on the nearest
+individual would have been a very mild ebullition; but I set my teeth
+against outward expression and let it fester in my heart, while the
+beauty of Dawn's disposition is that her feelings all come out. She
+has disgraced herself by making outward demonstration of what many
+inwardly feel; but understanding what I have put before you, you must
+not hold the girl responsible for her action."
+
+With masculine simplicity he was unable to comprehend the complexity
+of feminine emotions engendered by the exigencies of the more
+artificial and suppressed conditions of life as forced upon women.
+
+"I understand about old Rooney; I feel as disgusted with him as any
+one does, but _I_ am not going to emulate him. I'd jolly well cut my
+throat first; and if I could lay my hand on the snake at the root of
+the drowning case, I'd make one to roast him alive! What made Miss
+Dawn confound me with that sort?"
+
+"She doesn't for an instant do so. On the contrary, she would be the
+first to repudiate such a suggestion."
+
+"Good Lord! then why did she throw that stuff on me? It was only fit
+for a criminal."
+
+"Can you not grasp that she was irritated beyond endurance with the
+unwholesomeness of the whole system of life in relation to women, and
+that for the moment you appeared as one of the army of oppressors?"
+
+"But that isn't fair! _I_ know enough of women--some women--to make
+one shudder with repulsion; but there would be no sense or justice in
+venting my disgust on you or the other good ones," he contended.
+
+"Quite so; but our moral laws are such that some issues are more
+repulsive to a woman than a man, and you must admit there are heavy
+arguments could be brought in extenuation of Dawn's attitude of mind
+when the water slipped out of her hand."
+
+"There's no doubt women do have to swallow a lot," he said.
+
+"You don't feel so angry on account of the impetuous Dawn's act now,
+do you?"
+
+"It doesn't look so bad in the teeth of your argument, and if she
+would only say something to explain, I won't mind; but otherwise I'll
+have sense to make myself scarce in this neighbourhood."
+
+"I'm afraid her vanity will be too wounded for her to give in."
+
+"I'll make it as easy for her as I can; but, good Lord! I can't go to
+her and apologise because she threw dirty water on me."
+
+"Well, I'll bid you good-night. I must run in to Dawn. I expect she is
+sobbing her heart out by this, and biting her pretty curled lips to
+relieve her feelings,--her lips that were meant for kisses, not cruel
+usage."
+
+"Good heavens! Do you really think she'll feel like that?" he asked in
+astonishment.
+
+"I'm certain."
+
+"But I can't see why--she might have had reason had I been the
+aggressor."
+
+"If you had hurt her she would not feel half so bad. You would be a
+hopeless booby if you could not understand that."
+
+"Really, now, if I thought she would take it that way, it would make
+all the difference in the world. But had she desired to despatch me,
+half that energy of insult would do," he said, drawing up, while
+hardness crept into his voice, but it softened again as he concluded--
+
+"I wouldn't like her to be upset about it, though, if she didn't quite
+mean it."
+
+"Well, you can be sure that in regard to you she was very far from
+meaning it, and that she will be dreadfully upset about it; so think
+of what I've said, and come and see me in the morning."
+
+Now that he had grown calm, he was shivering with the cold, so I bade
+him run home.
+
+On returning to the house I found Andrew the solitary watcher of his
+charge, who, covered by an old cloak, was snoring on the kitchen sofa.
+
+"Dear me, where are they all?"
+
+"In bed; and look at his nibbs there. I reckon I took a wrinkle from
+Dawn as how to manage him. Soon as every one's back was turned he
+began actin' the goat again an' makin' for home, an' I thought here
+goes, I don't care a hang if all the others roused on me like blazes,
+so long as grandma don't,--she's the only one makes me sit up,--so I
+flung water on him, not warm water but real cold. It took seven years'
+growth out of him, an' then I gave him a drink of hot coffee, an'
+undressed him, an' he was jolly glad to lay down there."
+
+"Why, you'll give the man a cold!"
+
+"No jolly fear. I took his clothes off. I've got 'em dryin' here. I
+couldn't find any of my gear, an' wasn't game to ask Uncle Jake, so I
+clapped him into a night-dress of grandma's. Look! he's got his hand
+out. I reckon the frill looks all so gay, don't you? I bet grandma
+will rouse, but I'll have a little peace with him now an' chance the
+ducks," said the resourceful warder, whose charge really looked so
+absurd that I was provoked to laughter.
+
+"How did you manage him? Was he tractable?"
+
+"He soon dropped that there was no good in bein' nothing else. He
+spluttered something about me disgracin' him, because something on his
+crest said he was brave or something; but I told him I didn't care a
+hang if he had a crest the size of a cockatoo or was as bald as Uncle
+Jake, that I was full of him actin' the goat, an' that finished him."
+
+"Enough too," I laughed, as I bade the Australian lad, with the very
+Australian estimate of the unimportance of some things sacred to
+English minds, the Australian parting salute--
+
+"So long!"
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY.
+
+"ALAS! HOW EASILY THINGS GO WRONG!"
+
+
+On ascending to my room I did not, as expected, find Dawn sobbing, but
+she had her face so determinedly turned away that I refrained from
+remark. I was none the worse for the diverting incidents of the
+evening, because the excitement of them had come from without instead
+of within. The rush of the trains soon became a far-away sound, and
+the light that flashed from their engine-doors as they climbed the
+first zig of the mountain, and which could be seen from my bed, had
+been shut from my sight by the fogs of approaching sleep, when I was
+aroused by heart-broken sobbing from the bed by the opposite wall.
+
+After a while I got out of bed, bent on an attempt to comfort.
+
+"Dawn, what is it?"
+
+"I'm sorry I waked you, I thought you were sound asleep," she said,
+pulling in with a violent effort but speedily breaking into renewed
+sobs.
+
+"I was thinking of poor little Mrs Rooney-Molyneux, and how my mother
+died," said the girl, rolling over and burying her lovely head in her
+tear-drenched pillow. "I can't help thinking about the sadness and
+cruelty of life to women."
+
+I felt certain that a matter less deep and lying farther from the core
+of being was perturbing her more, but as she chose to ignore it, I did
+likewise.
+
+"Well, we must not dwell too sadly on that for which we are not
+responsible, and women are privileged in being able to repay the cost
+of their being."
+
+"Yes, I always remember that, and often shudder to think I might have
+been a man, with their greater possibilities of cowardliness and
+selfish cruelty, as illustrated by old Rooney and Miss Flipp's
+destroyer."
+
+Not a word concerning her action to Ernest. Thought of it stung too
+much for mention, so there was nothing to do but comfort her till she
+fell asleep and await from Ernest the next turn of events bearing on
+the situation.
+
+The next turn of events in the Clay household bore down upon us next
+morning after breakfast when grandma came home, having left the
+first-born of Rooney-Molyneux comfortably asleep in the swaddling
+clothes which had contained Dawn at the date when she had been "a
+little winjin' thing," with whom everything had disagreed, and which
+garments were lent to the new-born babe until grandma could provide
+him with others. The hale old dame was not too fatigued to be in a
+state of lively ire, and opened fire upon her circle with--
+
+"I met old Hollis on the way home, an' do you believe, he says to me,
+'Well, Mrs Clay, so I believe you've took to rabbit ketchin' in your
+old days.' It was like his cheek, the same as w'en he said the monkeys
+would be havin' a vote next. _Rabbit ketchin'_ indeed! No wonder women
+has got sense at last to make the birth-rate decline, when you see
+cases like that, and even the people that go to help them out of the
+fix--an' that out of kindness, not for no reward nor pleasure--is
+demeaned to their face an' called _rabbit ketchers_, if you please! I
+reckon all women ought to be compelled to be _rabbit ketchers_ for a
+time, an' it would be such a eye-opener to them that if there wasn't
+some alterations made in the tone of the whole business they would all
+strike so there'd be no need of _rabbit ketchin'_, as some call it, to
+make things more disagreeabler; and that's what has been goin' on
+lately in a underhand way, but _some people_," concluded the
+intelligent old lady with her customary choler, coming to a full stop
+ere recapitulating the misdoings of these unmentionable members of
+society.
+
+"Rabbit ketching," as midwifery is contemptuously termed in the
+vernacular, does require a status, and those who have need of it merit
+some consideration. Civilisation, stretching up to recognise that
+every child is a portion of State wealth, may presently make some
+movement to recognise maternity as a business or office needing time
+and strength, not as a mere passing detail thrown in among mountains
+of other slavery.
+
+During the whole forenoon I busied myself with the construction of
+garments for the new arrival in this vale of woe, and at the same time
+was on the alert for the commanded appearance of Ernest Breslaw.
+Instead of himself he sent as messenger a well-spoken lad, who
+presented Mr Ernest's compliments, and hoped that I was not feeling
+any ill effects from my unusual exertion during the previous evening.
+
+I sent a request, per return, that he should call upon me during the
+afternoon, but he did not regard it. The next being Dawn's day for
+Sydney, I waited for this event to hatch some progress in the case,
+but upon her return she had no favours to share with me or merry tale
+to tell of being taken to afternoon tea by Ernest.
+
+Eweword figured in this account, and so prominently as to suggest that
+her talk of the fun she had had with him was a little forced, so on
+the following morning I took it upon myself to call upon the backward
+knight in his own castle. Unmooring one of the boats, I rowed with
+great caution obliquely across the stream till, reaching the desired
+pier, I tethered my craft and ascended among an orange-grove laden
+with its golden fruit, and between the rattling canes of the vineyard
+dismantled by winter, till I reached the house where at present my
+young friend sojourned, and I was thankful that bleached as well as
+unfaded locks having their own peculiar privileges, I was able to make
+this call with propriety.
+
+The young gentleman was in, and without delay appeared to the
+beautiful lady's self-directed and appointed ambassadress.
+
+"I suppose I may pay you a visit," I said with a smile as he seated me
+in the drawing-room which we had to ourselves. "As you didn't seem to
+care whether I were dead or alive I have come over to practically
+illustrate that I'm still above ground. Why did you not come to see
+me?"
+
+Ernest reddened and fidgeted, and said haltingly--
+
+"You know if you had been ill I would have been the first to go to
+you, but I knew you were quite well, and I've been so busy," he
+finished lamely.
+
+"Now, you know that I know that you have been idle--quite unendurably
+idle," I retorted, a remark he received in embarrassed silence, which
+endured till I broke it with--
+
+"Well, I suppose you are waiting for me to divulge the real object of
+my pilgrimage, and that is to know why you haven't kept your agreement
+about making that little mistake as easy as you could for Miss Dawn.
+She's fretting herself pale about it."
+
+Ernest stood up, his colour flaming into his tanned cheeks till they
+were as bright as his locks, while he made as though to speak once or
+twice, but hesitated, and at length exclaimed--
+
+"This is not fair--you must, you have no reason to bother--you," and
+there he foundered. Ernest could neither lie, snub, nor evade. He was
+totally devoid of all the attributes of a smart politician.
+
+"Have you not sufficient faith in my regard for you to trust my motive
+in thus apparently seeking to pry into your private life?" I asked.
+
+"You know I think more of you than any one, and I'll tell you the
+whole thing," he replied, taking a seat beside me.
+
+"You have made a mistake in assuming that Miss Clay, or whatever her
+real name might be (his indifference was well assumed), did not fully
+mean her action, and I was a fool to believe you when I had more than
+sufficient proof to the contrary. Yesterday morning I happened to go
+to Sydney in the same train as she did, and as I happened--entirely by
+chance and quite unexpectedly--to meet her on the platform, I lifted
+my hat as usual to make it easy for her, and a nice fool I made of
+myself. She didn't merely pretend not to see me, but hurried by me in
+contempt and came back with that Eweword, who glared at me as though I
+were a tramp who had attempted to molest her. I am sure you could not
+expect me to go any farther than that, and I only did that because you
+call her a friend of yours. Perhaps Eweword doesn't do things that
+necessitate the throwing of dirty water on him. It was rather an
+uncalled-for thing to do to any one. Perhaps the old dame doesn't
+allow her boarders to have visitors, and that is the polite way they
+have of informing one to the contrary."
+
+The sky looked rather murky. I said nothing, having nothing ready to
+say.
+
+"Oh, by the way, I'm leaving here to-morrow for Adelaide, where I am
+to play in some inter-colonial football matches against the New
+Zealanders. Is there anything I could do for you over there?" he said,
+as though having dismissed the other unworthy trifle from his mind.
+
+"Going to run away because a girl, half accidentally and half out of
+nervous irritation, threw a little water on you!"
+
+There I had said what I really thought, and half expected the snub
+which, according to the rules of tact, I deserved for my divergence
+therefrom, but it did not come; he was a man of the field, and in this
+type of encounter had not a chance against one of my perceptions.
+
+He laughed forcedly. "That would be something to turn tail for,
+wouldn't it?"
+
+"But are you not doing so? If a beautiful girl did such a thing to me
+it would only make me the more set to woo her to graciousness," I
+said.
+
+"Perhaps so, if she were some girl you specially considered, but in
+the case of a passing stranger that I may never meet again, it would
+not be worth wasting time, especially as her action was so uncalled
+for and unwomanly."
+
+"But you are sure to meet her again if you continue our friendship, as
+I hope to have her with me, and that is why I'm taking the trouble to
+thus interfere in what does not apparently concern either you or me
+very much. _I_ don't consider Dawn as a passing stranger. I think her
+especially honest and especially beautiful, and it worries me to think
+she has thus erred. Her action was _unwomanly_, if you like, but
+peculiarly feminine, with the unavoidable hysterical femininity
+engendered in women by their subjected environment. Are you quite sure
+you consider Dawn merely a passing stranger not worth consideration?"
+I asked, looking him fair in the eyes; and the quick lowering of them
+and the tightening of his mouth satisfied me that he could not
+truthfully answer in the affirmative.
+
+"It is a matter of what she considers me," he said.
+
+"Oh, well," I said indifferently, now that I had gained my point, "it
+doesn't matter to me, but I'll be sorry to lose your company, and I
+thought you were taking an interest in Leslie's candidature, and we
+could have enjoyed it together."
+
+"So I do."
+
+"Well, come back as soon as you get these matches played, and we'll
+have some good times together again, and I'll keep the reprehensible
+Dawn out of the way; and anyhow, remember she didn't throw _cold_
+water on you, and that's something."
+
+"Very well, I'll be back in about three weeks' time to see how Les.
+gets on. Polling-day hasn't been fixed yet. I'd like to see it through
+now I've started."
+
+"Of course," said I, considering it a good move that he should
+disappear for a short time, and after this he rowed me on the Noonoon
+till Clay's dinner-bell sounded and I went up to eat.
+
+That evening "Dora" Eweword came in to tea and remained afterwards.
+He informed us that the red-headed chap who had been loafing around
+Kelman's had gone to Europe.
+
+"Has he? Did he tell you?" interestedly inquired Andrew.
+
+"He mentioned that he would leave for South Australia by the express
+this evening," I replied, but did not add that his going to Europe was
+a little stretched.
+
+Dawn was quiet. Her merry impudence did not enliven the company that
+night, and after tea, when Eweword caught her alone for a few moments
+as I was leaving the room, he said--
+
+"So you cleared the red-headed mug out after all. Andrew says it was
+alright. You won't listen to me, but you haven't chucked the wash-up
+water on me yet, that's one thing." His complacence was very
+pronounced. To his surprise Dawn made no reply, but biting her lip to
+keep back her tears, walked out of the room, and in the dark of the
+passage smote her dimpled palms together, exclaiming--
+
+"Would to heaven I had thrown the water over this galoot instead of
+_him_," and the thermometer of "Dora's" self-satisfaction fell
+considerably when she did not appear again that evening.
+
+That night, when the waning moon got far enough on her westward way to
+surmount the old house on the knoll beside the Noonoon and cast its
+shadow in the deep clear water, the silver beams strayed through a
+little window facing the great ranges, and found the features of a
+beautiful sleeper disfigured by weeping; but youth's rest was sound
+despite the tear-stains, and the old moon smiled at such ephemeral
+sorrow. The night wind coming down the gorges with the river sighed
+along the valley as the moon remembered all the faces which, though
+tearless under her nocturnal inspection, yet were pale from the inward
+sobs, only giving outward evidence in bleaching locks and shadowy
+eyes. Even within sound of the engines roaring down the spur, many of
+the little night-wrapped houses, hard set upon the plain, had inmates
+kept from sleep by deeper sorrows than Dawn had ever known.
+
+The first fortnight of Ernest's absence, believed by his doubting
+young lady to be final, was a stirring time in Noonoon, and
+particularly full at Clay's. Jam-making was the star item on the
+latter's domestic bill. Baskets and baskets of golden oranges and
+paler lemons and shaddocks were converted into jam and marmalade, and
+ranged on the shelves of the already replete storehouse, in readiness
+to tempt the summer palate of the week-end boarders which should
+appear when the days stretched out again. We were occupied in this
+business to such an extent that the sight of oranges became a
+weariness, and Andrew averred that the very name of marmalade gave him
+the pip.
+
+At night we enjoyed the diversion of the meetings, and talk and gossip
+of them made conversation for the days. The previously mentioned
+political addresses were but mild fanfares by comparison with the
+flamboyance of the gasconading now in progress, and in its reports of
+these bursts of oratory the 'Noonoon Advertiser' gave further evidence
+of its broad-minded liberality.
+
+"Mrs Gas Ranter," it reported, "addressed a packed meeting in the
+Citizens' Hall last night, and proved herself the best public speaker
+who has been heard in Noonoon during the present campaign," &c. It
+recognised worth, and gamely gave the palm to the deserving,
+irrespective of party or sex,--did not so much as insert the narrow
+quibble that she was the best for a woman.
+
+Among other incidents, the lady canvassers called at Clay's and
+received a piece of grandma's mind.
+
+"Thanks; I don't want no one to tell me how to vote. I've rared two or
+three families and gave a hand with more, and have intelligence the
+same as others, and at my time of my life don't want no one to tell me
+my business. I reckon I could tell a good many others how to vote."
+
+The pity of it was that it was immaterial how any electors cast their
+vote. Neither party had a sensible grip of affairs, and besides, love
+of country in a patriotic way is not a trait engendered in
+Australians. In politics, as in private life, all is selfishness. The
+city people thought only of building a greater Sydney, the residents
+of Noonoon and other little towns had mind for nothing but their own
+small centre,--all seeing no farther than their noses, or that what
+directly benefited their little want might not be good for the country
+at large, and that legislature must, to be successful, better the
+living conditions of the masses, not merely of one class or section.
+Then city men, unacquainted with the practical working of the land,
+could not possibly handle the land question effectively, and,
+moreover, a man might understand how to manage the coastal district
+and remain at sea regarding the great areas west of the watershed.
+
+Another big mistake lay in over representation of the city and the
+under representation of the man on the land. The producer should be
+the first care, and while he is woefully disregarded and
+ill-considered a country cannot thrive. The reason of this state of
+affairs was the division of electorates on a population basis. This
+meant that a city electorate covered a very small area, and that
+practically all its wants were attended by the municipality, so that
+the city member had leisure to ply the trade of merchant, doctor, or
+barrister within a few minutes of the house of parliament; whereas the
+country member, to become acquainted with the vast area he represented
+and the requirements of its inhabitants and attend parliamentary
+sittings, had no time left to be anything but a member of parliament,
+precariously depending upon re-election for a livelihood.
+
+Dawn threw herself into the contest with great enthusiasm, and also
+industriously pursued her vocal studies, but for her was exceptionally
+subdued and inclined to be cross on the smallest provocation. She had
+become so engrossed in political meetings that "Dora" Eweword, who was
+continually at Clay's since the retreat of Ernest, one day
+remonstrated with her. She had made a political meeting the excuse for
+declining to go rowing with him, whereupon he remarked--
+
+"Oh, leave 'em to the old maids, Dawn. You'll grow into a scarecrow
+that would frighten any man away if you hang on to politics much
+more."
+
+"Well, if it would frighten _some_ men away, I'd go in for them twice
+as much," snapped the girl. "I suppose you admire the style of girls
+who are going around now saying, after some straightforward women have
+said what we all feel and got the vote, 'Oh, I don't care for the
+vote. Let men rule; they are the stronger vessel. Politics don't
+belong to women,' and so on. You'd think me a sweet little womanly
+dear if I croaked like that; but you keep your brightest eye on that
+sort of a squarker, and for all her noise about being content with her
+rights, you'll see that she takes more than her share of the good of
+the reforms that other women have worked for."
+
+"Oh Lord!" good-temperedly giggled "Dora," for home truths that would
+be considered sheer spleen from a plain girl are taken as fine fun
+when uttered by a girl as physically attractive as Dawn.
+
+During the second week of the footballer's absence, who should appear
+to lend a hand on the side of Leslie Walker but Mr Pornsch, _uncle_ of
+the late Miss Flipp. He arrived with the callousness worthy of a
+certain department of man's character, and addressed a meeting with as
+much pomp and self-confidence and talk of bettering the morals of the
+people, as though he had been an Ellice Hopkins. He had the further
+effrontery to visit Clay's and feign crocodile grief for the
+deplorable fate of his niece. He protested his shame and horror,
+together with a desire for revenge, so loudly that I resolved that he
+should not be disappointed, that the dead girl should be in a slight
+measure avenged, and he should not only know but feel it.
+
+"I ain't got me voting paper. Me an' Carry will go up for 'em
+to-morrer," said grandma one evening from her arm-chair near the
+fireplace.
+
+There had been the usual meeting, and Ada Grosvenor and others had
+called in to discuss it.
+
+"Why, didn't the police deliver yours?" inquired Miss Grosvenor.
+
+"No, we was missed somehow."
+
+"Easy to see Danby wasn't on the racket of deliverin' electors'
+rights, or you would have had two or three apiece," Andrew chipped in.
+
+"I'm going for Walker straight," announced grandma. "He's temperance
+at all events, and that is somethink w'en there ain't any
+common-sense in any of them."
+
+"If I had twenty votes I wouldn't give one to that Walker," said
+Andrew. "All the women are after him because they think he's
+good-lookin', an' he's got bandy legs. They clap him like fury, and
+look round like as they'd eat any one that goes to ask him a question.
+They seem to reckon he's an angel that oughtn't to be asked nothink he
+can't answer. I believe they'd all kiss him an' marry him if they
+could. I hate him. Vote for Henderson, he wouldn't give the women a
+vote, and only men are workin' on his committee."
+
+"Oh my, what's this!" exclaimed Dawn.
+
+"Well, you know, the women _are_ making fools of themselves about this
+Walker," said Ada Grosvenor, with her intelligently humorous laugh. "I
+don't think much of him myself. In spite of his choice phrasing of the
+usual hustings' bellowing, if women had not already the franchise he
+would be slow to admit them on a footing of equality with men as
+regards being. There are two extremes of men, you know. One thinks
+that woman's position in life is to act squaw to her lord and master.
+The other regards her as a toy--an article to be handed in and out of
+carriages like choice china--a drawing-room ornament, to be decked in
+wonderful gowns, and whose whole philosophy of existence should be to
+add to the material delight of men. Walker is a representative of the
+latter type, and old Hollis, who thinks that monkeys have as good a
+right to vote as women, belongs to the other. At a surface glance
+their views regarding women seem to be diametrically opposed, but to
+me it has always appeared that they equally serve the purpose of
+degrading the position of women. You should have seen how cruel
+Walker looked to-night when an old man asked if he approved of women
+entering the senate. He said _no_ like a clap of thunder."
+
+It was probably this perspicacity on the part of Ada Grosvenor,
+coupled with a sense of humour, that earned for her the reputation of
+"trying to ape the swells."
+
+"Well, good-night everybody, and, Mrs Clay, don't forget to apply for
+your right in time, or you won't be able to vote," she said in
+parting.
+
+"No fear," responded grandma. "I've not been counted among mad people
+an' criminals, an' done out of me simple rights till this time of life
+without appreciatin' 'em w'en I've got 'em at last."
+
+Next day, true to intention, the old dame and Carry went up town for
+their "voting papers," and to repeat the former's words, "was
+downright insulted, so to speak."
+
+The civil servant whose duty it was to give rights to those electors
+who were not already in possession of such, was carrying affairs with
+a high hand, and had the brazen effrontery to tell Grandma Clay that
+it was a disgrace to see a woman of her years "running after a vote,"
+as he elegantly expressed it; and he also suggested to Carry that it
+would suit her better to be at home doing her housework, and to put
+the cap on his gross misconduct, he persuaded them that they had left
+it too late to obtain the coveted document, the first outward and
+visible proof that men considered their women complete rational
+beings.
+
+Carry had retorted that it would suit him better to do the work he was
+paid for than to exhibit his ignorance in meddling with the private
+affairs of others, and that if he could discharge his duties as well
+as she did her housework, he wouldn't make an ass of himself by
+showing his fangs about women having the vote in the way he did.
+
+The two electresses thus bluffed came down the street and told their
+grievance to Mr Oscar Lawyer, for the nonce head of the Opposition
+League, and at ordinary seasons a father of his people, to whom all
+the town made in times of necessity,--whether it was an old beldame
+requiring assistance from the Benevolent Society or a lad seeking a
+situation and requiring a testimonial of character.
+
+With Mr Oscar Lawyer they also ran upon Mr Pornsch; and it was
+discovered that the churlish clerk's statement was utterly false, and
+made because he was on the side of Henderson and these two women were
+not. There was more talk than there is space for here, but the upshot
+of it was the clerk was routed, and grandma and Carry came home
+triumphantly, each in possession of one of the magic sheets of blue
+paper, which they spread out on the table for us all to see.
+
+"Well, well!" said grandma, "I seen the convicts flogged in days w'en
+this was nothink but a colony to ship them to, and I drove coaches
+w'en the line was only as far out of Sydney as here; and to think I
+should have lived to see the last of the convicts gone, coaches nearly
+become a novelty of the past, us callin' ourselves a nation, an' here
+a paper in me hand to show I can vote a man into this parliament and
+the other that the king's son hisself come out to open. I'm glad to
+see us lived that we can have our say in the laws now same as the men,
+and not have to swaller anythink they liked to put upon us to soot
+theirselves," and the old dame, with a splendid light in her eye,
+rubbed the creases out of the paper and spread it out again.
+
+"Pooh, it's the same as we've had all along. You didn't think a
+elector's right was anythink to be grinnin' at w'en the men had it. I
+never seen you gapin' at mine; you'd think it was somethink wonderful
+now when you've got one of your own," said Uncle Jake, coming in.
+
+"Well, I never! Jake Sorrel! Of course we don't think much of other
+people's things! What is the good of another woman's baby or husband
+or _frying-pan_, that is, if it was equally a thing you couldn't
+borrer? And if you was blind, what pleasure would you get out of some
+one else seein' the blue sky, or warnin' that there was a snake there
+to be trod on, an' that's what it's been like with the elector's
+rights."
+
+"Well, but what difference does that bit of paper make to you now? You
+won't live no longer nor find your appetite no better, an' it won't
+pay the taxes for you," contended uncle.
+
+"Then if it is of so little account, why does it gruel you so much to
+see me with it? An' little as it is, there ain't that paper's reason
+why we shouldn't have always voted; and little though it is, that's
+all the difference has stood all these years between men voting and
+women not; and little as you think it is for a woman to have done
+without, it's what men would shed their blood for if _they_ was done
+out of it. It ain't what things actually are, it's all they stand
+for," and grandma gathered up her _right_ and went to take off her
+bonnet and change the bristling black dress which she donned for
+public appearance.
+
+I sat musing while she was away. "It ain't what things actually are,
+it's all they stand for," as the old dame had said; and her delight in
+being a freed citizen, no longer ranked with criminals and lunatics,
+had touched my higher self more profoundly than anything had had
+power to do for years.
+
+Though taking a vivid interest in the electioneering, owing to the
+large distillation of the essence of human nature it afforded, as
+neither of the candidates had a practical grip of public business, I
+cared not which should poll highest; but now I resolved to procure my
+right and go to the ballot, and, if nothing more, make an informal
+vote _for the sake of all that it stood for_.
+
+At back of the simple paper were arrayed the spirits of countless
+noble and fearless men and women who had so loved justice and their
+fellows that they had spent their lives in working for this betterment
+of the conditions of living, and the little paper further stood for an
+improvement in the position of women, and consequently of all
+humanity, inconceivable to cursory observation.
+
+As for a woman going to the poll and voting for Jones or Smith, that
+was harmless in either case, and would not help her live or die or pay
+her debts, as Uncle Jake expressed it; but excepting the female vote
+for the House of Keys in the Isle of Man, the enfranchisement of
+women, spreading from one to the other of the Australian States,
+represented the first time that woman, even in our vauntedly great and
+highly civilised British Empire, was constitutionally, statutably
+recognised as a human being,--equal with her brothers. That women
+shall compete equally with men in the utilitarian industrialism of
+every walk of life is not the ultimate ideal of universal adult
+franchise. Such emancipation is sought as the most condensed and
+direct method of abolishing the female sex disability which in time
+shall bring the human intelligence, regardless of sex, to an
+understanding of the superiority of the mother sex as it concerns the
+race--as it is the race, the whole race, and consequently worthy of a
+status in life where it shall neither have to battle at the polls for
+its rights nor be sold in the market-place for bread.
+
+The empty-headed cannot be expected to perceive the magnitude of this
+upward step in the evolution of man, and its machinery may not run
+smoothly for a span; we nor our children's children may not know much
+benefit from what it symbolises, but shall we who are comfortable in
+rights wrested from ignorance and prejudice but never enjoyed by past
+generations, be too selfish and small to rejoice in the possibility of
+bettered conditions those ahead may live under as the fruits of the
+self-sacrificing labour of those now fighting for their ideals?
+
+NO!
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-ONE.
+
+THINGS GO MORE WRONG.
+
+
+Grandma could think of nothing but the clerk's insult when she had
+gone for her electoral right.
+
+"Him! that thing! What's he employed for but to do this work, and if
+he ain't prepared to do it decent, why don't he give up an' let a
+better man in his place? They're easy to be got. 'Runnin' after a
+vote,' indeed! But that's where I made me big mistake. I should have
+stayed at home and writ to him, an' he'd have been compelled to send
+the police with it. That's what I ought to have done, an' let me
+servants that I'm taxed to keep do the work they're dying for want of,
+instead of doin' it meself; but at any rate I got me right safe an'
+sure," she said with satisfaction. "A long time we'd be getting them
+if all men was like him, which, thank God, they ain't. But that's the
+way with all these fellers in a Government job; they think they're
+Lord Muck, and too good to speak to the folk that's keeping them
+there, and only for which they wouldn't be there at all. Only for
+Oscar Lawyer and Mr Pornsch--and Dawn, where are you? Mr Pornsch was
+very nice to me, an' I asked him to tea, an' to come down for some of
+them little things belongin' to his niece. He's very cut up about
+her."
+
+"Yes, about as cut up about her as Uncle Jake would be over me."
+
+"Now, Dawn, how do you know?" severely inquired the old dame.
+
+"I know very well that old men with his delightful slenderness of
+figure, and men who have drunk all the champagne and other poison it
+must have taken to colour his nose that way, haven't got much true
+feeling left, except for a bottle of wine, and a feed of something
+high and well seasoned."
+
+However, Mr Pornsch presently arrived, and illustrated by his
+smickering at Dawn that notwithstanding his grief for a dead girl he
+yet retained an eye for the charms of a living one. It also transpired
+that he would not have waited for an invitation to call upon us.
+
+This sweet bachelor champion of Women's Protection Bills, who had so
+long deprived some woman of the felicity of being his wife, had
+apparently determined to hastily repair the omission, and it soon
+became evident that he meant to honour no less a person than Dawn in
+this connection--Dawn! a princess in her own right, by reason of her
+health, her beauty, her youth, and her honest maidenhood!
+
+He took Ernest's place in going to Sydney with her, thrust costly
+trifles upon her; he was fifty-five if he were a day, and a repulsive
+debauchee at that. Dawn, so healthy and wholesome, loathed him. She
+sat on her bed at night with her dainty toes on the floor, and raved
+while she combed her fine-spun brown hair. I let her rave, believing
+this a good antidote for the worry of that dish of water that was
+rarely out of her thoughts. I knew that she never omitted to scan the
+football news in hopes of seeing the doings of a certain red-headed
+player recorded there, and I also knew that she was doomed to
+disappointment, unless she could connect R. E. Breslaw with R. Ernest
+of the wash-up water incident.
+
+A man of Pornsch's calibre is hard to abash, or Dawn would have
+abashed him, but failing to do so, at last she came to me requesting
+that I should assist her to get rid of him.
+
+"I don't want to complain to grandma," said she. "It might get abroad
+if she took it in hand, so I'd like to choke him off myself if I
+could. I have enough to suffer already;" and I knew she was again
+thinking of that fatal dish of water, and how "Dora" Eweword twitted
+her concerning it.
+
+Then I took Dawn on my knee as it were, and told her a story. It was
+such a painful story that I first extracted from her a solemn promise
+that she would not make a fuss of any sort, for this young woman
+lacked restraint--that command over her emotions which, if carefully
+adjusted and gauged, will make the work of a talented artist pass for
+genius, and that of a genius pass for the work of a god.
+
+When his connection with the ill-fated young girl, who had slipped out
+in the dead of night to throw herself in the gently gliding Noonoon,
+became known to Dawn, I was afraid her horror would so betray her that
+any subsequent plans for the punishment of the miscreant might fall
+through.
+
+"I'll knock him down with the poker next time he comes. I'll throw a
+kettle of boiling water on him as sure as eggs are eggs. Fancy the
+reptile leering around me: I felt nearly poisoned as it was, but I
+didn't know he was a murderer as well! Oh, the hide of him to come
+here! I really will throw boiling water on him!"
+
+Dawn continued in this strain for some time, but as she quieted down
+became possessed of a notion to tar and feather him in the manner
+mentioned by her grandmother in one of her anecdotes. Carry and I were
+to be called upon to assist in this ceremony, which was to take place
+upon the return of Mr Pornsch. For the present he had disappeared to
+attend to some business.
+
+In the interim, the meetings continued without a break, and Dawn
+unremittingly looked for the football news, now with the war crowded
+into a far corner, by the special complexion that each daily chose to
+put on political affairs.
+
+"Just look up the football news," I said one day, "and see how my
+friend Ernest is doing."
+
+"He made a lot of goals as 'forward' in the last match. See!" she
+coolly replied, putting her tapering forefinger on the name of R. E.
+Breslaw, as she handed me the paper.
+
+"Did he tell you he wanted to disguise his identity while here?"
+
+"Yes; he told me all about it one day when we went to Sydney," she
+replied, leaving me wondering what else they might have confided
+during these jaunts.
+
+Now that we required his presence Mr Pornsch was not in evidence, and
+neither was anything to be heard of the red-headed footballer's
+reappearance, though he had been absent four weeks, and this brought
+us towards the end of June. At this date there appeared a paragraph
+stating that Breslaw and several other amateur sportsmen were
+contemplating a tour of America, to include the St Louis Exposition.
+
+That night some one besides myself heard the roar of the passing
+locomotives, but she did not confess the cause of her sleeplessness.
+It was one of those irritations one cannot tell, so she let off her
+irritation in other channels.
+
+Matters did not brighten as the days went on. Two nights after
+Ernest's reported departure for the States, "Dora" Eweword brought
+Dawn home from Walker's committee meeting, and remained talking to her
+in the otherwise deserted dining-room till a late hour. As soon as he
+left Dawn came upstairs, and throwing herself face downwards on her
+bed burst into violent weeping.
+
+"What has come to you lately, Dawn?" I inquired. "Tell me what sort of
+a twist you have put in your affairs so that I may be able to help
+you."
+
+"No one can help me," she crossly replied.
+
+"Don't you think that I was once young, and have suffered all these
+worries too? It is not so long since I was your age that I have
+forgotten what may torment a girl's heart."
+
+Thus abjured she presently made me her father-confessor.
+
+Eweword it appeared had grown very pressing, and her grandma had urged
+her to accept him as the best of her admirers. The old dame had not
+observed the trend of matters with Ernest. In a house where week-end
+boarders came and went, and the landlady had a pretty granddaughter,
+there were strings of ardent admirers who came and went like the
+weeks, and in all probability transferred their week-end affections as
+frequently and with as great pleasure as they did their person, and
+the old lady was too sensible to place any reliance in their
+earnestness, while Dawn too was very level-headed in the matter. Thus
+Ernest, if considered anything more than my friend, would have merely
+been placed in the week-end category. The old lady, not feeling so
+vigorous as usual, was anxious to have Dawn settled, and had tried to
+put a spoke in "Dora" Eweword's wheel by threatening Dawn with
+deprivation of her coveted singing lessons did she not receive him
+favourably. Dawn in a fit of the blues, probably brought on by seeing
+the announcement of Ernest's departure, had accepted Eweword
+conditionally. The conditions were that he should wait two years and
+keep the engagement entirely secret, and she had promised her grandma
+that she would think of marriage with him at the end of that time,
+provided her vocal studies should be continued till then.
+
+"That's the way I'll keep grandma agreeable to pay for the lessons,
+and in that time, do you think, I'll be able to go on the stage and do
+what I like and be somebody?" asked the girl from out the depths of
+her inexperience.
+
+"And what of '_Dora_'?"
+
+"He can go back to Dora Cowper then. I'll tell him I was only 'pulling
+his leg,' like he said about her. It will do him good."
+
+"You might break his heart," I said with mock compassion.
+
+"Break his heart! _His_ heart! He's got the sort of heart to be
+compensated by a good plate of roast-beef and plum-pudding--like a
+good many more!"
+
+"Will he consent to this?"
+
+"He'll have to or do the other thing; he can please himself which. I
+don't care a hang. He said that if I would marry him soon he would let
+me continue the singing lessons and get me a lovely piano,--all the
+soft-soap men always give a girl beforehand. I wonder did he think me
+one of the folks who would swallow it? Couldn't I see as soon as I was
+married all the privileges I would get would be to settle down and
+drudge all the time till I was broken down and telling the same
+hair-lifting tales against marriage as aired by every other married
+woman one meets;" and Dawn, her cheeks flushed and her white teeth
+gleaming between her pretty lips, looked the personification of
+furious irritation.
+
+"All I care for now is to get the singing lessons, as long as I don't
+have to do anything too bad to get them."
+
+I suddenly turned on her and asked--
+
+"Honestly, why did you throw that dish of water on Ernest Breslaw?"
+Thus unexpectedly attacked, her answer slipped out before she had time
+to prevaricate.
+
+"Because I was a mad-headed silly fool--the biggest idiot that ever
+walked. That's why I did it!"
+
+"Do you know that it hurt him very, very keenly?"
+
+No answer.
+
+"Do you know that he cared more for you than he understood himself?"
+
+No answer.
+
+"Dawn, do _you_ care?"
+
+"Not in that way; but oh, I care terribly that I made such a fool of
+myself. Had it been any one else it wouldn't have mattered, but he
+will think I did it because I was an ignorant commoner who knew no
+better. That's what stings; but I'm not going to think any more of it.
+I'm going to give my life up to singing, and it doesn't matter. I
+suppose I'll never see him again, and he'll never know but that I did
+it out of ignorance."
+
+I smiled at the despondence in her tone as I extinguished the kerosene
+lamp-light.
+
+There is a stage in the course of most love affairs when the knight is
+despised and rejected by the lady, when the sun and the salt of life
+depart, and he finds no more pleasure in it; when he is seized with an
+irresistible desire to go forth in the world and by his prowess dazzle
+all mankind for the purpose of attracting one pair of eyes. The same
+occurs to the lady, and she determines to make all men fall at her
+feet by way of illustrating to one adamantine heart that he was a
+dullard to have passed over her charms. And this young lady of the
+rose and lily complexion, and knight of the bright-hued locks and
+herculean muscles, being young--sufficiently young to be downcast by
+imaginary stumbling-blocks--had reached it. Goosey-gander knight!
+Gander-goosey lady!
+
+I smiled again, for in my pocket was a letter that morning received
+from the former himself, stating that he had been booked for a trip to
+the St Louis Exposition, but had flung it up at the last moment in
+favour of seeing how Les. got on at the election, and that he would be
+back in Noonoon before polling-day. Considering he could have seen how
+the election progressed equally as well in Sydney as Noonoon, and that
+to see how his step-brother polled, when he took little interest in
+politics, had grown preferable to a trip to America, quite contented
+me regarding the probable termination of affairs.
+
+However, I did not show this letter, as in matchmaking, like in good
+cooking, things have to be done to the turn, and this was not the
+opportune turn.
+
+"Oh, well," I said, "so long as you don't let your little arrangement
+get abroad, I don't expect it will harm Eweword."
+
+"No fear of it getting abroad. I've threatened him if it does that a
+contradiction that will be true will also get abroad by being put in
+the 'Noonoon Advertiser.'"
+
+Next night, however, I found Dawn stamping on something glittering
+that spread about the floor, and by inquiry elicited--
+
+"That infernal 'Dora' Eweword has had the cheek to give me a ring, and
+that's what I've done with it, and that's all the hope he has of ever
+marrying me," she exclaimed, bringing the heel of her high-arched foot
+another thump on the fragments.
+
+"He's a bit too quick with his signs and badges of slavery. He's so
+complacent with himself, and thinks he's ousted the 'red-headed mug'
+as he calls him, that I hate him."
+
+"He has a right to be complacent. You have given him reason to be. He
+has won you, so you have told him, and he believes you."
+
+"Yes, I know, and it makes me all the madder to think of it."
+
+I suppressed a chuckle; even before attaining my teens I had never
+been so splendidly, autocratically _young_ as this beautiful
+high-spirited creature!
+
+"Let things settle awhile, and then we'll pour them off the dregs," I
+advised.
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-TWO.
+
+    "O Spirit, and the Nine Angels who watch us,
+    And Thy Son, and Mary Virgin,
+    Heal us of the wrong of man."
+
+
+Outside politics the next item of interest on the Clay programme was
+the reappearance of Mr Pornsch, who came for afternoon tea, during
+which he invited himself to evening tea later on, and before it took
+Dawn's time in the drawing-room trying some late songs. Dawn averred
+that it was with difficulty she had restrained from setting fire to
+him or attacking him with the piano-stool.
+
+He got so far with his "love-making" on this occasion that he had
+asked Dawn to take a little walk with him, which she had readily
+consented to do, as it would enable her to entrap him for the
+tarring-and-feathering upon which she had determined.
+
+"He is going to meet me over among the grapes in the shade of the
+osage breakwind. Do you think we will be able to manage him? Let us be
+sure to have everything well arranged," whispered Dawn to me as we
+came to evening tea.
+
+Near the appointed time of tryst, when the first division of the
+Western mail was roaring by--the warm red lights from its windows
+shedding a glow by the viaduct--she and I betook ourselves to the far
+end of Grandma Clay's vineyard, where we were securely screened by the
+osage orange hedge on one side and the grape-canes and their stakes on
+the other. Dawn carried a two-pound treacle-tin filled with tar, and
+which had been sitting on the end of the stove during the afternoon to
+melt into working order. Carry, who had entered into the affair with
+vim, had her share of the arrangements in readiness, and was secreted
+nearer the house to act as sentinel, and to run to our assistance if
+summoned by a prearranged whistle.
+
+Dawn placed me and the superannuated hair broom, with which she had
+armed me, behind a grape-vine, and herself took up a position before
+it and beside a hole about eighteen inches deep and two feet square
+which she had excavated.
+
+Mr Pornsch was soon to be heard tripping and blundering along, while
+the starlight, to which our eyes had grown accustomed, showed the
+river where the dead girl whom we were there to avenge had ended her
+miserable existence.
+
+"Dawn, my pet, where are you? Curse the grape-vines," he gasped.
+
+"I'm here, _uncle darling_," she responded, the two last words under
+her breath.
+
+Directed by her voice, he neared till we could discern his bulk.
+
+"My little queen," he exclaimed, the tone of his voice betraying that
+which defiled the crisp glory of the night for as far as it carried.
+
+"Just wait a minute till I see where we are," said Dawn, "or we will
+be getting all tangled up in these canes."
+
+With this she started back, causing him to do likewise, and drawing a
+swab on a stick from the pot in her hand, she brought a consignment of
+the black sticky tar a resounding smack on his face, and following it
+with others thick and fast, exclaimed--
+
+"There! There! That's all for you!"
+
+Mr Pornsch naturally stepped backwards into the excavation, as
+designed, and sat down as completely and largely helplessly as one of
+his figure could be counted upon to do, and coming to Dawn's
+assistance I planted the broom on his chest, and bore with my feeble
+strength upon him. It was quite sufficient to detain him, seeing he
+was now stretched on the broad of his back with his amidship
+departments foundered in two feet of indentation.
+
+Dawn thoroughly plastered his face and head, and in spitting to keep
+his mouth clear he lost his false teeth. He attempted to bellow, but
+jabbing his mouth full Dawn soon cowed him into quietude.
+
+"Shut up, you old fool; if you make a noise we have six more girls
+waiting in a boat to fling you in the river and drag you up and down
+for a while tied on to a rope like a porpoise. Do you think you'll
+float?"
+
+This had the desired effect, though he spluttered a little.
+
+"What is the meaning of this? Have you all gone mad? I met you here at
+your own request to speak about helping you with your singing, and
+you've evidently put a wicked construction on my action. I demand a
+full explanation and an abject apology."
+
+"Well," said Dawn, punctuating her remarks with little dabs of the
+tar, "the explanation is that we're doing this to show what we think
+of a murderer. Even if Miss Flipp had not drowned herself, but had
+lived to be an outcast, you would be still a murderer of her soul."
+
+"What's this?" he blustered.
+
+"We have several witnesses ready to give evidence regarding all that
+passed between you and the unfortunate girl supposed to be your niece
+during your midnight calls upon her," I interposed, speaking for the
+first time, "so bluff or pretence of any kind on your part is
+unavailing. Remain silent and hear what we intend to say."
+
+"We're dealing with this case privately," continued Dawn, "because the
+laws are not fixed up yet to deal with it publicly. Old
+alligators--one couldn't call you men, and it's enough to make decent
+men squirm that you should be at large and be called by the same
+name--can act like you and yet be considered respectable, but this is
+to show you what _decent_ women think of your likes, and their spirits
+are with us in armies to-night in what we are doing. They'd all like
+to be giving your sort a wipe from the tar-pot, and then if you were
+set alight it would not be half sufficient punishment for your crimes.
+We haven't a law to squash you yet, but soon as we can we'll make one
+that the likes of you shall be publicly tarred and feathered by those
+made outcasts by the system of morality you patronise," vehemently
+said this ardent and practical young social reformer, who was more
+rabid than a veteran temperance advocate in fighting for her ideal of
+social purity.
+
+There was silence a moment while we listened to ascertain was there
+any likelihood of our being disturbed, but the only man-made sounds
+breaking the noisy crickets' chorus were the rumble of vehicles along
+the highroad and the shunting of the engines at the station, so I
+chimed in with promised support.
+
+"Yes, good women have to continually suffer the degradation of your
+type in all life's most sacred relations. They have to endure you at
+their board and in their homes, and leering at their sweet young
+daughters; and, alack! many in shame and humiliation own your stamp as
+their father or the father of their sons and daughters. They have had
+to endure it with a smile and hear it bolstered up as right, but those
+whose moral illumination has taken place would be with us in armies
+to-night if they could."
+
+"I'm dying to give him a piece of my mind," said Carry, coming up.
+
+"How do you like our little illustration of what we think of you?
+We've done it out of a long smouldering resentment against your reign,
+and this is a species of jubilation to find that the majority of
+Australian men are with us, because in the vote they have furnished us
+with a means of redress," and Carry finished her previously prepared
+speech by throwing a clod of dirt on him.
+
+"My grey hairs should have protected me," he muttered.
+
+"You mean they should have protected Miss Flipp," said Dawn, "and when
+a man with grey hairs carries on like this the crime is twice as
+deadly. There was nothing about grey hairs when you used a lead comb
+and got yourself up to kill. I thought you didn't want to make an
+especial feature of them, and that's why I'm dyeing them this
+beautiful treacley black. They'll look bosker when I'm done."
+
+"Get up out of that, lest I'm tempted to do you a permanent injury," I
+said, taking the broom off him.
+
+"You can go to the stable," said Dawn, "and I hope you won't
+contaminate it. Carry has a lantern and some grease and hot water, so
+you can clean yourself there and put on your overcoat. Never let us
+hear of you on a platform spouting about moral bills again unless you
+say it is on account of the practical experience you've had of the
+need of them to save weak and foolish young women from the clutches of
+such as you."
+
+Mr Pornsch arose with difficulty while Dawn struck matches to see what
+he was like, and a more deplorably ludicrous spectacle never could be
+seen in a pantomime. The only pity of it was that it was not a
+punishment more frequently meted out to the sinners of his degree. He
+raved and stuttered how he would move in the matter, but Dawn, who had
+a commendable fearlessness in carrying out her undertakings, only
+laughed merry little peals, and told him the best way for him to move
+in the tar was towards the stable, and the best way to move out of it
+was by the aid of grease, soap, hot water, and soda. The expression of
+his eyes rolling and glaring amid the black was quite eerie, but
+eventually we reached the stable, where Carry instructed him how to
+clean himself, while Dawn jeered at him during the operation.
+
+Having cleaned his face somewhat, he hid his neck and clothes in his
+overcoat which Carry handed, put on his hat, muffled his face in his
+handkerchief, and went away, Dawn administering a parting shot.
+
+"Now, Uncle Pornsch, dear, next time you go ogling and leering round a
+_decent_ girl, remember, though she may be so situated that she has to
+endure you, yet she feels just as we do, that is, if she is a decent
+girl, whose eyes have been opened to the facts of life."
+
+"I feel better than I have done for a long time," she concluded, as
+bearing the implements used in the adventure we three, who had agreed
+upon secrecy, made towards the house.
+
+"So do I," said Carry. "If we could only do it to all who deserve the
+like, it would be grand!"
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-THREE.
+
+UNIVERSAL ADULT SUFFRAGE.
+
+
+I.
+
+Electioneering matters ripened, and so did Carry's love affair with
+Larry Witcom. In fact it got so far that she gave grandma notice, and
+announced her intention of going to a married sister's home for that
+process known as "getting her things ready," while Larry, in keeping
+up his end of the stick, bought a neat cottage and began furnishing it
+in the style approved by his circle, with bright linoleum on the
+floors, plush chairs in the "parler," and china ornaments on the
+overmantels.
+
+Mrs Bray, one of those very everyday folk whose god was mammon, and
+who naturally hung on every word issuing from a person of means while
+she would ignore the most inimitable witticism from an impecunious
+individual, began to regard the lady-help from a new point of view.
+
+"She mightn't have done so bad for herself after all. Some of these
+girls knockin' about the world not havin' nothink to their name, don't
+baulk at things the same as you an' me would who's been used to plenty
+and like to pick our goods, so to speak. The way things is, Larry is
+as likely as most to be in a good position yet," was a sample of the
+modified sentiments falling from her full red lips.
+
+Carry was to remain at Clay's until after the election day, so that
+she could cast her vote for Leslie Walker.
+
+The political candidate thus favoured scarcely allowed three days to
+pass without personally or by proxy stumping the Noonoon end of the
+electorate. His last meeting in the Citizens' Hall was jam-pack an
+hour before the advertised time of speaking.
+
+The candidate on this occasion made no fresh utterances to entertain,
+he merely repeated the catch cries of his party; but the air was
+heavily charged with human electricity, and the questions and
+"barracking" of the crowd were supremely diverting.
+
+"Are you in favour of the Chows going to South Africa?" bawled one
+elector.
+
+"My dear fellow, we are going to govern New South Wales--not South
+Africa."
+
+"Yes; but when we sent contingents out to fight for the Empire in the
+Transvaal, do you think it fair that white men should be passed over
+in favour of Chows in the South African labour market?"
+
+This question being ignored another was interjected.
+
+"Are you in favour of the newspapers running New South Wales?"
+
+"Certainly not!"
+
+This being a satisfactory answer, the old favourite question, "Are you
+in favour of black gins wearing white stockings?" was put; and the
+candidate having assured us that, provided they could manage the
+laundry bill, he certainly was in favour of these ladies wearing any
+hosiery they preferred; and the loud guffaw which greeted this
+information having subsided, he continued--
+
+"Now, don't vote for _me_ or for _Henderson_,--vote for the best
+measures for the country. (Henderson was driving the personal ticket
+of having lived among them,--hence this warning.) I think it an
+unparalleled impertinence for a man to ask an intelligent body of
+electors to vote for _him_--"
+
+"When there's a swell bloke like you in the field."
+
+"Pip! pip! Hooray! Cock-a-doodle-do!" came the chorus. The "Pip! pip!"
+was a new sound to them, having been introduced to represent the noise
+made by the propulsion of a motor-car, in which set the candidate
+shone.
+
+"Are you in favour of gas and water running up the one pipe?" inquired
+another, when the din had once more fallen to comparative silence.
+
+"Don't you think that ladies ought to wear big boots now that they've
+got the vote?"
+
+All such important questions having been put, the chairman called for
+three cheers for Mr Walker.
+
+"Three cheers for Henderson," yelled the rabble at the back, which
+were given deafeningly, and the candidate, with the lively tact which
+bade fair to develop into his most prominent characteristic, joined in
+the cheers for his opponent, till some one had the grace to call
+"Three cheers for Mr Walker now"; and in the most delightfully
+uproarious, holiday-spirited clamour thus ended the last meeting but
+one before the election.
+
+This was fixed for the 6th of August, and, notwithstanding there being
+several other towns in the electorate equally as important as Noonoon,
+on polling eve both candidates were to make their final speech there
+at the same hour.
+
+During the week intervening, Leslie Walker's "Ladies' Committee" were
+very busy in the construction of dainty rosettes of pink and blue
+ribbon to be worn by his followers; and not to be outdone, Henderson's
+committee of "mere men" armed themselves with little squares of
+hatband ribbon of red, white, and blue--the Ministerial colours.
+
+These were not such dainty badges as the rosettes, but they served the
+purpose equally well; and the sterner sex, in our present stage of
+evolution ever to be trusted to make up in downright usefulness what
+they lack in mere prettiness, had attached a safety-pin to each piece
+of ribbon for its masculinely substantial affixing.
+
+
+II.
+
+Polling eve arrived, and the Ministerialists having secured the hall,
+the Oppositionists had perforce to hold an open-air meeting. We
+attended the hall first, intending to move on to the street
+entertainment later, and Dawn was attacked by an old dame in the
+opposing camp because she was displaying Walker's colours.
+
+"If I liked him I'd go an' stand in the street an' listen to him, not
+take up the room of them as has a hall hired for 'em by the _best_
+man, who has lived among us, and not some city lah-de-dah married to a
+hussy off the stage, an' who had women who might be any character
+goin' round speakin' for him," she tiraded, and turning to me
+aggressively demanded--
+
+"Where are _your_ colours?"
+
+"Could you supply me with some?" I replied; and only too pleased, she
+squalled to an urchin who was distributing the squares plus a
+safety-pin. I was such a well-poised "rail-sitter" that I was entitled
+to wear both colours; and as this one was being ostentatiously
+fastened to the lapel of my over-jacket, I remembered the injunction
+to live at peace with all.
+
+A brass band played the people in, and a trio of youngsters unfurled
+red, white, and blue parachutes,--alias gamps, alias ginghams, alias
+umberellers,--which were a popular feature of the "turn."
+
+The committee appeared on the platform one by one, each received with
+noisy approval, and one facetiously wearing a rosette the size of a
+large cabbage was tendered a particularly deafening ovation.
+
+After these crept Henderson, who, though not a particularly inspiring
+individual, was wildly and vociferously cheered for everything and
+nothing, and after listening awhile to his catch cries,--which
+differed from those of Walker only in the irritatingly halting and
+unimpressive way they were delivered,--we rose and scrambled our way
+out, jeered by the old dame as we went, and our departure was further
+commented upon from the platform by the speaker himself, in the
+words--
+
+"Getting too hot for some of the ladies," which, if correct, could not
+by any means have been attributed to the winter air or the dull and
+weakly maudlin speech he was trying to deliver.
+
+Walker spoke from a balcony crowded by devotees--mostly women--to an
+audience in the street, which was further enlivened by the fighting of
+the numerous dogs I have previously mentioned as addicted to holding
+municipal meetings. Their loud differences of opinion occasionally
+drowned the speakers, and the main street being also the public
+thoroughfare,--in fact, no less a place than the great Western
+Road,--there was no by-law or political etiquette to prevent the
+Ministerial band from strolling that way at intervals; so, much to the
+delight of all who were out for fun and the annoyance of those who
+were sensibly interested in the practical welfare of their country,
+and who imagined that the policy of this party would materially better
+matters, the cut-and-dried denouncement of the Ministry was at times
+drowned by the strains of "Molly Riley," "He's a Jolly Good Fellow,"
+and "See the Conquering Hero Comes!"
+
+The followers of Walker contended that Henderson was the worst of
+scorpions to thus come to Noonoon on the last night; but considering
+that he had only addressed Noonoon once to Walker's thrice, as an
+impartial wiggle-waggle I could not help seeing that the
+Ministerialists had most cause for complaint.
+
+Dawn pinned the badge I had acquired to the coat-tail of a local bank
+manager who, though on her side, had lately distinguished himself by a
+public denouncement of "Women's Rights," so savagely virulent and
+idiotically tyrannous in principle as to suggest that his household
+contained representatives of the "shrieking sisterhood," who had been
+one too many for him. The boys who saw the joke enjoyed it very much
+indeed, as he strolled along with the self-importance befitting so
+prominent a citizen.
+
+The beautiful voice of the candidate rose and fell, occasionally
+halting till the usual cheers or guffaws died away, and the meeting
+ended in the customary way. What good to the country was likely to
+accrue from it? On the other hand--what harm?
+
+To be abroad in the open air with comfort at that time of the year,
+and at that hour of the night, illustrated the beautiful climate of
+that latitude if nothing more, and every one was harmlessly
+entertained, for good-humour characterised the whole affair.
+
+Tea, coffee, and cheese abounded for all comers at the committee rooms of
+Leslie Walker--the candidate supported by the temperance societies; and on
+behalf of Olliver Henderson there was an "open night" at Jimmeny's "pub.,"
+with the result--as published by the Oppositionists--that boys of fourteen
+and sixteen were lying drunk in the gutters.
+
+The next day, however, was the culmination of the whole thing.
+
+Dawn almost wept that she was not of age to vote, and as I was so
+comfortably indifferent as to which man won, I offered to cast my vote
+for the one she favoured, but she declined.
+
+"That would only be the same as men having the vote and thinking they
+know how to represent us," she said.
+
+But though she couldn't vote she worked hard for her side, and with a
+big rosette of pink and blue decorating her dimpling bosom, and
+streamers of the same flying from her whip and her pony's headstall,
+she was out all day driving voters to the booth, where for the first
+time in that town women produced an electoral right. The Federal
+election had been conducted without them.
+
+In the forenoon Larry Witcom drove Carry to vote in state--otherwise a
+brand-new sulky he had recently purchased; and such is human nature
+that we were all sufficiently malicious to be secretly pleased that
+poor old Uncle Jake could not vote at all, because he had only an
+obsolete red elector's right, and he should have procured an
+up-to-date blue one.
+
+It was a genial sunshiny day, and the lucerne and rape fields and the
+Chinese gardens on either hand were beautifully green, as grandma
+noticed when during the afternoon she and I drove in the old sulky to
+cast our vote.
+
+"Poor Jake! I'm sorry he can't vote, though he ain't goin' for my
+man," she remarked. "But don't it seem like a judgment on him for
+bein' so narked about the women bein' set free? That's always the way
+in life. If you are spiteful about anythink it always comes back on
+yourself."
+
+The street opposite the court-house--for the time converted into a
+polling-booth--was thronged like a show-day with an orderly crowd of
+citizens of both sexes. The voting had become so congested that
+vehicle loads of voters were being conveyed over to Kangaroo, and each
+contingent set out amid the cheers of small boys, who were most ardent
+politicians.
+
+Laughing and banter were exchanged between people of all ages and
+classes, one as important as the other for the time being.
+
+As we crowded round the door, a jovial-looking man with a twinkle in
+his eyes, as he was unceremoniously shoved against a pillar, announced
+that women should not have been allowed the vote, for its disastrous
+results were already evident in this crush; while the equally
+pleasant-faced policeman, who, as soon as intimation came from within
+that there was a vacancy, wheeled us in like so many bales of wool,
+replied--
+
+"Women jolly well have as much right to vote as men, and more, because
+they can do it without getting drunk or breaking their heads."
+
+Many displayed colours and some did not. There was the truculent woman
+who voted as she thought fit, and who loudly advertised this fact; the
+man who voted for Henderson because he lived in the district; and the
+woman who supported Leslie Walker because he was rich and would be
+able to subscribe liberally to all local institutions. A shallow-pated
+Miss favoured Walker because his colours were the prettier; and an
+addle-pated old man balanced this by voting for Henderson because he
+"shouted,"[1] and Walker was temperance. There was a silly little
+flaxen-haired woman who also supported the Opposition to spite her
+husband,--a Henderson man, and the prototype of Mr Pornsch,--because,
+being over-grogful, he had made tracks for the polling-booth alone,
+leaving his wife to go as best she could. Alas! there was a poor
+little woman at home who could not vote at all because she had
+succumbed to the gentlemanliness of Leslie Walker, and her husband
+being against him had tyrannously taken her right from her; and there
+was also the woman who _would_ not vote at all, because she considered
+men were superior to women, and boisterously proclaimed this to all
+who would listen, in hopes of currying favour with the men; but
+fortunately this, in the case of the best men, is becoming an obsolete
+bid for popularity. There was the woman who voted for the man her
+father named, and those electors of each sex who voted to the best of
+their discernment great or small. Quite a crop of Uncle Jakes were
+disfranchised through their rights being back numbers, and the
+nobodies who imagined themselves something altogether too lofty to
+consider anything so mundane as law-making at all, were also rather
+numerous. Ada Grosvenor's bright happy face shone like a star amid her
+companions, and she discharged this duty honestly and thoughtfully as
+she did all others, recognising it as the practical way of working for
+the brave, bright ideals guiding her life.
+
+[Footnote 1: To treat to free drinks.]
+
+Among the electresses were all the same types of vote as cast by men,
+except that those sold for a glass of beer were not so frequent; and
+as civilisation climbs higher, universal suffrage, and the better
+methods of administration to which it will give birth, will be
+exercised for the adjustment of the great human question now so
+trivially divided into squabbles of sex and class.
+
+The bright Australian sun shone with genial approval on all, and in
+the air was a hint of the scent of the jonquils and violets, so early
+in that temperate region. Grandma Clay must not be forgotten, for in
+her immaculate silk-cloth dress and cape, her bonnet of the best
+material, and her "lastings," with her spectacles in one hand and her
+properly-prized electoral right in the other, and her irreproachable
+respectability oozing from her every action, she could not be
+overlooked. As she neared the door the gentlemen and younger ladies
+crowding there politely stood back and cancelled their turn in her
+favour; and Mrs Martha Clay, a flush on her cheeks, a flash in her
+eyes, and with her splendidly active, upright figure carried
+valiantly, at the age of seventy-five, disappeared within the
+polling-booth to cast her first vote for the State Parliament.
+
+What a girl she must have been in those far-off teens when she had
+handled a team of five in Cobb & Co.'s lumbering coaches, when her
+curls, blowing in the rain and wind, had been bronze, when with a
+feather-weight bound she could spring from the high box-seat to the
+ground! Lucky Jim Clay, to have held such vigorous love and splendid
+personality all his own. All his own to this late day, for the old
+dame returning said to me, "This is a great day to me, and I only wish
+that Jim Clay had lived to see me vote;" and there was a pathetic
+quiver in the old voice inexpressibly sweet to the ear of one
+believing in true love.
+
+After Grandma Clay there was myself--a widely different type of voter.
+In one way it did not matter whether I voted or not. Neither candidate
+had a clear-cut policy to rescue public affairs from their chaotic
+state. The electors themselves had no definite idea what they
+required, but this was in no way alarming--all the materials for
+national prosperity were at hand, presently matters would evolve, and
+the demand for able statesmen would be filled when the demand grew
+clearly defined.
+
+Which man would do most for women and children was also immaterial;
+the mere fact of women no longer being redressless creatures, but
+invested with rights of full citizenship, was even at that early stage
+having its effect. Politicians were trimming their sails to catch the
+great female vote by announcing their readiness to make issues of
+questions relative to the peculiar welfare of the big bulk of the
+human race represented by women and children. Inspired by women's
+newly-granted power of electing a real representative of their
+demands, would-be M.P.'s were hastening in one session to insert in
+their platform planks which much-vaunted "womanly influence" had been
+unable to get there during generations of masculine chivalry and
+feminine disenfranchisement.
+
+Let the women vote!
+
+As Grandma Clay expressed it, "It ain't what things actually are, it's
+all they stand for." For this reason I meant to exercise my right.
+
+A sovereign in itself may not be much, but to a starving man within
+reach of shops see what it means in twenty shillings' worth of food.
+Similarly the right to vote in a self-governed country meant many a
+mile in the upward evolution of mankind.
+
+Countless brave women and good men had sacrificed all that for which
+the human heart hankers, that women should be raised to this estate,
+and what a coward and insolent ignoramus would I be to lightly
+consider what had been so dearly bought and hard fought! And so
+thinking I presented my right, received my ballot-paper, and though
+not bothering to meddle with either candidate's name, I folded it
+correctly, and for the sake of all that stood behind and ahead of the
+right to perform this simple action, dropped it in the ballot-box.
+
+It closed at six o'clock, and then came a lull till the first returns
+should have time to come in. The candidates were not in Noonoon but
+Townend, where the head polling-booth was situated, though nothing
+could have exceeded the excitement in Noonoon.
+
+Grandma said she would wait quietly at home till next day to hear the
+result, but at nine o'clock the strains of a band, the glow of the
+town-lights like a red jewel through the night, and the sound of
+distant cheering proved too enticing to us two left alone in the
+house, so we locked it up, put the pony in the sulky, and sallied
+forth into the winter night, which in this genial climate was pleasant
+in an over-jacket added to one's ordinary indoor attire.
+
+We had the road to ourselves, for the strings of vehicles from which
+it was seldom free were all ahead of us.
+
+The candidates had tiny globes of electric light representing their
+colours hung across the street from their respective committee rooms,
+and the proprietor of 'The Noonoon Advertiser' had a splendid placard
+erected on his office balcony and well lighted by electricity, on
+which the names of members were pasted as they were elected, and in
+view of this had gathered one of the most good-humoured crowds
+imaginable. Irrespective of party, the hoisting of each name was
+wildly cheered by the embryo electors who, being at that time of life
+when to yell is a joy, took the opportunity of doing so in full.
+
+Leaving grandma in charge of the vehicle I got out to reconnoitre, and
+slipped in among the crowd desiring to be unobserved, but that was
+impossible; a good-tempered man invariably discovered me behind him,
+and insisted upon putting me forward where there was a better view of
+the numbers and names.
+
+"Let the women have a show. This is their first election and it ought
+to be their night," and similarly good-natured remarks in conjunction
+with a little "chyacking" from either party as the numbers fluctuated,
+were to be heard on all sides.
+
+Where were all the insults and ignominy that opponents of women
+franchise had been fearfully anticipating for women if they should
+consent to lower themselves by going to the polling-booth? If one
+excepted the discomfort that non-smokers have to suffer in any crowd
+owing to the indulgence of this selfish, disgusting, and absolutely
+idiotic vice, it was one of the best-mannered crowds I have been
+among.
+
+I espied Larry and Carry carefully among the shades of the trees on
+the outskirts of the gathering, and even in the teeth of a political
+crisis not so thoroughly "up-to-date" that they could forego a
+revival of the old, old story that will outlive voting and many other
+customs of many other times.
+
+Among the crowd of mercurial and lustily cheering boys was my friend
+Andrew, and a little farther on, lo! the knight himself. A motor cap
+was jammed on his warm curls, and a football guernsey displayed the
+proportions of his broad chest as his Chesterfield fell open, while
+with a gaiety and freedom he lacked when addressing girls he exchanged
+comments with some other young fellows, evidently fellow-motorists.
+
+My feeble pulse quickened out of sympathy with Dawn as I caught sight
+of him. It was easy to understand the hastened throb of her heart upon
+first becoming aware of his presence. Who has not known what it is to
+unexpectedly recognise the turn of a certain profile or the
+characteristic carriage of a pair of shoulders, meaning more to the
+inner heart than had a meteor flashed across the sky? Most of us have
+known some one whose smile could make heaven or whose indifference
+could spell hell to us, and those who by some fortuitous circumstances
+have spent their life without encountering either one or both these
+experiences, are still sufficiently human to regret having missed
+them, and to understand how much it could have meant.
+
+Had Dawn's blue eyes yet discovered the goodly sight?
+
+When I presently found her the light in them betrayed that they had.
+
+Her face shone with the inward gladness of a princess when she has
+come into view of a desired kingdom--whether it shall endure or be
+destroyed and replaced by the greyness of disappointment, depends upon
+the prince reciprocating and making her queen of his heart.
+
+"Dora" Eweword was in attendance, so I despatched him to ascertain if
+grandma were all right, and took advantage of his absence to say--
+
+"I see Ernest has returned to see the result of Leslie Walker's
+candidature."
+
+"Then it's a wonder he didn't stay in Townend. They'll know the
+results there sooner," she replied with studied indifference.
+
+Our pony fell sound asleep where she stood and in spite of the
+cheering, as though she were well acquainted with women taking a live
+interest in an election. We let her sleep till twelve, when to
+grandma's disappointment Leslie Walker was more than a hundred votes
+behind. There were yet other returns to come in, but these were not
+large enough to alter present results.
+
+When we left the street was still crowded and the cheering unabatedly
+vigorous.
+
+On our way home grandma remarked with satisfaction that Dawn seemed to
+be regarding Eweword sensibly at last, and I seized the opening to
+inquire if she were really anxious that the girl should marry him.
+
+"I am if she couldn't get no one better," replied the old lady, and I
+considered that this condition saved the situation.
+
+
+III.
+
+The poll had been taken on a Saturday, and on Monday both the elected
+and defeated candidates appeared in Noonoon to return thanks.
+
+The former came into town at the head of a long cortege of vehicles,
+and with the red, white, and blue parasols very prominently in
+evidence. The streets were hung with bunting, and at night the newly
+elected M.P. was lifted into a buggy in which he was drawn through the
+streets by youths, at the head of a glorified procession led by a
+brass band; and there were not only little boys covered with
+electioneering tickets from top to toe and yelling as they marched and
+waved flags, but also little girls, now equally with their brothers,
+electors to be. More power to them and their emancipation!
+
+It came on to rain, so black umbrellas, big and business-like, went up
+by dozens around the three special ones, and became an amusing feature
+of the train of miscellaneous people who came to a halt within earshot
+of a balcony in the main street. Henderson was carried upstairs on
+some enthusiasts' shoulders, and when landed there followed the usual
+"gassating" and flattery--the re-elected member being presented with a
+gorgeous bouquet of red, white, and blue flowers.
+
+A little farther up the street the Walkerites also held a
+"corroboree," where graceful thanks were returned by the Opposition
+candidate, who was overloaded with offerings of blue and white violets
+and narcissi, and amid great enthusiasm dragged in a buggy to the
+railway station.
+
+As they came down the street, though they had the intention of giving
+three cheers for the victors as they passed, the rabble could not be
+expected to anticipate such nicety of feeling, and some young
+irresponsibles attempted to form a barricade across the route.
+
+"Charge!" was then called out by some braw young Walkerites in the
+lead, and mild confusion followed.
+
+I was knocked on to the wheel of Leslie Walker's buggy, from whence I
+was rescued by an old gentleman, himself minus his pipe and cap, but
+good-humouredly laughing--
+
+"My word! aren't the other side dying hard?"
+
+"Take care you and I do not also die hard," I replied, stepping out of
+the way of an idiot lad, who, dressed as a jester in Walker's colours,
+was sitting on a horse whose progress was blocked by the crowd, which
+began jibing at the rider.
+
+Dawn, indignant at this, dashed forward like a beauteous and
+infuriated Queen Boadicea, her cheeks red from excitement and the
+winter air, and with her grandmother's flash in her eyes, exclaimed as
+she took the bridle rein--
+
+"Cowards, to torment a poor fellow!"
+
+She attempted to lead the animal through, but the torches of the band
+were put before it and the indispensable red, white, and blue parasols
+swirled in its face, till it reared and plunged frantically, catching
+the excited girl a blow on the shoulder with its chest. She must
+inevitably have been knocked down in the street and been trampled upon
+but for the intervention of a hand so timely that it seemed it must
+have been on guard.
+
+Noonoon was by no means an architectural town, and the ugliness of its
+always dirty, uneven streets was now accentuated by the mud and rain,
+but the picture under the dripping flags shown up by the torches of
+the band was very pretty.
+
+The sturdy young athlete thus triumphantly in the right place at a
+necessitous moment, held his precious burden with ease and delight,
+and though she was not in any way hurt she did not seem in a hurry to
+relinquish the arm so willingly and proudly protecting her. The
+expression on the young man's face as he bent over the beautiful girl
+was a revelation to some interested observers but not to me.
+
+Oh, lucky young lady! to be thus opportunely and romantically saved
+from a painful and humiliating if not serious accident!
+
+Oh, happy knight! to be thus at hand at the psychologic moment!
+
+And where was "Dora" Eweword then?
+
+And where was _my_ rescuer? Apparently he had forgotten that he had
+rescued me, or that to have done so was of moment.
+
+Ah, neither of us were in the heyday of youth, and 'tis only during
+that roseate period that we extract the full enchantment of being
+alive, and only by looking back from paler days that we understand how
+intense were the joys gone by.
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-FOUR.
+
+LITTLE ODDS AND ENDS OF LIFE.
+
+
+The electioneering over, the town fell to a dulness inconceivable, and
+from which it seemed nothing short of an earthquake could resuscitate
+it. So great was the lack of entertainment that the doings of the
+famous Mrs Dr Tinker regained prominence, and the old complaints
+against the inability of the council to better the roads awoke and
+cried again.
+
+Two days following Dawn's rescue from the accident, Ernest called upon
+me, and occupying one of the stiff chairs before the fireplace under
+the Gorgonean representations of Jim Clay, looked hopelessly
+self-conscious and inclined to blush like a schoolboy every time the
+door opened, but Dawn did not make her appearance. I knew he had come
+hoping that in averting the accident he had been able to illustrate
+his friendliness towards her, and that she would now meet him as of
+old, so that the little incident of the wash-up water could be
+explained and buried. At last, taking pity on the very natural young
+hope that was being deferred, I excused myself and went in quest of
+Dawn, and found her in her room sewing with ostentatious industry.
+
+"Dawn, won't you come down and speak to Ernest, he has called to see
+how you are after your adventure," I said with perfect truth, though
+as a matter of fact he had studiously refrained from mentioning her.
+
+"Oh, please don't ask me to go down," she implored excitedly; "you
+seem to have forgotten!"
+
+"Forgotten what?"
+
+"That dish of water," she faltered with changing colour, "and then he
+saved me so cleverly from being trampled on! If he had ridden over me
+I wouldn't have cared, as it would have made things square; but as it
+is, can't you understand that I'd rather _die_ than see him?" said she
+in the exaggerated language of the day, and burying her face in her
+hands.
+
+"I can better understand that you are _dying_ to see him," I returned,
+pulling her head on to my shoulder; "but never mind, you'll see him
+some other day, and it will all come straight in time."
+
+I forbore to press her farther, but that Ernest might not be too
+discouraged I gave him some splendid oranges Andrew had picked for me,
+and said--
+
+"Miss Dawn kept these for you, but as she is not visible this
+afternoon I am going to make the presentation."
+
+His face perceptibly brightened, and also noticeable was the brisk way
+he terminated his call upon learning that there was no prospect of
+seeing Dawn that day. I watched him bounding along the path to the
+bridge carrying the oranges in his handkerchief, and watched also by
+another pair of eyes from an upstairs window.
+
+Carry left us during that week, and as she had now fixed her
+wedding-day the tax of wedding presents had to be met. Grandma, in
+bidding her good-bye, presented her with a generous cheque, and paid
+her a fine compliment.
+
+"I wish you well wherever you go, for I never saw another young
+woman--unless it was meself when I was young--who could lick you at
+anythink."
+
+Carry's departure put the cap on our quietude at Clay's, but soon a
+movement transpired to stir the stagnation.
+
+The out-voted electors of Noonoon were so galled by their defeat that
+they ignored the British law under which it was their boast to live,
+and refused to acknowledge that the man who had been voted in by the
+majority was constitutionally their representative in parliament. They
+also failed to see that he would serve the purpose quite as well as
+the other man, and to publish their sentiments more fully, determined
+to tender Leslie Walker a complimentary entertainment of some kind,
+and present him with a piece of plate, not as the other side had it,
+in token of his defeat, but owing to the fact that he was actually the
+representative of Noonoon town, having in that place polled higher
+than his opponent. The presentation took the shape of a silver
+epergne. This to a man who probably did not know what to do with those
+he already possessed, a wealthy stranger who had contested the
+electorate for his own glory! Had he been a struggling townsman, who,
+at a loss to his business, had put up in hopes of benefiting his
+country, to have paid his expenses might have shown a commendable
+spirit, but this was such a pure and simple example of greasing the
+fatted sow, that even those who had supported him openly rebelled,
+Grandma Clay among them.
+
+"Well, that's the way women crawl to a man because he's got a smooth
+tongue and a little polish," sneered Uncle Jake.
+
+"And some of the men hadn't gumption to get the proper right to vote
+for their man who flew the publican's flag and truckled to the
+tag-rag," chuckled grandma, who was delighted to prove that this
+illustration of crawl had originated with the men.
+
+Nevertheless it was decided to present the epergne at a select concert
+or musical evening, with Mr and Mrs Leslie Walker sitting on the
+platform, where the audience could gloat upon them. Dawn was asked to
+contribute to the programme, and relieved her feelings to me
+forthwith.
+
+"The silly, crawling, ignorant fools!" she exclaimed. "The first item
+on the programme is a solo by Miss Clay!!!" says the chairman, "and
+I'll come forward and squark. 'Next item, a recitation by Mrs
+Thing-amebob.' Can't you just imagine it?" she said in inimitable and
+exasperated caricature from the folds of her silk kimono. "Good
+heavens! to give a man like that an amateur concert like ours! Do you
+know, they say he is the best amateur tenor in Australia, and his wife
+was a comic opera singer before she married--so a girl was telling me
+where I get my singing lessons. You'd think even the galoots of
+Noonoon wouldn't be so leather-headed but they'd know their length
+well enough not to make fools of themselves in this way! _I_ know; why
+can't they know too? They like these things themselves, and think
+others ought to like them too. What do they want to be licking
+Walker's boots at all for? We all voted and worked for him; that was
+enough! It will just show you the way people will crawl to a bit of
+money! Oh dear, how Walker must be grinning in his sleeve! I _won't_
+sing for them!"
+
+But she was not to escape so easily. A member of the committee asked
+grandma "Would she allow her granddaughter to contribute a solo?"
+
+"Of course!" said the old lady. "Ain't I getting her singing lessons
+to that end?" and down went the girl's name on the programme, and
+there was war in the Clay household on that account.
+
+"I can't sing yet," protested Dawn. "I can't sing in the old style,
+and can't manage the new style yet."
+
+"Rubbish!" said grandma, who could not be got to grasp the intricacies
+of voice production. "What am I payin' good money away for? It's near
+three months now, and nothing to show for it yet. If you can't sing
+now, you ought to give it best at once; and if you can't sing a song
+for Mr Walker, and show him you've got a better voice than some, I
+think it common-sense to stop your lessons at the end of the quarter."
+
+"My teacher wouldn't let me sing."
+
+"And who's the most to do with you, your teacher or me, pray? Who's
+_he_ to say when you shan't sing or the other thing?" and thus she
+decided the point; but Dawn each night dwelt upon the trouble, while I
+sought to comfort her.
+
+"It is best to sing to the people who know all about singing. They
+will see you have a good voice and appreciate it far more than could
+the ignorant."
+
+A fortnight had to elapse before the date of the concert, and during
+that time Carry's successor arrived in the form of a stout "general,"
+as Dawn averred she had sufficient companion in me, and that a kitchen
+woman was preferable to a lady help.
+
+The pruning of a portion of the vineyard, which had been delayed by
+electioneering matters till now, also took place during this time, and
+Andrew and Uncle Jake, when working in the far corner, made the
+extraordinary discovery of an odontologic gold plate of the best
+quality and in perfect order. The find created quite a sensation.
+
+As grandma said, it bore evidence that some one had been stealing
+grapes during the season, for any person legitimately in the vineyard
+would have instituted a search for such a valuable piece of property,
+and for a person who could afford such a first-class gold plate to
+steal grapes, showed what _some people_ were. It did indeed, for this
+person had been wont to clandestinely enter her premises to perpetrate
+a far lower grade of crime than pilfering her grapes or destroying her
+vineyard. The incident trickled into the columns of 'The Noonoon
+Advertiser,' in conjunction with the facetious remark that the invader
+would have had to take a lot of grapes to compensate him for what he
+had lost; and it was further stated that the article being useless
+except to him--its size bespoke it a man's--for whom it had been
+modelled, he could have it upon giving satisfactory proof that he was
+the owner.
+
+Needless to say, Mr Pornsch did not claim his property, and this
+souvenir was the last we heard of him. Andrew took it to Mr S. Messre,
+dentist, the man who had seemed to consider it unprofessional that to
+fill my teeth should take time, and with him the lad bargained that in
+return for the plate he was to tinker up those teeth whose aching I
+had allayed with the carbolic acid prescribed for me by the other
+dentist.
+
+Dawn and I chuckled in secret, sent a copy of 'The Noonoon Advertiser'
+to Carry, and remarked that it was an ill wind that blew no one any
+good.
+
+During the fortnight preceding the concert, Ernest Breslaw called at
+Clay's several times to see me, and saw me unattended by any extras in
+the form of a beautiful young girl, for Dawn blushingly avoided him.
+He had to fall back on such outside skirmishing as rowing me on the
+river, and though there was no longer an impending election to furnish
+him with excuse for loitering in Noonoon, he did not speak of
+deserting it in a hurry. He had reached that degree of amorous
+collapse when he could manage to shadow the haunts of his desired
+young lady regardless of circumstances, and grandma began to suspect
+that his attentions had a little more staying power than those of the
+week-end admirer.
+
+Seeing that the "red-headed mug" had reappeared, in the hope of
+permanently extirpating him "Dora" Eweword was anxious to announce his
+engagement, but with threats of immediate extermination if he should
+so much as give a hint of it, Dawn kept him in abeyance, and
+altogether behaved so erratically that Andrew candidly published his
+belief that she had gone "ratty."
+
+Ernest proffered himself as our escort to the Walker presentation, but
+Eweword having previously secured Dawn, Breslaw had to be satisfied
+with my company. I had already presented Andrew with a ticket, and as
+I could not now discard him, I resolved to ignore the injunctions to
+be found in etiquette books, and accept attentions from two gentlemen
+at once. Thus it happened that I, at the despised grey-haired stage,
+sat in state with a most attentive cavalier on either hand, while
+handsome young ladies sat all alone.
+
+We had entered September, and the early flowers had lifted their heads
+on every hand in this valley, where they grew in profusion, and that
+evening were in evidence at women's throats, in men's coats, and in
+young girls' hair. The stage was a bower of heavenly scented bloom,
+and many among the audience held bouquets the size of a broccoli in
+readiness for presentation to the guests of the evening.
+
+Ernest was holding the pony, which was restive, while Andrew buckled
+her to the sulky, when Dawn came upon the scene after the concert and
+presented me with a huge bunch of flowers, and Eweword also got his
+nag ready for home-going. Dawn had not met Ernest since the night in
+the street, and even now affected not to notice him, so thinking it
+time to take the situation by the horns, I said--
+
+"Here is Mr Ernest; you didn't see him because he was standing in the
+shade."
+
+Thus encouraged, he came forward and sturdily put out his hand, and
+Dawn could not very well fail to observe that, as it was of
+substantial build and held where the light shone full on it, so she
+was constrained to meet it with her own, and received, as she
+afterwards confessed, a lingering and affectionate pressure.
+
+It was not of Ernest, however, but of Mrs Walker that she talked that
+night as we prepared for rest, with our washhand basins full of
+violets that had been crowded out of the quantity given to the
+defeated candidate's wife.
+
+"Fancy being lovely like she is! After looking at her I've given up
+all hope. I suppose all I'm fit for is Mrs Eweword--Mrs 'Dora'
+Eweword; do my housework in the morning and take one of these sulkies
+full of youngsters for a drive in the afternoon like all the other
+humdrum, tame-hen, _respectable_ married women! It's a sweet prospect,
+isn't it?" she said vexedly, throwing herself on the bed.
+
+"Don't be absolutely absurd! Look in the glass and you will see a far
+more beautiful face, and one possessed of other qualities that make
+for success."
+
+"Oh, nonsense, you only say that to put me in a good humour. But how
+do women find such good matches as Leslie Walker?--that's what I want
+to know," she continued.
+
+"Either by being beautiful or using strategic ability in the great
+lottery. Mrs Walker probably used both these accomplishments. You can
+achieve similar results by means of the first without the necessity of
+developing the second. Silly girl, marry Leslie Walker's step-brother,
+Ernest Breslaw, and if you do not live happily ever after it will not
+be because you have not been furnished with a better opportunity than
+most people."
+
+She did not remark the relationship I thus divulged, showing that
+Ernest's confidences must have included it.
+
+"A girl can't _make_ a man marry her," was all she said. "I don't know
+how to use strategy, and wouldn't crawl to do such a thing if I
+could."
+
+"Neither would I, but if I loved a man and saw that he loved me, I'd
+secretly hoist a little flag of encouragement in some place where he
+could see it," I made reply.
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-FIVE.
+
+"LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM."
+
+
+Next morning was gloriously spring-like; the violets raised their
+heads in thick mats of blue and white in every available cranny of the
+garden and other enclosures where they were allowed to assert
+themselves, while other plants were opening their garlands to replace
+them, and the air breathed such a note of balminess that Ernest came
+to invite me to a boat-ride.
+
+To the practised eye there were certain indications that he hoped for
+Dawn's company too, but this was out of the question, as under
+ordinary circumstances it is rarely that girls in Dawn's walk of life
+can go pleasuring in the forenoon without previous warning, or what
+would become of the half-cooked midday dinner? So we set out by
+ourselves, and as the boat shot out to the middle of the stream
+between the peach orchards, just giving a hint of their coming glory,
+and past the erstwhile naked grape-canes, not cut away and replaced by
+a vivid green, the rower made a studiedly casual remark, "Your friend
+Miss Dawn spoke to me again at last. I wonder why on earth she threw
+that dish of water on me; did she ever say that she had anything
+against me?"
+
+"No. If you could be a girl for half an hour you'd know that the man
+to whom she shows most favour is frequently the one she most despises,
+while he whom she ignores or ill-treats is the one she most warmly
+regards."
+
+"How on earth is that?"
+
+"Oh, a species of shyness like your own, which makes you talk freely
+of Dawn and Ada Grosvenor, because you have no particular interest in
+them, whereas there is some name you guard jealously from me," I
+cunningly replied.
+
+"Is it true that Miss Dawn is engaged to Eweword? If she is let me
+know in time to send her a wedding present. I'd like to, because she's
+your friend," he said with such elaborate unconcern that I had
+difficulty in suppressing a smile. His step-brother, the dilettante,
+would never have been so clumsily transparent in a similar case.
+
+"Nonsense; she's as much engaged to you as to him," I said
+reassuringly, and that was all that passed between us on that subject.
+He energetically confined our conversation to the lovely odour from
+the lucerne fields we were passing on the river-bank, but I was not
+surprised that the afternoon's post brought Dawn a letter that
+smothered her in blushes, and plunged her in a gay abstraction too
+complete for either Uncle Jake or Andrew to penetrate.
+
+When we were once more in our big room, commanding a view of the
+Western mail with its cosy lights twinkling across the valley, she
+extended me the privilege of perusing one of the simplest and most
+straightforward avowals of love from a young man to a maiden it has
+been my delight to encounter.
+
+     "DEAR MISS DAWN,--You will be very surprised at receiving
+     such a letter from me, but I hope you will not be offended.
+     I have loved you since the first day I saw you, but have
+     kept it so well to myself that no one has suspected it,
+     perhaps not even yourself. Will you be my wife? I love you
+     better than life, and am willing to wait any number of years
+     up to ten, if you can only give me hope of eventually
+     winning you. I do not expect you to care for me at once, but
+     if you can give me hope that you do not dislike me I shall
+     be content to wait. You are so beautiful and good, I am
+     afraid to ask you to marry me, but I would try hard to make
+     you happy, and being in a position to live comfortably, you
+     could continue any studies you like." Here followed a most
+     business-like and lucid statement of his affairs, and the
+     ending--"Please do not keep me waiting long for a reply, and
+     let me know if I am to interview your grandmother. I am sure
+     I can satisfy her in regard to my position and
+     antecedents.--Yours devotedly,
+
+     "R. ERNEST BRESLAW."
+
+He was honest. Not fearing that his income might tempt a girl of
+Dawn's or indeed any other's station, he had in no way attempted to
+test her affection ere mentioning it. After the manner of his
+type--one of the best--he would place complete reliance where he
+loved, and feel sure of the same in return.
+
+"Good heavens! has he really all that money?" she exclaimed.
+
+"So I believe."
+
+"I'd be able to live the life I want, then. Learn to sing, have lovely
+dresses, and travel about. I'm not thinking only of his money, but
+don't you think people who marry on nothing are fools and selfish? A
+woman who marries a man who is only able to keep her and her children
+in starvation is a fool, and a man who wants a woman to suffer what
+wives have to, and drudge in poverty, is a selfish brute--that's what
+I've always thought. As for gassing about love when there's no comfort
+to keep it alive, that's about as foundationless as we, always being
+supposed to think men our superiors, even the ones a blind idiot could
+see are inferior."
+
+"Are you going to marry him?"
+
+"I want to, but what on earth am I to do with 'Dora' Eweword?"
+
+"Break his heart to keep Ernest's together?"
+
+"Break _his_ heart! It's the style to break, isn't it? He can have
+Dora Cowper or Ada Grosvenor, they both want him. If grandma got wind
+of the situation though, she'd put my pot on properly. She'd carry on
+like fury, and let me have neither of them--that would be the end of
+it. I can't make out why I fooled with that 'Dora' at all. I'll write
+and ask Ernest to give me a week;" and with her characteristic
+promptitude she sat down, and favoured a style as unadorned as that of
+the knight himself.
+
+     "DEAR MR ERNEST,--Your letter received. I care for you, but
+     cannot give you a definite answer at once. There may be
+     obstacles in the way of accepting your kind offer; if you
+     will give me a week to consider matters, I will answer you
+     definitely then.--Yours with love,
+
+     DAWN."
+
+As she got into bed she said with a happy giggle, "He says he loved
+me from the first day he saw me, and you thought he only came to see
+you!"
+
+"Well, my dear, you can't expect people whose hearts are broken from
+over-work, and whose hair is grey from want of love, to be as quick as
+beautiful young ladies whose affairs have come to a happy head with a
+splendid young knight;" and what I inwardly thought was, that at all
+events I had discovered the knight's symptoms long before he had done
+so.
+
+"Would you like Mr Ernest and me to marry?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, I don't object," I laconically replied.
+
+"Well, I'll marry him as soon as ever he likes if I can get rid of
+'Dora.' I'll see 'Dora' and see if I can do it without a rumpus first,
+but if he hasn't got sense to be quiet, well, I won't give in without
+a fight. Ernest mightn't like it if he knew, but I bet he will have to
+keep dark about worse things on his part if I only knew,--he's
+different to ninety-nine per cent of men if he hasn't," she said as
+she opened the French lights wider to the crisp breath of scented
+night and blew out the lamp.
+
+"You don't mind his hair being red now, do you?" I maliciously
+inquired in the darkness, and though she feigned sleep I knew that
+owing to a delightful wakefulness another beside myself heard the
+splendid music of the trains that night. The style of her breathing
+told that she was still awake some hours later when the old moon
+climbed high and came shining, shining down the valley, divided in two
+by its noble river, and laid out in orchard and agricultural squares.
+The great silver light outlined the glorious hills that walled the
+west away from the little towns and villages, and here and there a
+gleaming white cluster of tombstones bespoke the graveyards where
+slept the early pioneers and the folk who had followed them, and which
+one by one, as opening buds or withered stalks, were settling their
+last earthly score. The little homesteads lay royally, peacefully free
+from danger of molestation amid their wealth of trees and vines.
+Cottages raised on piles, and vain in the distinction of small
+protruding gables, pretentiously called bay windows, and with keys
+rusting for want of use in the cheap patent door-locks, were quickly
+superseding the earlier dwellings. These squat old cots generally had
+thresholds higher than the floors; their home-made slab doors knew no
+fastening but a latch with a string unfailingly on the outside day and
+night, and with their beetling verandahs and tiny box skillions, were
+crouchingly hard set upon the genial plain.
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-SIX.
+
+"OFF WITH THE OLD."
+
+
+Dawn was not a procrastinator, so she lost no time in sending Eweword
+a message to meet her next night at eight at the corner of the
+Gulagong Road for the purpose of a private talk.
+
+She was going to take something to Mrs Rooney-Molyneux and the baby as
+an excuse to be abroad at that hour of the night, and requested me to
+accompany her, so that she would not be saddled with Andrew as
+protector. We set out immediately after tea, and had time for a chat
+with Mrs Rooney-Molyneux about her son. Both were enjoying good
+health, thanks to the opportune arrival of a well-to-do sister, and
+the fact that, in honour of an heir to his name, the father had lately
+abstained from alcoholic drinks, and made an occasional pound by
+writing letters for people.
+
+We had some trouble to dissuade him from escorting us home, but
+emerged at last without him, and within a few minutes of eight
+o'clock.
+
+The cloudless, breezeless night, though a little chilly, was heavy
+with the odours of spring and free from the asperity of frost. The
+only sounds breaking its stillness were the trains passing across the
+long viaduct approaching the bridge. The vehicles which met from the
+two roads--the Great Western, leading in from Kangaroo, and the
+Gulagong, coming from the thickly-populated valley down the
+river-banks--had gone into town earlier for the Saturday night
+promenade, and we practically had to ourselves the broad highway,
+showing white in the soft starlight.
+
+I walked behind Dawn, and she, having found Eweword, who had been
+first at the tryst, they came back towards the river a few hundred
+yards and stopped behind some shrubbery, while I took up a place on
+the other side of it, as directed beforehand by this very
+business-like young person, to act as witness in case of future
+trouble.
+
+"Well, Dawn, what has turned up?" said the young man after a pause.
+
+"There's something that might explain the situation better than a lot
+of talk."
+
+Claude, alias "Dora" Eweword, struck a match, and upon discovering the
+fragments of his engagement-ring in the piece of paper she had handed
+him, was silent for a minute or two, and then said--
+
+"Dawn, so you want it to be all off. I knew that this long while, and
+have been mustering pluck to say so, but it seems you have got in
+before me."
+
+"Perhaps you were going to say you were pulling my leg like you did
+with Dora Cowper?"
+
+"No, I was not," and his tone was exceedingly manly. "I was going to
+say that, much as I care, I'd rather let you go free than hold you to
+your agreement when I saw you didn't care for me."
+
+"You were mighty smart!"
+
+"No, I'm only a dunce, but even a dunce can liven up sufficiently when
+he's in love to see whether his sweetheart cares for him or not, and
+you didn't take much pains to hide the state of affairs," he said with
+a rueful laugh. "I know enough about girls to know when they really
+care."
+
+"Practice, like," said Dawn.
+
+"You can say that if you like," he gravely replied.
+
+"Well, things were rather mixed, but now I know what I want."
+
+"And that you don't want me?" he interposed.
+
+"Well, you can marry Ada Grosvenor or Dora Cowper."
+
+"We can leave that to the future; it doesn't enter into this question
+at all," he said with a dignity that made the girl ashamed of herself.
+"There will be no difficulty about my marrying, the main thing is
+whether you are all right. It's easier for a man than a girl if he
+does make a hash of it."
+
+"Oh, Claude, don't be so good and generous, or you'll make me mad
+because I'm not going to have you after all."
+
+"Good and generous! Nonsense! I'm only doing what any decent fellow
+would do; you'd do as much and more for me if things were reversed,"
+he said, taking her hand. "Great Scott, what sort of a crawler did you
+take me for? Did you think I'd cut up nasty about it? Surely you knew
+I'd wish you well even if you were not for me; but won't you tell me
+who it is that has put my light out?"
+
+"Can't you guess?"
+
+"Well, I suppose it's--"
+
+"The red-headed mug," put in Dawn.
+
+"Yes, I saw it all along, but that night in the street finished
+matters. I knew my chances were as dead as a door-nail after that. You
+only took me because something went out of gear between you, and
+that's why you made me keep it dark."
+
+"Oh, I don't want to say that, Claude."
+
+"No, but I'm saying it; and now, is there anything else I can do for
+you except wish you luck?"
+
+"Only promise not to let grandma or any one know."
+
+"Did you think it necessary to tell me that. I'd not be likely to howl
+about my set-back. You needn't fear. I'll act with common-sense, and
+pull through. I won't drown myself and haunt you, or any of that sort
+of business," he said cheerfully.
+
+"Oh, thank you more than I can say," she exclaimed enthusiastically;
+"I hope you'll soon find some one better than I--some one as good as
+yourself. Good-bye!"
+
+"Well, Dawn, I wish you joy anyhow, and good luck to the fellow who
+has got the best of me. He seems an alright sort from what I can make
+out, and will be able to give you everything you want. Good-bye!" He
+drew her to him, and as she did not resist, kissed her warmly on the
+cheek, and let her go. He wanted to see her to her gate, but she
+dismissed him, and he walked away through the spring night whistling a
+cheery air. When he was safely gone I came out from hiding, and taking
+Dawn's arm moved homewards.
+
+The girl was weeping, but so softly that I was not aware of it till
+her warm tears fell on my hand.
+
+Oh, the never-ending fret and fume of being! When it is not discarded
+love or jealousy that is agitating the human bosom, it is unsatisfied
+ambition, the worry of parental responsibility, or loneliness and
+regret that one has never tasted them. The past--what has it been? The
+future--what will it be? The present--what does it matter? but a
+thousand curses on its pin-pricks, wounding like sword-thrusts, and
+which all must endure!
+
+"Oh dear, I wish he hadn't been so nice," sobbed the girl. "He has
+made me feel so ashamed that I don't think I'm fit to marry Ernest! I
+wish he had been nasty to me, and then I wouldn't have cared. But you
+don't think he cares, do you? Listen to him whistling so merrily!"
+
+"It is not those who whine loudest who feel most."
+
+"But men don't really have any feelings in this sort of thing, do
+they?"
+
+"Feeling is not peculiar to any section or sex of the community, but
+to a percentage of all humanity. This is my belief, but I cannot
+attempt to judge which feel and which do not."
+
+"Who would have dreamt of him being so sweet-natured about it?"
+
+"Nobility of character and unselfishness are also traits we cannot
+find in any set place."
+
+"I wish I hadn't been such a cat. I can't forgive myself."
+
+I smiled happily as Eweword's action bespoke a character more in
+keeping with his imposing physique than that betrayed when he had
+vulgarly spoken of pulling a girl's leg. That had been like seeing a
+beautiful house occupied by nothing but poachers, and I loved
+humanity, so that it always hurt to see even the meanest individual do
+less than their best.
+
+"Well, cheer up," I said. "Take care not to similarly transgress
+again. We all are constantly committing regrettable actions, but so
+long as we are careful not to repeat them we may hope to make some
+headway."
+
+So the knight received a favourable reply, and the man supplanted by
+him went another way.
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-SEVEN.
+
+     "One might think better of marriage if one's married friends
+     would not confide in one so much."--_Reflections of a
+     Bachelor Girl._
+
+
+Mrs Martha Clay proved a little obstreperous in regard to Ernest
+Breslaw filling the position of grandson-in-law.
+
+"You always get what you don't want," said she; "an' that's why one of
+the same class as treated me daughter so shocking is now to be
+pesterin' me for me grandchild in the same way. A girl of the decent
+class wants to look a long time before she leaps with one of them
+swells. They just take to a girl out of their own click out of the
+contrariness of human nature, and then by-and-by give 'em a dog's
+life. I know there's bad in all classes, but them upstarts have so
+much more licence to be up to bad capers,--that's where it comes in.
+And anyhow I ain't breakin' me neck to have Dawn married. None of my
+people ever had any trouble to get married, an' she can wait a bit an'
+look round an' see if this feller can stand the test of waitin',"
+concluded the old dame, with the light of conflict in her steel-blue
+eye.
+
+Fortunately I was able to bring forward a seductive statement of the
+case. Walker--the man who had made the money for Breslaw and his
+step-brother--had been a grand level-headed old labourer, and though
+his sons had been educated in the great English schools, they were
+not far removed from honest utilitarian folk, and owing to this, and
+in conjunction with Dawn, when her real name was divulged,--being a
+daughter of one of the "old families," to wit, the Mudeheepes of
+Menangle, the old dame consented to be reconciled.
+
+Now that the oppression of Carry had been removed, Mrs Bray came over
+and beamed upon us in her usual inspiriting way.
+
+The electioneering gossip having died out, she reopened the old budget
+concerning the misdoings of the Noonoon aristocracy, and once more the
+name of Mrs Tinker figured so largely on the bill that I deeply
+regretted my inability to encounter this much-discussed individual.
+
+However, when Dawn flung into the quiet pool the bomb of her
+approaching wedding with one of the best "catches" of New South Wales,
+all other topics faded into insignificance, and every woman who had
+the slightest acquaintance with the bride-elect called on her to warn
+her against the horrors to be discovered after she had irrevocably
+taken the contemplated step in the dark.
+
+As Dawn was going to take it speedily, they were very enthusiastic and
+unanimous in their evidence against the married state under present
+conditions, and the thoughtful student of life on listening to the
+testimony of these women of the respectable useful class, supposed to
+be comfortably and happily married, will know that notwithstanding the
+great epoch of female enfranchisement the workers for the cause of
+women have yet no time for rest.
+
+Dawn was so visibly worried by the revelations made to her in the most
+natural way, that grandma grew concerned and published her mind on
+the subject.
+
+"Women ought to hold their tongues and let young girls come to things
+gradual. To have it thrust upon them sudden is too much of a
+eye-opener for them. The way women tell how their husbands treat them
+nowadays is surprisin'. We all know that with the best of men marriage
+ain't a path of roses, but in my day women kep' it to theirselves.
+They suffered it in silence and thought it was the right thing, but
+they're getting too much sense now; and perhaps all this cryin' out
+against it will be a means to an end, for a grievance can't be
+remedied till it's aired, that's for certain," said she.
+
+Mrs Bray was in great form during those days, and though her
+assertions frequently lacked logic, and betrayed in her the very
+shortcomings which she railed against in men, nevertheless I liked
+her, for she blurted out that with which the little quiet woman rules
+by keeping it in the background, well hidden under seeming humility.
+
+"Look here, Dawn," said she on one of these occasions, "when you get a
+home of your own, take my advice and don't never let no other woman in
+it. You can't, seein' what men are. There's no trustin' none of them,
+and if you think you can you'll find yourself sold. And try soon as
+ever you're married to get something into your own hands, as a married
+woman is helpless to earn her livin'; and once you have any children
+you're right at the mercy of a man, and if he ain't pleased with you
+in every way you're in a pretty fix, because the law upholds men in
+every way. If you don't feel inclined to be their abject slave they
+can even take your children from you, and what do you think of that?
+It shows we ain't got the vote none too soon, I reckon! I'm not sayin'
+that you'll get that kind of a crawler; some of them is good,--a jolly
+sight better than some of the women,--but the most, when you come to
+live with them, is as hard as nails. They don't know how to be nothing
+else. They never know what it is to be quite helpless and dependent,
+so what do they care. They just glory and triumph over women bein'
+under them, because they know there's nothing to bring them down, and
+you want to set your wits to get some hold on a man,--he has plenty on
+you by law and everything else,--get some property or something in
+your name so that he can't make a dishcloth of you altogether. Bein'
+rich you'll have a somewhat easier time, but it's when you've got
+mountains of work, when you ain't feelin' as strong as Sandow for it,
+an' have one child at your skirts an' another in your arms, an' your
+husband to think women ain't intended for nothink better,--that this
+is God's design for 'em, like most men do,--it's then that married
+life ain't the heaven some young girls think it's goin' to be. This
+ain't a description of no uncommon case but among them all around you,
+and supposed to be the fortunate ones. I think girls want warnin', so
+they ain't goin' into it with their eyes shut."
+
+The picture painted by this lady was duplicated by sadder pictures of
+the small worn type, and some weeks of this brought us to advanced
+spring and a bride-to-be so worried and unhappy that she had lost her
+appetite and the roses from her cheeks, and grew visibly thinner.
+
+Ernest, who managed to snatch a little time from worshipping his
+bride-elect wherein to superintend the furnishing of his house, was
+exceedingly sensitive that his affianced should look so perceptibly
+miserable.
+
+"Do you think she doesn't care for me, and would like to be released?
+I'd rather die than marry her if she doesn't want me," he would say,
+sometimes with haughtiness and more often with anger. "Good gracious!
+I don't know why she thinks I'm going to belong to the criminal class.
+Goodness knows, if I were to judge her the same way there are plenty
+wives would scare even a Hottentot from matrimony, and if I were to
+express to Dawn any fears of her being similar, I bet you'd hear of
+our engagement coming to a sudden death. You seem to understand her
+better than I do, so say a good word for me if you can."
+
+My opinion of him being so high, saying a word in his favour gave me
+delight, and I took the first opportunity of saying a good many. At
+the end of one day, after Dawn had been subjected to a particularly
+gruesome account of what she might expect, I found her face downwards
+on her bed, weeping bitterly, and elicited--
+
+"I'm going to tell Ernest to-morrow that I won't marry him. It's too
+terrible--they all tell you the same. I'd rather earn my living in
+some other way while I'm able. I'd rather throw up the thing now when
+most of my trousseau is ready than go on if one quarter of what they
+say is true. I'm not one of those fools who think life is going to
+turn out something special for me. Before these women were married I
+suppose they thought their husbands were going to be kings, but see
+how they have panned out, and why should I expect any better?"
+
+Time had arrived to take the subject in both hands, so I gripped it
+firmly.
+
+"You must be thankful to gain one point at a time," I said, beginning
+with the lightest end of my argument. "A little while since you feared
+you were fated for the life of those around--household drudgery, with
+an occasional sulky drive in the afternoon; now that you have escaped
+that prospect you are haunted by worse possibilities. No doubt you
+hear some saddening and deplorable stories, for some of the laws
+relating to marriage are degrading, and the lot of the married woman
+in the working class where she is wife, mother, cook, laundress,
+needlewoman, charwoman, and often many other things combined, is the
+most heartbreakingly cruel and tortured slavery; but you are escaping
+the probability of such a purgatorial existence. Take comfort in
+knowing that a great percentage of men are infinitely superior to the
+laws under which they live, because law is determined by public
+opinion, and though it restrains and modifies public behaviour it will
+not mould private character. Law is shaped for the masses, but there
+is a small percentage of individuals in either sex who are superior to
+any workable law, and I think Ernest Breslaw is one of these."
+
+"Do you?" she said, sitting up eagerly. "Would you marry him without
+any fear if you were me?"
+
+"I would--right at once. In spite of all its shortcomings I have a
+profound belief that not woman, as the poet has it, but all humanity--
+
+    'Holds something sacred, something undefiled,
+    Some quenchless gleam of the celestial light.'"
+
+The rain that was temporarily washing the perfume from the flowers
+pattered against the window-panes and accentuated the silence, till I
+added--
+
+"I will tell you my history some day, so that you may see that when I
+have belief in my fellows how little reason you have to fear. I have
+been an actress, you know."
+
+"Yes; Ernest told me."
+
+"Well, I'll tell you about it one day." I did not mention that I had
+expressly requested Ernest to keep my past a secret. However, I was
+not displeased that he had been unable to do so. If a man of his
+inexperience, and in the zenith of his first overwhelming passion, had
+been able to keep such a secret in the teeth of his love's wheedling,
+he would have proved himself of the stuff to make an ambassadorial
+diplomat, but not of the calibre to be the affectionate, domesticated
+husband, having no interests of which his wife might not be
+cognisant--the only character to whom I could without misgiving
+entrust the hot-headed Dawn.
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-EIGHT.
+
+LET THERE BE LOVE.
+
+
+I so nearly "pegged out" with an attack that fell to my lot a little
+time after the election, that Dr Smalley considered it advisable to
+summon Dr Tinker to a consultation, but sad to say I was too comatose
+to have become acquainted with the husband of the famous Mrs Tinker,
+whose individuality afforded considerable interest, because it was
+very conspicuous when surrounded by the neutrality of life in Noonoon.
+However, with the aid of some "powltices" constructed by Grandma Clay
+and energetically applied by Mrs Bray, and because my hour had not yet
+come, against the time when we slid into a splendid October I was
+tottering about once more.
+
+During my time of confinement the old valley had put on its finishing
+touches of spring glory. Only a few golden oranges now remained on the
+trees, and amid the bright green leaves were thick clusters of waxy
+bloom. The perfume from them was heavenly, and sometimes almost too
+powerful after the sun had toppled behind the great level-browed range
+which, viewed from the plain, guarded the west of the valley of
+Noonoon like a mighty wall. Some of the land had been cultivated for a
+century without attention to artificial renewal of its fertility, but
+still it gave forth a wondrous variety and wealth of vegetation. The
+widespreading cedars hung out their scented bloom like heliotrope
+flags amid surrounding greenery of pine, plane, poplar, and loquat,
+and the peach and apricot orchards contributed banks of their delicate
+flowers, which in the glory of their massed bloom could have
+out-Japanned Japan. Along the lanes, where their stones had been
+thrown, they sprang up and bloomed and bore liberally; roses of many
+kinds and colours clambered up verandah posts and peeped over fences;
+the garden plots were like compressed bouquets; the brilliant,
+graceful, and exquisitely perfumed pink oleanders grew wild in the
+fields; and altogether the vale of melons had graduated to a valley of
+flowers.
+
+The days had stretched out so that the mail from the far West trundled
+down the mountains in time to cross the queer old bridge across the
+Noonoon at daybreak, and the first beams of morning turned its windows
+to gold as the waking flowers were lifting their dew-drenched heads
+and the soft white mists were dispersing themselves betimes from the
+plains dotted with ramshackle little homes and cut into squares by
+barbed-wire fences. The weather had warmed, so that the fashionables'
+week-end exit to the cool Blue Mountains had begun; and the youngsters
+near the railway line sometimes left their play and stood agape in the
+soft twilight to watch the governor's car, painted in a strikingly
+different colour to all the others and emblazoned with the British
+coat of arms, go by.
+
+Uncle Jake, a hired man, and Andrew were very busy on the farm, and we
+none the less engaged in the house, where every article of furniture
+was made a receptacle for drapery and haberdashery, and where the
+wedding was the only subject. It so often gave Andrew the "pip" that
+his constitution must have been seriously impaired by such frequent
+attacks of this complaint.
+
+In those days Dawn was too engrossed to take me for drives, and Ernest
+too occupied to pull me on the historic stretch of water running like
+the moats of old beside his lady's castle, so that Ada Grosvenor, in
+her office of doing good to all with whom she came in contact, stepped
+into the breach, and sought to aid my recovery by taking me for gentle
+exercise.
+
+It was one day when we had driven east from Noonoon that she
+remarked--
+
+"It's a wonder that Mr Breslaw would care for Dawn's style when he
+moves in such a smart set. She is a handsome girl, which covers a
+multitude of sins in that respect, but still she is very downright,
+and--and, well, doesn't quite conform to the rules of refinement."
+
+I only smiled, and waited till the pony's head was turned for home,
+when I covered the necessity for reply by admiring the incomparable
+panorama before us. From the altitude we had reached on the Sydney
+road, we could see above the unbroken line of the horizon west from
+Noonoon town, and the Blue Australian Mountains stretched across the
+view in an endless succession of round-topped peaks painted in their
+matchless cerulean tints, which, near the end of day, were royal in
+their splendour. For a hundred miles they reigned supreme before the
+fringe of the endless plains was reached--peak after peak, gorge on
+gorge, tier upon tier of beetling walls of rock, disclosing dim
+shadowy gullies clothed with greenery and ferns where abounded
+cascades of water and dewy springs in romantic and unrivalled
+solitude. The sun, surrounded by a gorgeous pageant of flame and
+gold, rested his chin on one of the peaks as though well pleased with
+the glowing snowless scene that his offices had in part created, and
+lingered a moment ere giving it up to the eager night. She sent her
+forerunners,--twilight, which paled the wondrous blues, and dusk, that
+left the mountains shadowy and indistinct, when the lady of darkness
+herself rubbed them right out of the great canvas, and left it no
+coloured beauty but the gleam of the far stars overhead and the tiny
+man-made lights below, which, showing from the windows of the little
+homesteads creeping up the mountain-sides, twinkled like points
+between earth and sky.
+
+Miss Grosvenor made no further comment regarding Dawn's probable
+inability to rise to the demands of smart society. Only inexperience
+had caused her to make any. Ernest fluttered in the smart set; he and
+I were familiar with it; Miss Grosvenor was not, therefore we were
+disillusioned and she was not.
+
+We knew that the acme of refinement and culture might possibly be
+found in the smart set, but that it was a very small island,
+surrounded by a very large sea of other styles which spoke nothing so
+much as squandered opportunities. We knew girls too superior to dress
+themselves without a maid, yet who rolled tipsy to bed after every
+champagne orgy; supercilious and much-paragraphed misses educated in
+England, finished in Paris, and presented at Court, but who used more
+slang than grooms; while an expensive education did not raise their
+brothers above ribaldry and other vulgar excesses. Ernest and I knew a
+beautiful, honest, intelligent girl when we had the good fortune to
+meet her, and had no fears that she could not hold her own in good
+sets, let alone in the smarter ones of colonial or any other
+fashionable society, where the majority were animated by nothing
+higher than an insane and inane pursuit of something to kill time.
+
+Besides, it was wonderful how Dawn suddenly eschewed slang and
+conspicuous violation of syntax, as she could easily do, for she had
+been somewhat educated in a school patronised by the Australian _beau
+monde_. Had not her grandma told me of the magnitude of her education
+when I had first arrived? and did she not constantly repeat the story
+now? For having survived the fear of Ernest being too aristocratic,
+she took pride in his worldly possessions and position, and
+characterised him as "more likely than most, if he only turns out true
+to name, which in the case of husbands is as rare as bought seed
+potatoes turnin' out what they're supposed to be; but there ain't any
+good of meeting troubles half-way."
+
+As the wedding preparations made so much bother, grandma got in a
+woman to clean and another to sew, and determined to admit no summer
+boarders until after Christmas.
+
+"I can do without 'em, only I like to see money changin' hands quicker
+than happens with a farm," said she; while also, in consideration of
+the wedding, the doors, whose opening and shutting had been obstructed
+by the ravages of the white ants, were at last satisfactorily
+repaired.
+
+Dawn, after the manner of most youthful brides, was desirous of the
+full torture of "keeping up" her wedding, while Ernest, as usual with
+bridegrooms, so shrunk from display that he would have paid half a
+year's income to escape it; but it was only to me he made this
+confession, to Dawn he was manfully unselfish, allowing her full rein
+and agreeably falling in with her requirements.
+
+I did not think much of fussy weddings, but these were such a
+splendid pair of young things that I was pleased to endure the
+preparations with a smile instead of a sigh, and contribute some old
+silks and laces towards the trousseau; while a few dainty and
+expensive trifles, sent to me from a traveller over the sea, found a
+place in the furnishing of the bride's boudoir.
+
+Like all strictly reared girls, a certain prudishness at first caused
+Dawn to shrink from her love as something that should be resisted, but
+as her wedding-day drew near her heart grew more at peace regarding
+her contemplated change of life, and unfolded to the enchanting
+influence of youth's master passion. The roseate mists it weaves
+before the vision of its happy and willing victims, blunted even this
+girl's exceptional and matter-of-fact perspicacity, and with her ears
+grown suddenly deaf to those who had at first alarmed her by the
+recapitulation of their unfortunate practical and disillusioning
+experiences, looked out towards a future beautified with as many
+shades of blue as the mountain ramparts beyond the river flowing by
+her door. There was no hitch to speak of. Grandma, being one of a
+bygone brigade, enforced the almost obsolete rule of a chaperon, and
+the two evils in this case being represented by Andrew and me, Dawn
+considered me the lesser, and installed me in the office known by the
+irreverent as "gooseberrying."
+
+Mostly it is a thankless and objectionable undertaking, but in this
+instance it was delightful, and we three spent a kind of antenuptial
+honeymoon that was an experience to be appreciated with a warm glow by
+one whom the world has all gone by.
+
+I suddenly developed a latent artistic ambition, and no subject would
+do for my brush but the exquisite scenes far up the quiet river, where
+its deep clear pools lay like basins under the overhanging cliffs,
+and numerous species of beautiful flowering creepers clambered over
+the cool brown rocks shaded by the turpentine and gum-trees, ti-tree,
+wild cotton-bush, native hibiscus, and an endless variety of trees and
+shrubs getting a foothold in the crevices. These nooks, owing to the
+rugged and precipitous country, could only be reached by water, so
+Ernest rowed me up by boat and Dawn went with me for company, for thus
+do we live the best of our lives under pretence of trivial outside
+actions. The river was dotted with other boaters on these summer
+afternoons, and Grandma Clay's "Best Boats on the River" were seldom
+idle, while Uncle Jake was also occupied in collecting the tariff from
+those who hired them, and in seeing that the boats themselves were
+safely moored again after their jaunts.
+
+I fear that I may have been a better chaperon from Dawn's point of
+view than from grandma's, but even chaperons, however great their
+diplomacy, cannot well serve two mistresses. While I sketched, the
+young couple made horticultural expeditions up the river-banks where
+the cliffs were not too precipitous, and though they went beyond my
+sight and hearing, and after a couple of hours' absence returned with
+no better specimens of ferns and flowers than were to be plucked
+within a stone's-throw of the boat, I failed to remark it. They were
+equally lenient in the matter of my feeble sketches, which never
+progressed beyond a certain stage, and which could have been equally
+well perpetrated at home from memory, for all the justice they did the
+exquisite little gems of the picturesque river scenery. Grandma Clay,
+however, thought them fine, and as the demand for them was not likely
+to be greater than the supply, I generously presented her with one,
+unfinished and all though it was, and which she "hung on the line"
+with Jim Clay; and no doubt it was not so great a caricature of the
+beauty of the Noonoon as the "enlargements" were of the comeliness of
+their dead original in the days when he had told life's sweetest story
+to the dashing damsel who could handle her coaching team of five with
+as much complacence as her granddaughter drove her small fat pony in
+the little yellow sulky about the execrably rough but level roads of
+Noonoon municipality.
+
+This month of real orange blossoms was a time of moonlight, and
+regardless of the fact that the river scenes were at their best for
+reproduction on canvas, when the sun was high enough above the gorges
+to send great quivering shafts of sunlight between the tree-trunks
+deep into the heart of the pools, and to cast the shadow of the gum
+leaves in lace-like patterns on their surface, we sometimes delayed
+our setting out till close upon sundown, and took a billy[2] and
+provisions, intent upon having our tea on the rocks under the trees by
+Noonoon's banks.
+
+[Footnote 2: A tin pail.]
+
+Ah! glorious summer hours on the happy Noonoon, amid-stream, bright in
+the hot afternoon sun, cool by the edges where the lilies and reeds
+abounded, and the beetling cliffs and the limitless eucalypti flung
+their shade.
+
+There was a joy in going abroad when the sun was nearly on the blue
+wall of mountain, and its oblique beams poured a golden mist over the
+blossoming orangeries, the milk-white spiraea in Clay's drive, and
+intensified the gorgeous red of the regal pomegranate blooms showing
+against the heliotrope on the lower limbs of the umbrageous cedars.
+Coming down the little pathway gained by the creaking garden gate, we
+shot out from among the drooping willows, the steerswoman turning her
+face up-stream where, in a southerly direction, the ranges were cut in
+a great V-shaped rift that let the waters through. Anxious to escape
+from the company and critical observation of the garden species of the
+local boater, we went a long way up-stream. Seven or eight miles were
+but a bagatelle to the amateur sculling champion of the State that
+held the world's championship, and he pulled his freight past the
+evidence of husbandmen, past the straight historic stretch where the
+Canadian champion had lost his laurels to New South Wales; on, on the
+strong arms took the craft till a wall of mountain loomed straight
+across our way, and the river had every appearance of coming to a
+sudden end, but round a sudden surprising elbow we went till a similar
+prospect confronted the navigator, and the river came round another of
+its many angles. On, on we steered till the warm rich scent from the
+flowering vineyards was left behind and the sound of the trains could
+not be heard. Far up the ravines beyond the pasture lands and men's
+habitations, we found the desired privacy, and the solitude was broken
+only by the dip of the oars, the flash of an occasional water-fowl,
+the cry of some night-bird, or the "plopping" of the fishes that
+Andrew could never catch as they fell back after rising to snatch some
+unwary insect. The gentle breezes sighing down the gullies, dim and
+lone in the eerie moonlight, were laden with the scent of wattle and
+other native flowers, and otherwise fresh and sweet with the
+inexpressible purity of summer night on the great unbroken bush-land.
+In such dryad-like resorts we were tempted to dawdle so long that the
+big hours of the evening frequently found us still on the breast of
+the river. I was wont to recline on an impromptu couch of rugs in the
+bottom of the well-built craft identified with our excursions, where I
+could feign to be asleep. At first Dawn suspected me of only
+pretending, but I was so emphatic in declaring that the fresh air and
+motion of the boat induced the sleep I could not woo in bed, that they
+grew to believe me, and carefully covering me from mosquitoes, it
+became invariable that at a certain distance on our homeward way the
+rower relinquished rowing, the steerer stopped steering, and the boat
+drifted down-stream with the gentle flow, while two-thirds of its
+occupants tasted of the elixir--
+
+    "That burns beneath the beauty of the rose,
+    And in the hearts of youth and maiden glows,
+    And fills and thrills the world with life and light,
+    And is the soul of all that breathes and grows."
+
+And what did the old moon see in that peaceful valley ere she sank
+behind the great primeval gum-tree forests on the mountain crests,
+across which zigzagged the noisy trains? There were heavy crops above
+ground, vineyards abloom, orchards forming fruit, hundreds of
+comfortable homes, and no doubt many pairs of lovers abroad, for
+lovers love their friend the gentle moon; but none were more fitted
+for love's consummation than the two drifting on the old river whose
+limpid waters never again "shall blacken below, spear and the shadow
+of spear, bow and the shadow of bow," and which, after rushing a
+tortuous way between its wild gorges, steadies by the old settlement
+on the plain, and saunters smooth and straight and deep a space
+between fertile banks gardened with lucerne fields, orchards of peach
+and apricot, and delightful orange groves. The air was intoxicatingly
+heavy with the exquisite perfume of these bridal blooms, and the
+soft-scented breezes laughed as they too kissed the close-pressed lips
+of the fair young pair who--
+
+    "Gathered the blossom that rebloom'd, and drank
+    The magic cup that filled itself anew."
+
+Ah! Love's idyllic hours on the breast of a grandly gliding river,
+when the dews were on the flowers, and all was enchantingly sweet and
+fair under the sleep-time silver of a southern summer moon!
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-NINE.
+
+    "The savage sells or exchanges his daughter, but in
+     civilisation the man gives his away, and is thankful for the
+     opportunity."--_Reflections of a Bachelor Girl._
+
+
+Dawn took a great deal of her own way, Ernest and I were privileged to
+make suggestions so long as we were careful to remember our
+insignificance, and grandma saw to it that her lawful rights were not
+altogether usurped.
+
+Occasionally it fell to my lot to act in a slightly mediatorial
+capacity, owing to the divergence of the swell wishes of the
+bridegroom-elect, and the plebeian determination of his
+grandmother-in-law to be, regarding the wedding celebrations, but
+Ernest was exceptionally unselfish and therefore very long-suffering.
+
+Dawn being under age, her grandmother came forward with a project that
+her father should be apprised of what was transpiring, requested to
+give his daughter away, and to bring some of his side of the house to
+the wedding. Dawn raised vigorous opposition.
+
+"It would be like my father's presumption to interfere in any way,
+considering his career with my mother. I hate him for a mean coward.
+He's the very style of man I'd be ashamed to acknowledge as an
+acquaintance yet alone own as a _father_! I'd like to see him dare to
+give me away,--he'd have to own me first!"
+
+"Well, Jake, there, will have to give you away then," said grandma.
+
+"I'd give _him_ away with pleasure," replied Dawn. "If I _must_ be
+_given_ away like a slave or animal, you'll give me away grandma, or
+I'll stay where I am. 'Who giveth this woman to be married to this
+man?' the old parson will ask; why won't he also ask, 'Who giveth this
+man?' as if he too were only a chattel belonging to some one?"
+
+That she would be disposed of by no one but her grandmother rather
+pleased the old lady than otherwise; so she invested in yet another
+black silk gown, over which she was to wear a seldom seen cape of
+point lace worked by Dawn's mother; and she also purchased a wonderful
+bonnet, and armed herself with a new pair of "lastings." Thus Dawn was
+to have her way in this particular, but the old dame adhered to her
+original intention in the matter of the Mudeheepes.
+
+"I've kep' 'em at bay long enough now. I'll just acknowledge 'em this
+once, or it will seem as if you was a 'illegitimate,'" said she in the
+plenitude of her worldly wisdom, and thereupon "writ" a stiff though
+not discourteous letter to Dawn's father, inviting any number of the
+bride's relatives up to six, to come and spend a week before the
+wedding in her home, for the purpose of making Dawn's acquaintance.
+
+"There, I have done me duty, and they can suit theirselves whether
+they come or go to Halifax," she remarked as she despatched the
+communication.
+
+They came. Dawn's father, his second wife, and his youngest sister,
+Miss Mudeheepe, arrived three days before the wedding and remained to
+grace the ceremony.
+
+Dawn, being a mere girl, perhaps it was Ernest's wealth and position
+induced them to meet Mrs Martha Clay's overture, for they were
+thorough snobs, but if they had come prepared to patronise, their
+intention was killed ere it bore fruit.
+
+The hostess hired the town 'bus to convey them from the station, and
+despatched Andrew, with many injunctions to "conduct hisself with
+reason," to meet them there, while she and Dawn waited to receive them
+on one of the old porches. It was a bower of roses and pot-plants, and
+further shaded by a graceful pepper-tree, and made a beautiful frame
+for the grandmother and the maiden,--the old dame so straight and
+vigorous, the girl as roseate and fresh as her name, but each equally
+haughty and bent upon maintaining their iron independence of the
+people who had discarded the girl and her mother ere the former had
+been born.
+
+Personal appearance was much in their favour, and no practised belle
+of thirty could have held her own better than the inexperienced girl
+of nineteen, whose native wit and downright honesty of purpose were
+more than equal to all the diplomacy of thrust and parry to be gained
+by living in society. Her stepmother, who was apparently as
+good-natured as she seemed brainless, was prepared to be gushing, but
+that was nipped in the bud by the way Dawn extended her pretty, firm
+hand with the dimpling wrist and knuckles and exquisitely tapering
+fingers.
+
+Her father and aunt, who were tall and angular, with thin faces of
+dull expression, met a similar reception, and she presented them to me
+herself, explaining that I was a very dear friend with her for the
+wedding.
+
+I had long since risen from a boarder to be a guest and friend of the
+house, and it had devolved upon me to exhibit the presents and
+interview the endless callers at this time of nine days' wonder.
+
+It being hot, the ladies retired to doff their hats ere partaking of
+afternoon tea, and Dawn took her father's hat while he trumpeted in
+his handkerchief and attempted a few commonplace platitudes from the
+biggest and stiffest arm-chair in the "parler," into which he had
+subsided. I left the room, but could hear him from where I stood
+awaiting the ladies' reappearance, one from the room that had been
+Miss Flipp's and the other from the one I had at first occupied, and
+Mr George Mudeheepe was to occupy the third one of these apartments,
+which had been empty since the tragedy.
+
+"Dawn, my dear, you are your mother once again," he said with a sigh;
+"I have never seen you, and now you are sufficiently grown to be
+married."
+
+"Yes," said the girl.
+
+"Will you give me a kiss?"
+
+"I'd rather not. You see you are only a stranger to me. I have never
+heard of you only as the man who was a monster to my mother. I never
+saw her, but I remember to love her for what she did for me, whereas
+you, what did you do for her and me? I would like you to understand
+how I feel on this subject, so that there can be no mistake," said the
+girl honestly.
+
+"Oh, well, I didn't come here to be told that, but to give consent to
+your marriage."
+
+"Oh!" said the girl, rearing the pretty head with its wealth of bright
+hair, "as for that, I'm going to marry. If you like to exercise your
+authority I'll run away and you can't unmarry me. It is at grandma's
+wish you are here; she said to let old bitterness sleep for the time
+you are here, and so I will now that I have explained that I utterly
+refuse to recognise that a father is anything but a stranger unless he
+discharges the responsibilities of the office. For the sake of the
+race I maintain this ground," she concluded in words that had been put
+into her mouth by one of the speakers at Ada Grosvenor's election
+league, and the appearance of the ladies put an end to further
+contention.
+
+Dawn's judgments were remorseless, as becoming clean-souled, fearless
+youth as yet unacquainted with the great gulf 'twixt the ideal and
+real, and untainted by that charity and complaisance which, like
+senility, come with advancing years.
+
+The aunt was elderly and unprepossessing, and the stepmother of the
+type bespeaking champagne and too much eating for the exercise taken,
+for her head was partly sunk in a huge mass of adipose substance that
+had once been bosom, and the other proportions of her figure were in
+keeping.
+
+The cups were spread in the dining-room, so thither we repaired to eat
+and drink while representations of Jim Clay and Jake Sorrel, senior,
+who had wept for the sufferings of the convicts, glowered down upon
+the gathering of plebeians who were half swells and the swells who
+were wholly plebeian.
+
+Presently grandma and I excused ourselves and left Dawn with her
+relations.
+
+"What do you think of 'em? Are they any better than Dawn an' me?" said
+the old dame as we got out of hearing. "How do I compare with that old
+sack of charcoal?"
+
+Ay, how did she compare? As a slight, active, handsome woman, still
+vigorous at seventy-six, with one who, though thirty years her junior, was
+already almost helpless from obesity and natural clumsiness,--that's how
+she compared!
+
+"Them's some of the swells for you--one of the 'old families,' who
+think they're made of different stuff to you an' me. What do you think
+of Dawn, Jim Clay's granddaughter, who drove the coach, when placed
+beside her aunt, the granddaughter of an admiral in the army?"
+
+"She looks as though Jim Clay had been a general in the navy and she
+had done justice to her heredity," I gravely replied.
+
+"Andrew, come here an' tell me how you managed 'em, an' what you think
+of the great bugs now you've seen 'em," commanded the old lady of that
+individual, as he emerged from the kitchen with both hands full of
+cake.
+
+"Did you walk up to 'em an' say, 'Are you Mr and Mrs Mudeheepe, I'm
+Mrs Clay's grandson?' like I told you."
+
+"No; I seen it on their luggage without arskin' them, an' one look at
+'em was enough for me. I didn't bother tellin' 'em who I was. I didn't
+care if they had fell down an' broke their necks--the bloomin'
+long-nosed old goats! I just took hold of their things an' flung 'em
+in the 'bus, and the old fat one she says, 'Are you Mrs Clay's groom?'
+an' I says, 'Mrs Clay is my grandma,' an' she says, 'Oh'!"
+
+"Well, you might have introduced yourself a bit better to make things
+more agreeabler, but they really are the untakin'est people I've seen
+for a long time. Ain't I delighted that Dawn took after my side! An'
+now, though she's me own, do you think I'm over conceited to think her
+fit for the king's son?"
+
+"Certainly not," I replied; for it would have taken a very estimable
+son of a king to be meet for this Princess of the Break-of-Day,
+appropriately christened Dawn!
+
+
+
+
+THIRTY.
+
+FOR FURTHER PARTICULARS CONSULT 'THE NOONOON ADVERTISER' OF THAT DATE.
+
+
+That was a grand wedding celebrated in Noonoon ere the orange blossoms
+had turned into oranges, but for details it would be better to refer
+to that most reliable little journal, 'The Noonoon Advertiser.' Only a
+few particulars remain in my mind, but the paper published a full
+account, including a minute description of the bride's gown and a
+careful list of the presents. It was much to the horror of Ernest that
+the latter was inserted, but it would have been much more horrible to
+Grandma Clay had the mention of so much as a jam-spoon been omitted,
+so he consoled himself with the reflection that it was only in 'The
+Noonoon Advertiser,' and took care to keep the list out of the account
+which appeared in the Sydney dailies. The curious, by consulting a
+back number of the little country sheet, may learn that Mrs L. Witcom
+(_nee_ Carry, the ex-lady help) gave the bride one of many pairs of
+shadow-work pillow shams, and that Miss Grosvenor contributed one of
+the equally numerous drawn-thread table centres. Mrs Bray presented a
+ribbon-work cushion; Dr Smalley, some of the jam-spoons; Andrew, a
+bread-fork; and Mr J. Sorrel, great-uncle of the bride, a silver
+cream-jug; while Mr Claude (alias "Dora") Eweword kept himself in mind
+by an afternoon tea-set. The complete list took a column, and included
+dozens of magnificent articles from sporting associations and chums of
+the bridegroom.
+
+The bride--a glorious vision in Duchesse satin and accessories in
+keeping, and with real orange blossoms in hair, corsage, and train;
+the proud shyness of the gentle and stalwart groom standing beside
+her, and the brave old grandmother drawn up a little in the rear,
+formed a picture I shall never forget. The old lady performed her
+office with flashing eyes, a steady voice, and an individuality which
+none could despise or overlook.
+
+Excepting her grandmother, Dawn was unattended, and as the young
+couple came down the aisle, by previous request of the bride, I had
+the honour of accompanying the old lady from the church, and she said,
+as we drove away over the scattered rose petals to be in readiness to
+receive the guests--
+
+"I've done it--give me little girl away, an' without misgivin's, for
+if she's as happy as I was she'll do. When the time was here there was
+some patches of me life wasn't too soft, but lookin' back, I would
+marry Jim Clay over again if I could."
+
+The caterpillars that had been eating the grape-vines and giving
+Andrew exercise as destroyer, had turned into millions of white
+butterflies that flecked the golden sunlight like a vast flotilla of
+miniature aerial yachts, and enhanced the splendour of that balmy
+wedding-day. It was the month of roses, and, intertwined with jasmine
+and mignonette, they formed the chief decorations in the roomy marquee
+erected for the breakfast under the big old cedars overlooking the
+river. All Noonoonites of any importance sat down to the repast, and
+their names, from that of Mrs Bray to Mrs Dr Tinker, are recorded in
+'The Noonoon Advertiser.' The last-mentioned lady did not exhibit any
+of her famous characteristics at the function further than to use a
+gorgeous fan she carried in rapping her husband over the knuckles
+every time his attention wandered from her remarks. The toasts were
+many and long, and it fell to "Dora" Eweword to respond to that of the
+"ladies." Since the announcement of Dawn's engagement to Ernest,
+"Dora" had been frequently seen out driving with Ada Grosvenor, and he
+paid her marked attention at the wedding; but this was private, not
+public, information.
+
+After I had helped Dawn into her travelling dress I had a few words
+apart with Ernest while Grandma Clay bade a private good-bye to his
+wife.
+
+"Well," he said, with self-contained and pardonable triumph, "I've won
+her in spite of that dish of water."
+
+"Yes, we three have accomplished our desire."
+
+"What three?"
+
+"Mr and Mrs R. E. Breslaw and myself!"
+
+"Oh, was it your desire too?" he said with a happy laugh.
+
+The bride now appeared, and wringing my hand as he said--
+
+"You'll come to us when we return," he stepped forward to place her in
+the carriage that took them to the railway.
+
+The paper had better be again consulted for accurate account of the
+confetti pelting and other customary happenings that took place at the
+station. These details, and the real greatness of Dawn's match, and
+her aristocratic relatives, who, as often suspected, had not proved to
+be only a myth, were the chief theme of conversation for many days.
+
+All the engines in the sheds at the time, and whose music had lulled
+me to sleep o' nights, blew the bride a royal fanfare as she entered
+her first, _engaged_, and further cock-a-doodled "good luck" as the
+train steamed out.
+
+Most keenly of all I remember that it was piteously lonely, and as
+dreary as though the sun had lost its power, when the panting engine
+had climbed the hill from the sleepy little town, and dropped out of
+hearing on the down grade from the old valley of ripening peach and
+apricot, bearing the girl for ever away from the slow, meandering
+grooves of life of which her vigorous young soul was weary.
+
+A meeting of the municipal council claimed Uncle Jake that night,
+Andrew went over to discuss the situation with Jack Bray, and the
+loneliness of the old dining-room was insupportable to grandma and me.
+Joy and beauty seemed to have fled from the scented nights beside the
+river,--even the whistle and rush of the trains breathed a forlorn
+note to my bereaved fancy, and there was a tear in grandma's eye as
+she said--
+
+"Well, she's really gone for altogether--she that I helped into the
+world and rared with my own hand, and named after the Dawn in which
+she came. That's the order of life. It's always the same--you can't
+keep any one for always. I couldn't abear it here now--it seems as if
+everything in life was done, and there's no need for me to stay if
+Ernest puts Andrew in the way of this electrical engineerin' he's so
+mad for. Jake can board somewhere. He don't care about things so much.
+I'll go to Dawn: thank God she wants me, an' I've got plenty to take
+me away if she gets tired of me, as young folks often do of the old,
+and which is only natural after all. I can let or sell the place, an'
+w'en I'm gone it will be enough for Dawn if ever she's threw on the
+world like I was. Everythink seems fair with her now, but this is a
+life of ups an' downs, and there's no tellin' what may happen."
+
+
+
+
+L'ENVOI.
+
+
+What interest can there be in the play after the knight has settled
+affairs with the lady, or in the story-book when the heroine and hero
+have gone on a honeymoon preparatory to living happily ever
+after?--and that is what befell my tale in Noonoon.
+
+I listen no more to the splendid music of the locomotives as they roar
+across the queer old bridge, nor watch the red light flashing from
+their coaling doors as they climb the Blue Mountain ascent and fire as
+they go. Their far-carrying rumble has been succeeded by the more
+thunderous voice of the sea on the rock-walled coast of my native
+land.
+
+Four months have elapsed since the wedding in Noonoon, yet Ernest is
+still content to let his athletic ambitions remain in abeyance while
+he squanders his time in the sweet dalliance of love. Squander, I say;
+but on reviewing the expired years, how sanely sweet the youthful
+hours we dallied shine from amid the years we toiled, fumed, cursed,
+sweated, and strove to step past our brother in the bootless race for
+pleasure, opulence, or popularity!
+
+Being able to indulge in the insignia of wealth, even without being
+the good fellow he is, Ernest finds it is of little significance that
+his hair is "what fond mothers term auburn," while Dawn's triumphs
+were assured from the outset. As mistress of a fine town mansion,
+with good looks, with smart ideas of dress, and smarter ability to
+verbally hold her own in any set, it goes without saying that her
+grandmother having "kep' a accommodation" is not remembered against
+her to any harmful extent in everyday life, where a large percentage
+of folks in all cliques have to survive the knowledge of their
+progenitors having been worse things than irreproachable proprietors
+and conductors of most exemplary accommodation houses for those who
+travel.
+
+As Ada Grosvenor is not a girl in a book but in everyday life, I
+cannot record that she has married a man worthy of her. Such an one
+would have to be a leader of men--a prime minister, reformer, or other
+prominent worker in the cause of humanity--and as these do not abound
+in the quiet whirlpools of existence, I can only hope that she does
+not drop in for a too impossible noodle, as is frequently the fate of
+noble women. "Dora" Eweword would have done very well to discharge the
+clodhopping work of her earthly journey--could have made her
+bread-and-butter and carried her parcels, but if I can depend on
+Andrew's letters, which breathe more heavily of generosity than of
+grammar and gracefulness, this eligible and strapping young member of
+Noonoon society has been rejected a second time, so that Mrs Bray's
+fears that he would be made over conceited by adulation from
+marriageable girls seems to have been unnecessary.
+
+Noonoon is enshrined in my heart as one of the pleasantest valleys on
+earth, so during enforcedly idle hours it has given me delight to
+paint its beauty, however feebly, and to put some of the doings of
+some of its folk in a story, that others might possibly enjoy them
+too. But I put the MSS. aside till, as the good country doctor so
+much esteemed in his circle expresses it, I shall have "pegged out,"
+and the heroine and hero of the plot shall then judge whether it is
+fit or not for publication. It has interested me to write, but
+
+    "My life has crept so long on a broken wing
+    . . . . . . . .
+    That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing,"
+
+and those whose lives are strong, fruitful, and successful may have no
+patience with the sentimental meanderings of an old woman who has
+outlived joy and usefulness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now, may the Lady of my tale, as her life progresses from dawn to
+noon, high noon to afternoon, dusk, evening, and night, have the
+Knight of her choice and peace always beside her, till new dawns break
+in other worlds beyond this place of fears and phantoms.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, by Miles Franklin
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME EVERYDAY FOLK AND DAWN ***
+
+***** This file should be named 21659.txt or 21659.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/1/6/5/21659/
+
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