The chairs proper to the front of the hall had been replaced by rows of desks, each of which was labelled with the name of its occupant’s firm. Van Huys. Riven Bros. Dubois. Yen. Steiner. James Ogden. Hartz. Ormerod. Rhodes. Markino. James Barnett. Dressed in business men’s suits woven from good wool, the buyers had come in from the four corners of the world for the summer wool sales. They might have been carefully selected types, so eloquently did they display their nationality. Van Huys’s buyer with his round wooden head and soft hat, Dubois’s, sleek, with a thin moustache and heavy grooves running from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth, old Jimmy Ormerod who bought for himself, screamed like a stallion, and turned purple in the face, Hartz with horn-rimmed glasses who barked, and Mr Kurata Kan of Markino’s with his falsetto yelp. Each buyer held printed lists before him, and from time to time, like a well-trained chorus-ensemble, they would all turn a page. The auctioneer’s recital was uninflected, and monotonous; yet, as if the buyers were marionettes and he their puppet-master, they would twitch into violent action and as suddenly return to their nervously intent immobility. Some holding the papers before their eyes, stood waiting for a particular wool clip to come up. Others wrote at their desks. Each had trained himself to jerk in a flash from watchful relaxation into spreadeagled yelling urgency. Many of them smoked continuously and Flossie Rubrick saw them through drifts of blue tobacco clouds.

In the open doorways and under the gallery stood groups of men whose faces and hands were raddled and creased by the sun and whose clothes were those of the country man in town. They were the woolgrowers, the run-holders, the sheep-cockies, the back-countrymen.

Upon the behaviour of the buyers their manner of living for the next twelve months would depend. The wool sale was what it all amounted to; long musters over high country, nights spent by shepherds in tin huts on mountain sides, late snows that came down into lambing paddocks, noisy rituals of dipping, crutching, shearing; the final down-country journey of the wool bales—this was the brief and final comment on the sheep man’s working year.

Flossie saw her husband, Arthur Rubrick, standing in a doorway. She waved vigorously. The men who were with Arthur pointed her out. He gave her a dubious nod and began to make his way along a side aisle towards her. As soon as he reached the steps that led from the auditorium up to her doorway she called out in a sprightly manner. ‘Look where I’ve got to! Come up and join me!’ He did so but without enthusiasm.

‘What are you doing up here, Floss?’ he said. ‘You ought to have gone down below.’

‘Down below wouldn’t suit me at all.’

‘Everyone’s looking at you.’