“Gaddy, come into the garden with me, like Maud,” I pled. “I love it and the Harbor so, but I’m not safe there without you.”

Gaddy always did what he was asked without fuss, and no one noticed how unselfish he was because he was fat and old. He waddled around the flower beds plucking me a masculine bouquet—a leafless mixture of bloom, short of stalks and tightly compressed, but it smelt of heaven.

I confessed my trouble with Big Ears, and Gaddy wanted to know could I not consider him. I said I’d rather earn my living as a nurse maid. “Well, then,” said Gaddy, “just don’t bother about him.”

“But supposing he should commit suicide!”

“I’ll tell Derek, he’ll knock sense into him.”

This brought relief mixed with fear of Derek’s ridicule. I then told Gaddy about the drought and Pa being ill, and that I had to go home. Gaddy said that that was no sort of a career for a girl like me. I said my literary career had entirely gone bung in Sydney. Gaddy wanted to know what this fellow Hardy had been doing to help me. “Is he putting you in a play or what? A fellow like that doesn’t waste his time without getting something out of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, a little bird told me that a certain AUNT was away.”

So it seemed there were crows and magpies in Sydney as well as in the bush. “He wanted me to turn into someone that I am not, and go to London, but we have no money for that.”

Gaddy snorted and walked about a bit. “It’s a shame,” he said. “You need a patron, who would let you be yourself, and then you would have a brilliant career. Or you should have some cushy job with plenty of cash and leisure; but those jobs are given to men with influence. It would never do to let women have them, or where would men get wives?” He said this with a grin which extracted the sting.

Things would be righted now that women had the vote, but it would not be in time to help me, and I had not the necessary education. Gaddy breathed around the drive a bit and then we sat on the sea wall and he said, “There is a way that it could be settled as tight as a trivet.”

“Tell me how?” I demanded eagerly. Gaddy looked strange, even apoplectic, and his eyes bulged as if he were twisting his squint straight to look at me.

When a woman has warning she can obviate the conventional fable that a man stutters or mutters about loving her more than life or a good dinner, and which necessitates the companion fibs about being unworthy of his love combined with humble thanks for the honour he has offered her in the opportunity to be his wife, likewise drudge, echo, unfailing flatterer and so on. I had no warning from Gaddy. He said that I needed time and leisure to develop my kind of genius, and as he had plenty of money for the job, and loved me better than all the flash and selfish exploiters of my youth and beauty put together were capable of doing, what about solving my problem and making him as proud and happy as a pup with two tails by becoming Mrs. Gad.