* “Bulletin” Verse.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

SO TO SPEAK!

Henry Beauchamp was nearly a year away in Queensland. The seasons there enabled him to take up the slack of his property pinched by drought in the Southern District. He came back overland, arriving first at Moongudgeonby, or Five-Bob Downs, as it had come to be known, as he said, over his head and under his nose, because of my pranks.

The warnings against his fickleness were contradicted by his actions, but the smut of certain allegations remained like the smoke from a railway engine when you get in a tunnel. Renewed business around Goulburn enabled him to spend a lot of time at ’Possum Gully.

We reopened our old battles, he being armoured in the dogma that it was NATURE for women to serve men and bring children into the world regardless of whether or not the world was a fit place to receive them. He said he could give me much more than I could ever make by writing. “Marriage,” he insisted, “gives a woman standing. If she gets hold of a fellow with any sort of a head on him she has lots more standing than sour old school teachers and these other old maids, on their own, can have.”

STANDING!

“You don’t allow a woman any standing at all except by being the annexation of a man,” I said.

He laughed in his large healthy way. “Well, I did not arrange the world.”

“Yes, but you could help rearrange it,” I flashed, though I knew that among all the billions of men in the world there were few so just and brave that they would attempt any rearrangement that would lessen their top-dog self-confidence and loot; and none of these except Pa had ever undergone a sojourn at ’Possum Gully.

“You’ll have the vote when you are old enough. The rearranging of the world is in your own hands now; and I voted for woman suffrage.”

“There’s a lot of evolution in that, and evolution like posterity will be rather late in doing anything for the current generation.”

“Oh, Lord, I can’t make out how you can have so much rebellion in such a small soft frame.”

Many less stupid men than he would be surprised if they could see into the hearts of women who lie beside them so passively, or could hear what they say when the ogres of their bosom cannot hear.

“You’ll find women more against your ideas than men.”

“That is because they think it will please men—merely a matter of business advertisement.”

“Ah,” he continued complacently. “You are not meant to be one of those brainy old man-haters who would rather have a snake around than a child. You were meant for love and motherhood.”

“Man-haters,” I contended, “are those who are game enough to object to the present state of affairs for their motherhood. One such woman has more power of deep loving than half-a-dozen of the namby-pamby over-sexed womanised things “