“Look here,” I warn Henry over and over again, “don’t you risk me in the matrimonial basket. Throw your handkerchief on one of the dozens of girls and widows who would snatch it eagerly. The world is infested with women who will agree with you—little darlings without intelligence, and boastful of it, who have been trained to be afraid of the night and to screech at a mouse and all that sort of thing. I love being out alone in the night, and mice could sleep in my pocket without frightening me.”

If we are out riding when these discussions take place, he chews a few more gum leaves and says, “Thank you, no. The dolls have no spirit. I’d sooner marry a cow. I’d run away from a doll in three weeks.”

He has the same mentality as Goring Hardy—take the world as it is and be comfortable and a success. Take me and set to work to squash me into the groove of the noodles. The difference between Mr. Hardy and Mr. Beauchamp is in their interests, Henry’s being those of a man on the land and the politics appertaining thereto, and Goring having the literary tastes and politics of the Londoner.

“After your first child,” Henry maintains, “you’ll settle down as steady as a church.”

My first child! Something to break my spirit and tether me to the domestic tread-mill! Had he known my dreams of a first child he would not have uttered that mistake.

Even so, a first child need not last for ever. It could contribute to the fulfilment of life if it were not followed by a dozen others. I claim the same right as all the Father O’Toole’s to be a spiritual parent of my race rather than to submit to the ideal or to follow the example of the mother rabbit.

I repudiate the crawl theory that we should be servile to our parents or to God for the bare fact of a mean existence. Most people are satisfied with a world run in a wasteful insanitary fashion. I am not. They are unashamed that seventy-five per cent, of human beings are fit only for the scrap heap. I am not. They are thankful to thrive while others starve. I am not.

I rebel with all my lung force against sitting down under life as it is, and as for a first child being an instrument of enslavement, both for his own and his mother’s sake, ’twere better he should never be.

The two greatest women in Australia are unmarried, and it would be a good plan for a few more to support them, to remain free to ventilate the state of marriage and motherhood and to reform its conditions.

“You just talk through your hat to be entertaining,” Henry continued after a while. “You’ll have to marry someone.”

“Why?”

“You could not endure to be despised as an old maid who could not get a man.”

At that I galloped right away from him leaving him a far speck on the glistening road that rises towards Lake George. I galloped until Popinjay was blown. Henry would not overtax Black-Dappled Grey to carry his sixteen stone at top speed. I reined-in on the crest from which far to the south can be seen the dreaming peaks of the mountains beyond the Murrumbidgee. Their beauty is a banner of spiritual strength raised for me to follow away from ’Possum Gully limitations.