“You’ll grow into one of those dreadful female agitators—eccentric women that men hate. You’ll get the name of a man-hater if you don’t take care.”

“This men-hating business seems to be as lop-sided as God’s will for women. You condemn a woman if she doesn’t worship men. She is the one in the wrong to hate the darling creatures, though they’re pretty hatable by all accounts. Then if a girl is fond of men that also disgraces her. I do like logic and fair play.”

“So do I,” interposed Ma, “but you’ll have to resign yourself to it all being on the other side.”

“It’s all silly nonsense. The men don’t act as if they hated me. The old ones as well as the boys all are friendly wherever I go.”

“Men will always blather to a forward woman while she is young; but they won’t respect her or marry her,” said Aunt Jane.

“She couldn’t marry more than one at a time, however willing she is,” said Pa. “She has plenty of time yet.”

When Pa and I were driving around the electorate together he talked about LIFE and said that my idea of being Premier was not fantastic. The political enfranchisement of women was inevitable, and women free could do what they liked with the world.

Votes for women was a magic talisman by which all evils and abuses were to be righted. Women no longer would have to pander to men through sexual attraction and pretend to be what they weren’t. They would burgeon as themselves. Those were splendid days. Pa said I must educate myself in readiness as by the time I should be of age I could stand for Parliament and discover if I had ability as a statesman. As a beginning he suggested that I should study history and the lives of great people to learn how they conducted the business. To this end the poor dear once again postponed a new suit, which Ma truly said he needed to prevent his being mistaken for a scarecrow, and brought me home an armful of books, including some autobiographies.

That’s how the trouble began.

The histories I left for later consumption, as the people in them are always so long dead and are nearly all kings and queens and military or political murderers who have no relation to the ordinary kind of people like those I know in Australia. The biographies of real people nearer our own day, and especially the autobiographies, where people told about themselves, filled me with excitement.

Judging by the way Ma always misunderstands my deeds and purposes and intentions, and by what she and Aunt Jane tell me that other people do think or will think of me, it seemed that an autobiography was a device for disseminating personal facts straight from the horse’s mouth.

I read ardently, nay, furiously would better express the way that one tackles the things one wants to do. Grace Darling, Charlotte Bronte, Joan of Arc and Mrs. Fry passed in review, evidently by dull old professors. These were a long time dead. Lives nearer to my own day had more appeal—until I read them. What I absorbed from autobiographies was not how to be great so much as the littleness of the great. Every one of those productions, whether the fiction that passes for reality or the decorated reality that is termed fiction was marred by the same thing—the false pose of the autobiographer.