Only the trouble with God has abated. LIFE and LOVE and WORK insist increasingly. The need to submit to marriage or else find some other way of earning my living grows nearer, clearer, deadlier than before. Fortunately Henry Beauchamp has had to go to Queensland again to look after his property. It is a safe distance offering respite for the present.

The idea of marriage is going bung with me. Marriage is unnecessarily engulfing and too full of opportunities to experience GREY TOPPER’S receipt for producing genius.

Henry once said that he would be jealous of my writing if it took up my spare time when he needed me. In short, my brain-children would be proscribed. I am weary of Henry’s indulgent but inflexible assumption that my ideas are mere vivacity or girlish coquetry, which motherhood will extirpate. I can discern under the padded glove of spooniness the fixed determination to bend me to prescribed femaleness. Ah, no, m’lord, the bait is not sufficiently enticing, nor does it entirely conceal the hook.

I have refuged in day-dreams, but one must have more than these on which to expend emotion: there must be some object of passion, personal or public. Mine is the beauty of the universe. And there is always England. England with her ancient historic beauty—tradition—the racial rooftree. I picture her cool green fields, her misty downs, her bare woods under the snow, her young leaves and soft flowers in spring. Her castles and cathedrals, her ivied towers, her brooks are as clear to my nostrils and closed eyes as the scents and features of ’Possum Gully. And there is London with its romantic fogs, its crowds and ceremonial pageants, Rotten Row and the Mall, the British Museum, the Mansion House, The Tower and Westminster. I know London much better than I do Sydney. Through song and story it has permeated every fibre of my mind since I could first scan a pictured page, while I have spent scarcely a month in but one corner of Sydney. London—THE BIG SMOKE—London, where our dreams come true.

England acclaimed my first homespun effort. England may welcome my second and third. I will arise and go to Mother England.

Lady Jane’s column is devoted to escapees. Sculptors, writers, singers, actors, painters, educationists, politicians all depart inevitably. I have been going with them in imagination ever since I saw the Heads standing up there with the spray playing around their base and the Pacific beyond like a high blue plateau. It seems that only those remain who cannot get away, those who are tied to pots and pans by poverty and ignorance, by misfortune or incompetence.

The seasons have smiled once more. The chief reminder of the drought which killed the stock and bared the paddocks is that here and there a spot of richer green shows where in death some animal fertilised its pasture. The doubled value of remaining stock compensates for what was lost. Ridge and gully echo the cry of young things which replenish the earth.