“Why, my girl, it is wonderful at your age to be denounced by a preacher and argued with by a priest, though I can’t see what the stir is about, myself. I’m sorry that you did not write something much more rousing. Surely you are man enough to stand up to a little flutter like this. Use common sense. Think what you say about other people. You don’t like them any the less, but if they heard your private criticism of their clothes and persons there would’nt be a friend from Cape Otway to Cape Leeuwin. If you enter public life, you have to take all that as the chattering of magpies. As for people going to cut you dead, and that stuff that Eusty brings home; just walk out before them and smile, and they’ll all be running to lick your boots and gain your favour.”

Pa then went on to tell me of his experiences as a member of the Legislature. “Bless me, I was accused of being a traitor to the State when I tried to bring in measures to help the under dog. I was called the misappropriator of funds for trying to save a great public swindle, and the fellows who carried it through were knighted.”

Pa took me further into his confidence in a grown-up way.

“I was slandered—they even tried to defeat me by annoying your mother. They said she was a drunkard, which was madness, as you know.”

Poor Ma, herself perfect and circumspect, first to have suffered the backwash from Pa’s opponents and now to undergo a repetition through me! It made me understand Ma’s attitude.

“You are old enough to face these things now,” continued Pa and added in a whisper, “they even accused me of carrying on with other women.”

This completely cheered me. I laughed until the pigs went whoof! whoof! whoof! all around the sty expecting a second helping. Pa and other women! was atrociously absurd, and Ma being accused of drunkenness was so abnormal that I was henceforward prepared for any stories about myself. Dear old Pa! Pa and OTHER WOMEN!

The prating about nothing new under the sun (Solomon) and the impossibility of upsetting antecedents, which met me when I wished to try something different, was gaining weight with me. Dismal. Now I could see why people have written those self-praising, white-washing autobiographies. People don’t write autobiographies until they are old fogies. Otherwise they would have lacked time for EXPERIENCE, and EXPERIENCE had taught them before they started what it was teaching me now, that people can’t endure their reality in print and so create an uncomfortable situation for the realistic autobiographer with his family and all concerned. Pa is always saying that when you get up in years you want peace, that it is only while you are very young or haven’t any spiritual grist that you hanker for emotional tornadoes.

These lessons from Pa were a great help. Politics have seasoned him. He gives a whoof of contempt for gossip and scandal. He always turns what is said of him into a circus against the talebearer.