Things, all the same, are not simple. If I had stuck to my lords and ladies in England and a beautiful heroine who went through tophet to give the hero a chance to show-off as a deferred rescuer; if I had had the villain scrunching the gravel, and a jealous rival beauty biting her lips till the blood came and breaking the stem of a champagne glass between her jewelled fingers with rage (though I have not yet seen a champagne glass) I should have been acclaimed. My tale might have adorned the Supplement to the Goulburn Evening Penny Post. I love the tales in the Penny Post, full of mystery and glamour and castles and lords and gorgeous lovers. I don’t know why on earth I became afflicted with this foolish notion of showing how comical the ’Possum Gully sort of reality would look by comparison. Aunt Jane is right, no doubt, when she says I was born contrary.

It was Old Harris who got me into this trouble by adjuring me to be Australian and thus add to culture. CULTURE! Talk about culture! ! ! I wrote to him on the subject.

There were fresh inconsistencies teasing me. Ma said that if I wasn’t womanly and all that sort of triffle-traffle, the men would not propose to me, and here I was beset with proposals from all over the place. Some of them were nearly as bad as Old Grayling’s, though he was the dean of the faculty, but men cannot help nearly all being duds from the lover angle. I suppose their delirium of egotism keeps them perpendicular. I should never have the front to try to get a man to marry me, but you should see the objects that booby up to me and think they can have me for the asking.

There are others, always young and sometimes desirable who are so shy that I know them only in letters in which they confess they have followed me all day, recording my least action, or have sat on the same seat in Belmore Square and have heard the sound of my voice. There now!

One Sunday afternoon old Bismarck made an unusual commotion and called our attention to another exhibition of driving on the tortuous back track. A pair of spirited trotters swung around the stumps, down into the creek at a dizzy angle and up over the mere footbridge of the garden drain to fetch-up at the side gate. The turn-out was too good for a tea agent: it must be a wool agent. All kinds of agents are rather regarded as parasites upon the squatters and selectors—middlemen who fatten on the profits of commodities which other men sweat to produce. He looked like someone who had got out of his way and had called for directions. I hoped he was not coming in. I used to long for any sort of caller, but that infernal book has resulted in my being a kind of puppet show, and I am heartily sick of it.