The men evidently knew this as well as Pa, and acted upon it scrupulously. They never disrespected me further than to beg me to marry them. Some of them offered in return to leave Australia to settle in South Africa or New Zealand to meet my desire for travel. City people, of course, were much more wicked than country ones. It is probably city men, I thought, who are sensual and coarse.

Grandma’s suspicions roused even Ma’s dander a little. She said as a girl it had always been annoying to her to be watched as if she were an incontinent drab who couldn’t impose respect upon any man she ever met. During this attack of Grannie’s, Ma was the least off my side I had ever known her. She said, however, if I intended to marry, I had better think of picking the best of the men who came along, as Pa was useless as a provider, and in a world arranged as this one was, the only boat to success for a woman is a rich man to dote on her and back her up. It was all very fine while I was young and saucy to be giggle-gaggling, but I would early find that a girl had small choice. It would be a miracle if there was someone at all acceptable. That is how Ma had found it.

Ma was not at all a slavish advocate of marriage. She said if women had the sense to organise themselves and refrain from marriage till they had won better conditions there wouldn’t be so many wives wishing they had had some other chance to earn their living, nor so many spinsters either thankful they had escaped marriage or regretful that they had not known the fulfilment of love. Ma said also that many girls married out of mere curiosity, but quickly had too much of THAT.

Grandma wrote again that if Beauchamp was in earnest it would be a lucky disposal of me, Richard being such a failure and I so self-willed. Grandma was away back in the stages of thinking that it was natural for women to be quelled by marriage and the giving birth to as many children as God’s will or a rabbit’s example dictated. She and Father O’Toole were in the same boat in putting God’s will and the rabbit’s instinct on the one level, though Grannie was such a vigorous Protestant and Father O’Toole such a sealed Roman that either would have argued till he or she was blue without budging an inch, and have called the other a benighted bigot.

Aren’t old people silly when you question their ideas, and yet they prate at us as if they were God Himself!

The bickering continued about me and Henry and other young men. When I came to think it over, I never heard Grannie say a good word of Ma, and yet Ma was the most beautiful and capable daughter a woman could have. Ma was passing on this piece of heredity. Perhaps, I began to think, you could not respect a thing you made yourself, or else they had such high standards that they concentrated on flaws and took excellences for granted. There were other mothers though who thought their children marvels because they were their own.