And all is egotism. The only people whose mainspring is not egotism are the dead, and perhaps idiots—the one class having ceased to have a main-spring and it having been omitted from the works of the others. Immediately people’s egotism fails them, if they are not on the point of death from senile decay, they commit suicide. Egotism is the spirit of self which is designated human nature. The more human nature one has, the more egotism. Some people are not so readily fitted with the adjective of egotistical as others because they are not such pronounced types or are cunning in dissimulation. There are of course different brands of egotism. Some egotists are lovable and some not. The child is the perfect example of egotism, and the most lovable. One of the lovable kinds among adults is he with a high sensitiveness which can be used as a thermometer to gauge the worries and desires of his fellows’ heads and hearts. Such are classified as sympathetic. The commonest, the least interesting, have their egotism interwoven with a delusion that their most banal experiences are unique. These are called bores. The intense egotism of another class is so charming that it is called personality, but all human manifestations are brewed from egotism—it is their major psychological content.

Leading people, some of them set aloft by money, hired vehicles in Goulburn and harried their horses in getting lost among the stumps of back tracks and bridle tracks, and found their way to call on us. One was an old gentleman of individuality in the matter of grey toppers and leggings. He paid an investigatory visit to Pa on behalf of his brother philosophers, or windbags as they would have been called only they had money too. Pa and he had a long, mysterious conversation out near the beehives and quince trees.

Pa told us about it afterwards. Grey Topper wanted to know unmentionable and intimate things about my prenatal days. The Governor-General, who had literary leanings, was responsible for classifying me as a genius, so a genius I became. Grey Topper and his coterie had a theory that a genius arrived from a mother who had far from enjoyed surrendering to a satyr.

I knew of a satyr as the mythological beast. To apply this to Pa was productive of chortles. The dictionary divulged the word’s fissiparations: “A very lecherous person and a species of butterfly.”

Pa did not fit any of these. When other women were divulging the atrocities which appear to be a normal risk of marriage, Ma would always say, “Thank God, I have never had to endure anything like that.” Ma would add that any woman who did, deserved it.

Ma disdained Grey Topper’s theory, though her remarks confirmed rather than exploded it. She said she never seemed to come to the end of the foolishness of men, this à propos Grey Topper having time as well as the indelicacy to trot about prying into such matters. Ma added that it was only men’s maniacal egotism and complacency that enabled them to wreak their will regardless of women’s revulsion and weariness.