What did it matter about a sash when I was on the way to the station to go to Sydney, a cauldron of excitement about the holiday that was coming—my first visit to the city! I also dwelt upon the aristocratic address to which I was bound.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

THE DENIZENS OF GEEBUNG VILLA.

Goulburn slid behind. I felt all crumbly and full of pangs that poor old Pa and Ma were not coming too, but they both had been to Sydney often in days gone by. I was bubbling with glee inside like a bottle of honey-mead. If the stopper had not been firmly tied I’d have effervesced right out in one high jet.

There was nothing joyful in the landscape. It was naturally barren and scraggly and dry, and now dotted with dead beasts. Those alive were so pitifully frail that it was painful to behold them. Milch cows being beaten in and out of bails and dusty yards, in such condition, was surely a cruel purgatory for animals. But the coastal belt approached with everything green and soft, and ferns and shrubs and flowers not to be seen inland. I ran out on the platform at each stop to see all I could. Liverpool, and after that it all seemed town. Strathfield and the roar of the city like a flood. Surging, exciting. It gave me tremors all over. The racket of the trains passing each other shocked like blows. Sydney was all around me. I was swamped by new feelings.

I was to be the guest of people who were somebody, I was to see all the sights and meet heaps and heaps of people, and work at nothing but pleasure from morning till night for a month!

I stood beside Pa’s old Gladstone bag—my only luggage—and when most of the passengers had gone a large old lady came and claimed me with: “This is my little girl, I know. I am Mrs. Crasterton.” She gave me a friendly kiss and said, “This is my brother.”

A man much her own general cut but younger, greeted me with a chummy nod and a flabby handshake. Mrs. Crasterton was weirdly smart. She had “kept her figure” with corset and belts as strong as patent wire strainers. The brother had a short figure, enlarged by a corpulency. He was instantly ruled out as an object of romance. Knights of the imagination are straight and slim, preferably tall and beautiful. Married men, however, have a false importance through their wives that one has to recognise; and in most cases it is impossible to conceive what elderly people ever saw in each other to admire.

I put the brother in the married class. He took a sidelong squint at me like a judicial old cockatoo. His sister called him Gaddie, but he did not look it. He carried my port along the platform and put Mrs. Crasterton and me in a cab and muttered, “See you later.”

The first thing I noticed about Sydney streets was the rain rushing through them in muddy torrents and a tram with water spraying out of its rear to the derision of the bystanders. The bystanders took my eyes. There were so many. Except at a horse race or a funeral bystanders in the bush are scarce.