Shame invaded me. “I would rather not,” I said shakily. “I could just stay with you. I don’t want to see smart people, and then it would not matter about my clothes.” My frugal wardrobe merely covered me and the demands of decency, and was in no sense decorative.

I was alone when there was a tap on the door, and there stood a beautiful young lady. “I am Edmée Actem,” said she, with a most gorgeous smile. “I’m a bush girl too, and staying here on purpose to meet you. I was born on a station up the country. I just love your book. It’s ripping. You’ve said all the things we all think, but did not know how to express.”

Edmée had big bluish grey eyes that she rolled most arrestingly, and her hair was in chestnut curls on her forehead. Her dress showed off her figure in a SOCIETY manner. She was tall “yet voluptuous”, just like the heroines in The Goulburn Evening Penny Post, and she could languish and cast appealing glances. She looked as if she had all kinds of lovers—quondam, hopeless, distracted and those who would even try to be clandestine, and propose to her in conservatories, or find her monogrammed handkerchief in the shrubberies. Life must begin for me too on meeting her, so lovely and romantic—the very girl of my dreams.

She said she was dressing after dinner. “But that is such a pretty dress, and oh, you are lovely!” burst from me.

She called it just an old rag that she kept for wet nights and when there was no company. Every man who met her must fall madly in love with her. She confirmed this as soon as I confessed apologetically that I had no evening dress. She said it did not matter in my case as I was only a little girl from the bush, but that she was so conspicuous for her fatal beauty that it was an effort to keep pace with it. She knew I would not misunderstand her, and it was a relief to speak from soul to soul without humbug.

I wished that I was so beautiful that men would love me to distraction, but she said I was not the type. I doted and gloated on her while she told me there and then in confidence some of the burdens of her fascination. Such luscious love affairs put my little experiences out of existence.

Right in Geebung Villa Edmée was having trouble. Derek was very troublesome, and would have been the boy of her dreams only that he was four years younger. Gaddy too was a silly old thing. I asked was that why he was called Gaddy, and she laughed and said he had been christened Gad. Derek was a spoiled darling only son, and Gaddy … Both lived at Geebung Villa.

I could hardly keep from laughing at the thought of Gad approaching such a beauty as Edmée. In a democracy where admirers abounded by the dozen a girl does not at first realise that a bachelor of any age can purchase a woman of any youth if he but have the wherewithal and determination. It takes time also for a girl to grasp that any old tramp of a man thinks that every woman is craving a man, even a thing like himself, which she wouldn’t wipe her boots upon; when all the time her despair is not that she is without men importuning her, but that among the flock there is not one that she could consider with satisfaction, and that the one that she would desire might think her as undesirable as she found the ones who were plaguing her.