You should see Ma’s belts, and her hems and her lace! She is always the pink of perfection (her own phrase) even when she is baking, or washing the blankets. From Ma I had gathered the idea that to be unkempt about hem or belt was the equivalent of being weak-minded, and Ma was emphatic that daintiness of person, especially when women were elderly, was indispensable.

I hate to have to mention anything so low, but it had a big influence on my attitude, so it must go in. I found that Hobnob House had BUGS. Yes, insects that are never mentioned except in soft pedal and with a nick-name B FLATS. The vegetables at lunch tasted of antique butter and there was a mouldy atmosphere in the top floors. No one as capable as Ma had been there. It appeared that Lady Hobnob specialised in big dinners for which caterers and waiters came in. There were lots of other things that would have made Ma and Grandma snort in Hobnob Villa and the other houses I saw later.

When we were at dinner at Geebung Villa after my return, Edmée took me to task for provincialism in refusing Sir James’s wine, and Mrs. Crasterton said I must guard against being tiresome and odd or showing any taint of socialism. Only Gaddy cheered me still.

“You had a case,” said he. “You have a right to your own tastes and old Jimmy was rude. As for the crowd they’d dress in sugee bagging if some bigger swell took the lead.”

I sat silent and rather stubborn. I would have adduced the B FLATS only that Lady Hobnob had been so kind. I thought about them, however, and resisted SOCIETY pretensions. Pa and Ma had reared me exceptionally, plus which I had my own affliction of bringing reality to bear. After all, my paternal grandmother had been assured of her altitude above the hoi polloi of the “beastly Cawlonies”; and a cockatoo’s crest would have been an infant compared with the eyebrows of my maternal grandfather had Sydney society tried to dictate his right to tolerate it or to ignore it.

As I retreated upstairs I heard Gaddy again, “If she weren’t different from other girls she wouldn’t be such a draw, and you would have to give her some new dresses. I never met another kid who would have the pluck to go among others all dressed to kill while she has nothing but the one school-girl dress of some kind of white rag.”

I was continually surprised by Gaddy’s understanding: but ah, if Derek had only championed me! Gaddy put on no airs about literature and we both loved flowers, so we had an absorbing topic in common. He was responsible for the beauty of the terraced gardens and dug in them himself on Saturdays and Sunday mornings. He was something in a Government Department—a soft job, I was told, with a big screw that his brother-in-law had secured for him while in power.