Sunday. Mrs Crasterton asked Edmée and me to accompany her to church. Edmée laboured in a Sunday school while in Sydney. “Horrible little brutes of kids!” she observed. “I detest them, but it is good to keep in with the Church. Sometimes the most distinguished people from England have introductions that keep them tight in church circles. Besides, men say that a girl without religion is like a rose without perfume.”

This sort of yelp raised in me a devil of opposition and I decided to tell any man that began to admire me that I was a free-thinker.

My hostess appeared in a black satin gown and a resplendent yellow bonnet and a set of “wonderfully old” jewellery, and carried a prayer book inscribed by the Bishop. I chose to stay at home with Gaddy. I did not feel well-dressed enough for church.

Gaddy read a yellow-back in French and I read the Sunday Times. In it I found a story about myself. Some writer under an alias said I had no idea of how to dress. She ridiculed my appearance among fashionable people in a dress suitable only for the house in the morning, and flat-heeled shoes and cotton stockings, and said that I had no cloak but a sort of jacket, and that my hands showed the effects of manual labour, and that I had no idea of how to exercise sexual charm. She also said that nothing could have excited more interest than my lack of a suitable wardrobe.

“What does exercising sexual charm mean?” I asked Gaddy.

He damned and exploded and said he had meant to burn that unholy rag, and that exercising charm meant rolling one’s eye like Edmée did, and exposing the salt-cellars around the clavicles, and having a lot of damned rags on the floor where he was forever tripping over ’em.

This SOCIETY REPORTER was a Mrs. Thrumnoddy who had been at the Hobnobs’ dinner, and considered herself the best-dressed woman in Sydney. “Does she get money for writing like that about me?” I asked.

Gaddy said she certainly did, and was the wife of a rich broker.

No wonder she could dress well!

“Gaddy,” I said, “I could dress well if I had money, but the drought killed all our stock, and Pa is not a good business man. We haven’t a thing really. I couldn’t even have a sash for my dress, but my stockings are real good cashmere.” I began to cry.

“Never mind, ducky,” said he. “Your little finger is worth all those old cats put together. Do let us get you some clothes. My sister owes it to you for all the social prominence you are bringing her.”

I shrank into my shell. A man offering me clothes filled me with shame, even though it was only fat old Gaddy, who seemed more like Humpty Dumpty than a man or a bachelor or even an uncle. I longed for pretty clothes but could bear up without them, what cut me so deeply was that a woman who had kissed me and made such a fuss over me could write about me like that in the paper for everyone to read, and that she could get money for writing thus while I could not get any for writing about her, though I needed it so dreadfully. I hate unfairness.