I had hours to put in while Wheeler dressed Mrs. Crasterton, and I wrote in my diary or pondered discontentedly on the waste it was that Ma could not have a nice town house. It was a heinous thing for all Ma’s administrative ability to be squeezed into a petty grind of one irreverent urchin, one rebellious girl and one gentle and easily-pleased man. Ma could have managed a grand hotel or some vast institution, and in the place unto which it had pleased God to mis-direct her she had but a poverty-restricted cubby. No doubt she had found the same luny obstructions to using her ability as I had run my head into with mine.

I was desperately in need of money. If I had had the means I should have been a recluse, but when you are poor you are helpless to build a barrier to keep people away. I stood it as quietly as I could. I told Mrs. Crasterton that I had imposed upon her hospitality long enough, I would now like to go home.

She positively wailed that that would make a fool of her. All of Sydney that had not met me was clamoring to do so, including the Admiral; and some of these high official invitations were really commands. I was tired of high officials and longed for young people like Derek and Edmée. I sometimes played the piano while they practised new steps in the hall. If I could play tennis and dance, and have just one evening dress to show my décolleté I was sure I could have some fun coloured by a little of the romance that swirled around Edmée. When I went swimming the girls always said that the more clothes I took off the prettier I grew. I wished that Derek would give me a lesson in dancing, but his hopeless passion for Edmée’s fatal beauty so burdened him that he thought of me only to play the piano so that he could “hold her in his arms.”

Mrs. Greville de Vesey put the cap on my society rights regardless of the frock of “some kind of white rag”, and my cotton (cashmere) stockings. Her mother had been born on the station adjoining my mother’s, and knew that Ma was as high as herself. Mrs. de Vesey was the chic leader of the younger smart set. People were no longer surprised that I was so properly behaved, my mother being one of the lovely Misses Bossier of Caddagat, which is one of the few original stations entered in the Land-holders’ Record. The Melvyns too were among the earliest educated free men to take up stations in the Southern District. It was I who was entitled to look into other people’s pretensions to being of the old squattocracy.

Mrs. de Vesey said that banana-barrow and bottle-o commercialism did not yet rule SOCIETY in Sydney though it was going that way. I loved Zoë de Vesey. She reminded me of a cruiser cutting a clean high wave and sending barges and lesser craft scuttling to their lesser ways. With the Governor-General to announce that I was a genius, and Zoë to vouch for my antecedents, I was established. Zoë said that I need not be shy about imposing on Mrs. Crasterton. Poor old soul had sunk into “innocuous desuetude” following the death of her husband, and this was a happy revival for her. She was really of good family, and Gaddy was a bachelor whom all the girls tried to bag.