“Bag Gaddy!!”

“Gaddy is rich. Edmée Actem camps there every now and again, but he hasn’t given in yet. He’d be a fine instrument for an ambitious woman.”

“He’s silly about Edmée,” I said. “But she cannot be bothered with him.”

Zoë laughed her short mocking laugh, “You are taking Edmée at her own valuation.”

Zoë was almost young, not more than twenty-eight and I loved going to her house and talking to her.

My wearing the jewellery of Big Ears brought me fresh attention. He too was rich, though not of high aristocraticness. His father had made his money in mines. Big Ears had been sent to Cambridge to acquire gentility and was to go into Parliament to establish himself. People seemed to gather importance under Zoë’s classification, though I had discerned nothing much in them when trying to place them by my own INEXPERIENCE. Her estimate of people was out of EXPERIENCE mixed with CONTACT. She summed them up by what they did and had. I could only measure them by what they were. When I saw Mrs. Crasterton booming across a drawing-room I measured that she was of exactly the same proportions and human texture as Mrs. McSwat, save that Mrs. Crasterton had had some sort of a tilling and wore expensive stays, whereas Mrs. McSwat’s form was unconfined and her culture had camped out at Barney’s Gap and subsisted on bully and damper. I saw that the brass buttons and uniforms of the Admiral’s staff, which have a dangerous charm for the fair, were worn by boys of helplessly English posture and stilted speech. Some of them were clean cut and straight of limb, but I could see that there were any number of bullock drivers, shearers and boundary riders of my acquaintance in patched shirts and thrummy moles who matched them muscle for muscle and thew for thew.

Soon the people who had predicted that I would be ruined by adulation were croaking that there was something the matter with me as I was not impressed by anyone or anything, that I was very difficult, and laughed at the most important people and made friends of those of no substance, just because I liked them. I would never advance by such tactics.

At the end of my first ten days in SOCIETY my true friend hove above the horizon of my bantling career. Ma had warned me that those who flattered me would not be my true friends, they would want only to get something out of me. My true friends would correct me for my good. Mr. Wilting so mangled the vanity I did not have, that there was no mistaking his good intentions.

He was a pugnacious old boy who did a lot of reviewing on the Watchdog, a paper not so long born, with the reputation of possessing the only literary acumen in the new Commonwealth. The sole reason that Mr. Wilting was to be found in the crude wilds of the Antipodes was to better his health. This, I inferred, though exile for him was likely to be the making of Australian literature.