The road outside the town hall had cleared and the woman who was run over, if it had been a woman, was gone to the morgue or to the hospital or back to whichever gin house she had stumbled out of. A young Aboriginal boy took the penny that Eleanor offered and went off to secure a cab for her, returning triumphantly a few minutes later. There was little point in taking Miss Dempsey with her, for the Dempseys lived in another part of town entirely, Ned Dempsey’s loss of his cabinet post and any attendant income necessitating a sudden and dramatic change of residence. But twenty years a politician’s wife had taught Eleanor that these things were not irreversible—a year from now Ned Dempsey might be Attorney-General or Premier (though one hoped not), and it was as well to maintain some connection with his sister in the meantime. So Eleanor kissed Marian Dempsey warmly on both cheeks and left her on Darlington Road to fend for herself as best she could.

The ride home through the darkened streets was exhilarating. Rain had been forecast, though there was no sign of it yet; it was a cloudless night, cold and still, and the moon hung in the eastern sky, casting a glow over the rooftops.

And Eleanor was elated. The reason for her elation remained elusive, yet she felt it was tied up somehow with these women at the meeting who wished to vote at the referendum and, if they could not do so, then they wished to have nothing to do with it. It seemed to Eleanor churlish and not a little ridiculous, for the referendum would go ahead regardless, yet they spoke as though this state of affairs—paid employment, voting, the payment of taxes—was something to aspire to.

And she could not agree, she could not understand it. Her own mother had worked in paid employment—cleaning and gutting fish down at the quay when little more than a child before the schoolmaster, John Bass, newly arrived in the colony, had offered her a life of modest respectability in Balmain: a respectability her mother had grasped at with both hands and clung tenaciously to, and when she had found herself widowed and her children dead and that respectability threatened, she had married the retired Captain Tremaine and moved into his cottage and raised a child she could enrol in piano lessons and take to edifying lectures at the local town hall. No, there had been nothing in her mother’s grim childhood to which one might aspire.