This evening the Premier was hosting a reception. Mr George Reid, recently and triumphantly returned from a series of successful pro-Federation meetings at Maitland and Tamworth in the north, was in high spirits and the mood was celebratory. The divisions that usually separated men—this party or that, Council or Assembly, those born in the mother country and those born in the colony—counted for little tonight. It was all Federation and there was no talk of defeat.

Eleanor Dunlevy entered the house via the Assembly stairs. Removing her coat and handing it to a footman, she joined a line of other rain-affected late arrivals and was swept, immediately, into the throng of ministers.

A throng of ministers. Yes, she would put that in her journal.

But the throng of ministers, though it might look droll on the page, was not so amusing in reality, and Eleanor, who had always arrived at such events on the arm of her husband, was jostled, her progress was impeded. One gentleman brushed up against her and a young lady stepped on her toe. Had it been possible, she might have turned about at this point and departed. It was not possible. She was swept into the throng.

She found herself in one of the formal chambers, high-ceilinged and richly decorated in white and gold and peppered liberally with ferns and white marble busts (of which a surprising number appeared to be Mr William Wentworth). Smartly liveried footmen in white gloves darted about balancing silver trays. The Premier was here she saw, his prominent and portly figure hard to miss, and so, too, many of the members of the Legislative Assembly and a number of the Legislative Council, some accompanied by their wives. Those who supported Federation—and there were many who did not—and who had attended meetings that evening in the more easily accessible suburbs had got here early, despite the rain. Those travelling in from the more outlying suburbs or who had been the most hampered by the weather were only now arriving and, it appeared—for she overheard someone say it—had missed the Premier’s brief words of welcome and the Speaker’s toast to the Federation and the little flurry of excitement as a reporter from the Mail was identified and ejected from the chamber.

She looked about her and saw, as well as the Premier, Mr Barton of the Opposition and his wife. She saw the Speaker, the Clerk, the Attorney-General (though she rather thought she had read that the Attorney-General had resigned, but perhaps she had got that wrong?). She saw that the gentlemen swirled about the Premier, whose voice boomed and whose laughter was audible from one side of the chamber to the other, and their wives swirled about Mr Barton, whose voice did not carry above the little crowd that gathered about him but it did not need to. He was that sort of man. The Premier was another sort.