Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/21

Rh different. Perhaps everything was different from all he had known. Perhaps if St Paul and Hildebrand and Darwin had lived south of the equator, we might have known the world all different, quite different. But it is useless iffing. Sufficient that Somers went indoors into his little bungalow, and found his wife setting the table for supper, with cold meat and salad.

"The only thing that's really cheap," said Harriet, "is meat. That huge piece cost two shillings. There's nothing to do but to become savage and carnivorous—if you can."

"The kangaroo and the dingo are the largest fauna in Australia," said Somers. "And the dingo is probably introduced."

"But it's very good meat," said Harriet.

"I know that," said he.

The hedge between number fifty-one and number fifty was a rather weary hedge with a lot of dead branches in it, on the Somers' side. Yet it grew thickly, with its dark green, slightly glossy leaves. And it had little pinky-green flowers just coming out: sort of pink pea-flowers. Harriet went nosing round for flowers. Their garden was just trodden grass with the remains of some bushes and a pumpkin vine. So she went picking sprigs from the intervening hedge, trying to smell a bit of scent in them, but failing. At one place the hedge was really thin, and so of course she stood to look through into the next patch.

"Oh, but these dahlias are really marvellous. You must come and look," she sang out to Somers.

"Yes, I know, I've seen them," he replied rather crossly, knowing that the neighbours would hear her. Harriet was so blithely unconscious of people on the other side of hedges. As far as she was concerned, they ought not to be there: even if they were in their own garden.

"You must come and look, though. Lovely! Real plum-colour, and the loveliest velvet. You must come."

He left off sweeping the little yard, which was the job he had set himself for the moment, and walked across the brown grass to where Harriet stood peeping through the rift in the dead hedge, her head tied in a yellow, red-spotted duster. And of course, as Somers was peeping beside her, the neighbour who belonged to the garden must come backing out of the shed and shoving a motor-cycle down the