Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/77

 "And did you like them?"

"Yes, quite well."

"And have you promised to see them again to-day?"

"Who?"

"Why, any of them—the Callcotts."

"No."

"Oh. They're becoming rather an institution."

"You like them too?"

"Yes, they're all right. But I don't want to spend my life with them. After all, that sort of people isn't exactly my sort—and I thought you used to pretend it wasn't yours."

"It isn't. But then no sort of people is my sort."

"Yes, it is. Any sort of people, so long as they make a fuss of you."

"Surely they make an even greater fuss of you."

"Do they! It's you they want, not me. And you go as usual, like a lamb to the slaughter."

"Baa!" he said.

"Yes, baa! You should hear yourself bleat."

"I'll listen," he said.

But Harriet was becoming discontented. They had been in their house only six weeks: and she had had enough of it. Yet it was paid for for three months: at four guineas a week. And they were pretty short of money, and would be for the rest of the year. He had already overdrawn.

Yet she began to suggest going away: away from Sydney. She felt humiliated in that beastly little Murdoch Street.

"What did I tell you?" he retorted. "The very look of it humiliated me. Yet you wanted it, and you said you liked it."

"I did like it—for the fun of it. But now there's all this intimacy and neighbouring. I just can't stand it. I just can't."

"But you began it."

"No, I didn't; you began it. And your beastly sweetness and gentleness with such people. I wish you kept a bit of it for me."

He went away in silence, knowing the uselessness of argument. And to tell the truth he was feeling also a revulsion from all this neighbouring, as Harriet called