Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/86

 "How queer to hear you say so?"

"But this isn't the place for them. Here in Australia we don't want them. We want the new-fashioned sort of people who are all dead-level as good as one another. You're going to Mullumbimby this week-end with Jack and Victoria, aren't you?"

"Yes. And I thought if we liked it we might stay down there for a while—by the sea—away from the town."

"You please yourselves, of course. Perhaps better there than here. But—it's no business of mine, you know that"—he shrugged his shoulders. "But there's something comes over me when I see Mr Somers thinking he can live out here, and work with the Australians. I think he's wrong—I really do. They'll drag him down to their level, and make what use they can of him—and—well, in my opinion you'd both be sorry for it."

"How strange that you should say so, you who are one of them."

"I am one of them, and I'm not. I'm not one of anybody. But I haven't got only just the two eyes in my head that can tell the kettle from the teapot. I've got another set of eyes inside me somewhere that can tell real differences, when there are any. And that's what these people don't seem to have at all. They've only got the outside eyes."

Harriet looked at him in wonder. And he looked at her—at her queer, rather large, but thin-skinned, soft hands.

"You need a thick skin to live out here," he said.

But still she sat with her hands folded, lost in meditation.

"But Lovat wants so much to do something in the world, with other men," she said at last. "It's not my urging, I assure you."

"He's making a mistake. He's making a mistake to come out here, tell him from me. They'll take him at their own level, not at his."

"But perhaps he wants to be taken at their level," said Harriet, rather bitterly, almost loving the short, thick man opposite for his quiet, Cornish voice and his uncanny grey eyes, and his warning.

"If he does he makes the mistake of his life, tell him from me." And William James rose to his feet, "You'll