Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/118

106 would surprise a Sydneysider to see how many respectable working women go into pubs as a matter of course; but you soon get used to these things. There was the drunk who hooked his elbow on to the back of a seat and half hung, half sat, and talked to himself, until he felt able to get up and stagger to the pub.

There was one man, or the shadow of a man, who drifted on to that space with a human eddy from the street, and rested on a seat for a while. He wore a white shirt and a high collar, and his boots were pathetically well polished; his clothes seemed decent and whole, though the cloth rather dull and the linen cloudy; his face was white and worn sharp—a dead white, with something bluish about it, I fancied. He drew in his shoulders, as if he were cold, and, as he sat down he bent forward and hitched up the knee of his trousers. The "dicky," or false shirt-front, worked up and buckled outwards, and I could see through between it and his bare bony breast. And when he got up and moved away I saw that he was walking on his bare feet. Things hadn't changed much since Dickens' time. I had seen something like this in Sydney, and I felt that I would live to see the same scene from a Sydney or Melbourne window. I began to feel pretty dismal.

On Sunday morning the Buster's Dad and a couple of friends took me round to show me the city, and point out places which were as familiar to me as the face of the old Boomerang cashier—or as mine should be to him—because I had seen those places, from as