Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/41

Rh neighbour, if so built and constituted, is free to loom up over the shrubbery and curse and criticize, and tradespeople and carters to fling things on the front verandah and smoke in their fellow-countrymen's or women's faces—whether they smoke or not, as many union barbers do now in Sydney, where Mrs. Liberty-Freedom is free to forget, as painfully, frequently, and freely as she dares, that she is a lady—or ought to be one.

I had my fences raised three or four feet in Harpenden, a day-end village, but that was nothing. We were Australians and therefore unconventional. Also we were used to living alone and privately in the Bush. I only had one suit at a time, but that was nothing. I was an Australian, and therefore had money. I fled to London for the first winter, where there were lights, privacy and humanity.

Fate sent a friend and an Australian to me in a high flat in Clovelly Mansions in Gray's Inn Road (where an "old maid" once "lived a life of woe"), in London. And, in order to escape from London and high rent for the second summer I sent my friend scouting. Fate sent him, in a circle almost, to Chawlton, at a time when one of the "Winders" was vacant. And I took it and got some blinds and things from Stains, and we were accepted at once as writin' gents or something from London, who wanted to have a lark or somethin', and do as they liked. Had we gone in bags and barefoot it would have been the same. We didn't work and therefore we were gents.

Leonard had "some things" on the beams in the