From that date I began to have more practice in love, or perhaps it was merely experience.

The following morning I posted my article to Mr. Wilting, then opened my mail. In it was a long letter from Big Ears. He told me that he loved me to distraction. Every day since I had come to town he had perched in a Moreton Bay fig in his grounds which overlooked our route to the ferry, to watch me go by. Would I, could I ever think of him? He would have patience for ten years if necessary. I was shocked. What would Edmée think—when she had been so kind to me! Fortunately she despised him, and was waiting for him to propose solely to dismiss him. With another section of myself I thought, Huh! If I put this down, Mr. Wilting would say I know nothing of how men make love.

I hadn’t time to think just then: the telephone rang and Mrs. Crasterton called me. “You had better hear the whole of this,” she said. “I find you are a wise young thing and seem to know more than those who are trying to instruct you.”

She handed me the second ear piece. Zo? de Vesey was speaking.

Now it appears that Australia has one great literary man, or that one great literary man was a native of Australia? He had been many years in London, had gone HOME on the Press Association but in London had had the opportunity to turn into a real man of letters. He was now one of the most successful playwrights of the day. His plays had record runs in London. Here was a comet with two tails when compared with the LOCAL CACKLERS. He made pots of money, Zo? said, but his expensive tastes kept ahead of his income. He went everywhere and was a social lion. And this great god had expressed the wish to see little me during his visit to his native land.

He had been born on the Northern Tableland as I on the Southern, but he had gone to the University and had swum about in SOCIETY since a tadpole, whereas I had simply been entitled to do so, but had been kept on the cockatoo level because of indigence.

At the time of the Diamond Jubilee he had won a prize for an ode entitled, Australia to England!, and became known as the Australian Swinburne. However, he had quickly renounced all Australian crudities and had written a novel of London entitled The Woman Who Wilted, one of the greatest circulating library successes, which had earned him the title of the Australian Anthony Hope.

“He doesn’t seem to be anything on his own hook”, thinks I to myself.

On going to London he had not stressed his Australian origin but played the game on London lines. He had outdone the Londoners in Londonness through having more of England known in knowing Australia too. His comedies of duchesses and high ladies who knew all about extracting the erotic excitement from amour, as Gaddy put it, were the last word in being risque without being bannable. He was a SUCCESS. He must be just reeking with EXPERIENCE, thinks I, drinking in this titillating news.

He had had to fight for long years in London for recognition, and might never have won it only that he had got away as a war correspondent for the Daily Thunderer for a year with the Boers, and his articles had charmed everyone. He was a sizzling imperialist. Rhodes had condescended to him, Kipling patted him on the back, Barney Barnato nudged him in the ribs. He was on the way to a title and all that. What he needed to complete him was a wealthy and influential marriage. Only now could he afford to emphasise his Australian nativity and turn it to commercial account.

He had always kept in touch with the Press Association and while out was to do some articles on Australia from an imperial angle which would appear in The Thunderer and The Argus, or perhaps it was The Age,—I can’t tell these two apart. He was also connected with a leading publishing house, and if he saw anything worth picking up, was to pick it up. This gave him great importance among us poor LOCAL CACKLERS, of which I was the localest and least. If he could, without compromising his status and deteriorating his attainments, he would insert an Australian character or scene in his next comedy. His former set was jubilant about this. He was trumpeted as a good Australian. Zo? did not tell us all this on the telephone at that moment. This was pieced together later from different sources of information or misinformation.

What Zo? said, and the reason she said some of it was because she ranked Mr. Goring Hardy very high as one who both did and had. She said that to meet him was a unique chance and would be an education for a little girl like me. He thought there was promise in my book, though he did not approve of its point of view. It was possible, Zoé said, that something might come to me through his interest, but she did not want the poor little thing to be hurt in any way. Goring was a fascinating fellow and he might take the imagination of a girl reared in seclusion. Too many strings had harped to his bow. Zo?‘s advice was that I should not be too accessible. “He wants her to call at his office at Cunningham and Bucklers, but he must meet the poor little thing in the proper way.”

“I’ll see to that,” said Mrs Crasterton.

“I want to have her here, but I haven’t a spare hour this week,” said Zo?.

Mrs. Crasterton turned to me. “He must come to us. I shall let him see that you are a celebrity too.”

She telephoned to the union Club for Mr. Hardy to call her, and he did. He started by ordering that I should be sent to him—like a girl from a registry office seeking employment.

“He does feel his oats,” remarked Mrs. Crasterton, aside. “But my people were bishops and generals when his were mere market gardeners.”

“Oh, no,” she continued into the phone. “I’m so sorry. I haven’t time to go with her this week. We could try to wedge you in here though. So many people are craving for my little friend’s time that the days are not long enough. Perhaps you could come to breakfast.”

At last he was so generous and condescending as to say he would come to dinner that very day if we would not mind his running away immediately after. He had to open an artist’s show at five and was to be at an official gathering at Government House that evening. Mrs. Crasterton said that would fit nicely as we too would be engaged until six and had an after-dinner engagement.

On that night Gaddy went to his Club. His sister asked him to support her, “After all, Mr. Hardy is a really distinguished man,” she observed.

“Don’t lose your head,” Gaddy replied, “he certainly has marketed himself like a politician, but when it comes to literary genius, we have five hundred poets, every blooming one boomed as the greatest, but some of the greatest have yet to be born.”

Derek, on the other hand, loudly lamented that he was not to be home for dinner. “Hardy’s a regular swell,” he said, “not in the same street with the little unwashed ‘potes’.”

Edmée was half through an elaborate toilette when we got home that evening, and poor Mrs. Crasterton was taken with cramps and had to go to bed. Edmée unselfishly gave up her dinner engagement to dine at Geebung Villa.

“It’s really an amazing condescension for Goring Hardy to come to see you,” she said. “It must be because Zo? de Vesey’s mother knew yours and it has become the thing to see you. He is run after right and left. Some panjandrum in the literary world in London has written out to him to find out what you are like, and if you could ever write anything else. You had better make the most of your furore while it lasts.”

A little later Mr. Hardy telephoned that he found himself half-an-hour ahead of his schedule and would have a chat with me before dinner. “Don’t let him paralyse you,” Edmée said. “Women throw themselves at him, especially the married ones...I think,” continued Edmée reflectively, “it must be no end of sport to be safely married and then seek a little diversion.”

I sat tight in my room until the maid had a colloquy with Mrs. Crasterton and then came to me. I stole down the back stairway, catching sight of my reflection in a mirror—like a doll in the white dress and Gad’s big sash.

A tall figure in immaculate toggery—a dress-coat knight with silk on heel—rose from a couch and looked so hard at me that I was unable to withstand the batt............