them.  The faces of the girls, who were quite young, looked so miserable that even I pitied them.  The look on the face of one of those girls as she stood by the hearth drawing off her gloves lives in my memory.  Too deep for tears was its sorrow, shame, and hopelessness....

“I had given up drink and was living in the bush.  To anyone with normal nerves it would have been a happy time of quiet, rustic peace, beauty, and relief from city life.  With me it was restless vanity amounting to madness.  In every relation, action, or possible event in which I figured or might figure in the future, I always instantaneously called up an imaginary audience.  And then this imaginary audience admired everything I did or might do, and put the most heroic, gallant, and romantic construction on my acts, appearance, lineage, and breeding.  Suppose I saw a pretty girl on a bush road.  Instead of thinking ’There is a pretty girl; I should like to know her or kiss her,’ as I suppose a healthy, normal young man would think, I thought after this fashion:  ’There is a pretty girl; now, as I pass her she will think I am a handsome and aristocratic-looking stranger, and, as I carry a sketch-book, an artist—­“A landscape painter!  How romantic!” she will say, and then she will fall in love with me,’ etc.  This preoccupation with what other people might think or would think so engrossed all my time that I had no means of enjoying the presence, thought, or favor of the divine creatures I met, and I must have appeared ‘cracked’ to them with my reticence, pride, and silly airs.

“I met girls as foolish as myself sometimes.  Once at a table d’hote I met a young girl who went for a walk with me and let me know her carnally although she was little more than a schoolgirl.  She was going down to town soon, she said, and would meet me at a certain hotel (belonging to relations of hers) in Adelaide on a certain date, some time ahead; if I took a room there she would come into it during the night.  In the meanwhile I had given way to drink again and abused myself at intervals.  I came down to town, drunk, in the coach, and kept my appointment with the young girl at the hotel, expecting a night of pleasure; but she merely stared at me coldly as if she had never seen me before.  I abused myself twice in my solitary room....

“I met a middle-aged schoolteacher (who had once been an officer in the army) down for his holidays.  As he spoke well, and was a ‘gentleman,’ I cultivated him.  One night he asked me to meet a girl he had an appointment with and tell her he was not well enough to meet her.  He foolishly told me the purpose of their intended meeting.  I went to the trysting-place, at the back of the hotel, and met the girl.  On delivering my message she smiled, made some joke about her friend, and looked at me as much as to say:  ‘You will do as well.’  I had been drinking, and in the most brutal manner I took her into a closet.