“I want everything,” said Marcella, decidedly.

“I don’t care so long’s my back isn’t too bad, and he scrubs down for me, and I can pay my way.  I’ve got this house paying proper now, and the young chaps treat me as if I was their mother.”

Marcella felt it was well that she was getting away from this atmosphere of dull acceptance of misery, of the worst in life.  Anyway, she told herself, she would make a quick end to things with fire or knife before she got like that.  Expediently keeping a drunken man quiet; expediently kissing him and fondling him for fear he would get drunk again to-morrow in spite or pique:  content with a man who would scrub floors for a “livener”!  It was better, far, to be homeless wanderers in the Bush where there was no need to be expedient for the sake of others, where they would have to stand up on their own intrinsic strength or fall; where they need not be respectable and where she could, if he were weak, alternately shake him up and soothe him without spectators.  She would never, never, never allow herself to get into this cringing habit of being thankful for the small mercies of life when the big justices of life were there, so very big and shining.

“Of course,” went on Mrs. King in a flat voice, “I’ve always one mercy I thank God for on my bended knees every night.  That is, not having any drunkard’s children to bring up and be a curse to me when their father’s left off breaking my heart.”

“Oh—­no, no!” cried Marcella, staring at her with horror.

“Yes, kid, just you keep that in mind!  You ta’ care, my dear.  It’s on’y natural, if you have kids, they’ll take after their father.  And I’d sooner see them laying dead before me than bring up drunkards to be a curse to some other poor devil.  They’ll not escape it.  It’s in their blood.”

Marcella burst in passionately: 

“Why, Mrs. King, that’s the rottenest, wickedest heresy that was ever invented to tell anyone!  If you believe a cruel thing like that, it means that the whole scheme of things is wrong.  Why should children take after a bad parent more than a good one?  Why should they be weak rather than strong?  If you’re logical, what you say means that the world is getting worse and worse.  And everyone knows it’s getting better every minute—­”

“I’d like to see it,” said Mrs. King.

“Besides,” went on Marcella, “besides, if I had a baby I’d build him so strong, I’d make him so good his father would simply get strong and good because he couldn’t fight the strength and goodness all round him!  I’d build a wall of strength round the child—­I’d pull down the pillars of the heavens to make him strong—­I’d clothe him in fires—­There, I do talk rubbish, don’t I?” she added, quietly as she turned away.  But Mrs. King’s words stuck:  she pushed them forcibly away from her mind:  they would not go, and sank deep down; they came back in dreams, tormenting.  She dreamed often of a little child starving and cold out in the Domain, while the southerly winds lashed rain at him—­dreams of a little boy with Louis’s brown eyes—­a little boy who gnawed his nails—­and stammered—­and grew old—­and wavered—­and shook in drink delirium.