“When Mary was fifteen and I was thirteen, you remember, she went to Toowoomba, to an uncle of ours, mother’s brother, who had four boys and no girls and didn’t know what to put the boys to.  Father and mother thought this a splendid chance for Mary to learn a trade, there were so many of us at home, you know, and so they took one of my cousins and uncle took Mary and she started to learn dressmaking.  Uncle was a small contractor, who had a hard time of it, and his wife was a woman who’d got frozen about the heart, although she was as good as gold when it melted a little.  She was always preaching about the need for working and saving and the folly of wasting money in drink and ribbons and everything but what was ugly.  She said that there was little pleasure in the world for those who had to work, so the sooner we made up our minds to do without pleasure the better we’d get on.  Mary lived with them a couple of years, coming home once in a while.  Then she got the chance of a place where she’d get her board and half-a-crown a week.  She couldn’t bear aunt and so she took it and I went to live at uncle’s and to learn dressmaking, too.  That was six months after you went off, Ned.  I wasn’t quite fifteen and you were eighteen, past.  Seven years ago.  I was so sorry when you went away, Ned.

“Aunt wasn’t pleasant to live with.  I used to try to get on with her and I think she liked me in her way but she made me miserable with her perpetual lecturing about the sin of liking to look nice and the wickedness of laughing and the virtue of scraping every ha’penny.  I used to help in the house, of course, when I came from work and I was always getting into trouble for reading books, that I borrowed, at odd minutes when aunt thought I ought to be knitting or darning or slaving away somehow at keeping uncomfortable.  I used to tell Mary and Mary used to wish that I could come to work where she did.  We used to see each other every dinner hour and in the evening she’d come round and on Sundays we used to go to church together.  She was so kind to me, and loving, looking after me like a little mother.  She used to buy little things for me out of her halfcrown and say that when she was older aunt shouldn’t make me miserable.  Besides aunt, I didn’t like working in a close shop, shut up.  I didn’t seem to be able to take a good breath.  I used to think as I sat, tacking stuff together or unpicking threads that seemed to be endless, how it was out in the bush and who was riding old Bluey to get the cows in now I was gone and whether the hens laid in the same places and if it was as still and fresh as it used to be when we washed our faces and hands under the old lean-to before breakfast.  And Toowoomba is fresher than Sydney.  I don’t know what I’d have thought of Sydney then.  I used to tell Mary everything and she used to cheer me up.  Poor Mary!