“Lizzie’s father got a job next week a few miles out of Brisbane and went away to it and on the Monday I answered an advertisement for a woman to do sewing in the house and was the first and got it.  She was quite young, the woman I worked for, and very nice.  She got talking to me and I told her how I’d got out of work and about Mary.  I suppose she was Socialist for she talked of what I didn’t understand much then, of how we ought to have a union to get wages enough to keep us when work fell off and of the absurdity of men and women having to depend for work upon a few employers who only worked them when they could get profit.  She thought I should go to the police-station about Mary but I said Mary wouldn’t like that.  What was more to me at the time, she paid me four shillings a day and found me work for two weeks, though I don’t think she wanted it.  There are kind people in the world, Ned.

“I got back to regular work again, not in the same shop but in another, and then Lizzie’s folks moved out to where her father was working.  I and another girl got a room that we paid five shillings a week for, furnished, with the use of the kitchen.  It cost us about ten shillings a week between us for food, and I got raised to twelve-and-six a week because they wanted me back where I’d worked before.  So we weren’t so badly off, and we kept a week ahead.  Of course we lived anyhow, on dry bread and tea very often, with cakes now and then as a treat, boiled eggs sometimes and a chop.  There was this about it, we felt free.  Sometimes we got sewing to do at night from people we got to hear of.  So we managed to get stuff for our dresses and we kept altering our hats and we used to fix our boots up with waxed threads.  And all the time I kept looking for Mary and couldn’t see her or hear of her.

“I had got to understand how Mary might live for years in a place like Brisbane without being known by more than a very few, but I puzzled more and more as to how she’d got the money she’d sent home.  The places where she might have earned enough seemed so few that everybody knew of them.  In all dressmaking places the general run of girls didn’t earn enough to keep themselves decently unless they lived at home as most did.  Even then they had a struggle to dress neatly and looked ill-fed, for, you see, it isn’t only not getting enough it’s not getting enough of the right food and getting it regularly.  Most of the girls brought their lunch with them in a little paper parcel, bread and butter, and in some places they made tea.  Some had lots of things to eat and lots to wear and plenty of pocket money and didn’t seem to have to work but they weren’t my sort or Mary’s.