“Nellie,” he said, speaking the thought he had been thinking for an hour.  “What difference does all this make between you and me?”

“Don’t you understand?” she cried.  “When people marry they have children.  And when my sister Mary ended so, who is safe?  Nothing we can do, no care we can take, can secure a child against misery while the world is what it is.  I try to alter things for that.  I would do anything, everything, no matter what, to make things so that little children would have a chance to be good and happy.  Because the unions go that way I am unionist and because Socialism means that I am Socialist and I love whatever strikes at things that are and I hate everything that helps maintain them.  And that is how we all really feel who feel at all, it is the mother in us, the source of everything that is good, and mothers do not mind much how their children are bettered so long as they are bettered.  No matter what the bushmen do up there in Queensland, my heart is with them, so long as they shake this hateful state of things.  I can’t remember when everybody round weren’t slaving away and no good coming of it.  My father has only a mortgaged farm to show for a life of toil.  My sister, my own sister, who grew up like a flower in the Queensland bush and worked her fingers to the bone and should have been to-day a happy woman with happy children on her knee, they picked her up when she lay dying in the gutter like a dog and in their charity gave her a bed to die on when they wouldn’t give her decent wages to live on.  Everywhere I’ve been it’s the same story, men out of work, women out of work, children who should be at school the only ones who can always get work.  Everywhere men crawling for a job, sinking their manhood for the chance of work, cringing and sneaking and throat-cutting, even in their unionism.  In every town an army of women like my Mary, women like ourselves, going down, down, down.  Honesty and virtue and courage getting uncommon.  We’re all getting to steal and plunder when we get a chance, the work people do it, the employers do it, the politicians do it.  I know.  We all do it.  Women actually don’t understand that they’re selling themselves often even when a priest does patter a few clap-trap phrases over them.  Oppression on every hand and we dare not destroy it.  We haven’t courage enough.  And things will never be any better while Society is as it is.  So I hate what Society is.  Oh!  I hate it so.  If word or will of mind could sweep it away to leave us free to do what our inner hearts, crushed by this industrialism that we have, tell us to do it should go.  For we’ve good in our hearts, most of us.  We like to do what’s kind, when we’ve a chance.  I’ve found it so, anyway.  Only we’re caught in this whirl that crushes us all, the poor in body and the rich in soul.  But till it goes, if it ever goes, I’ll not be guilty of bringing a child into such a hell as this is now.  That to me would be a cruelty that no weakness of mine, no human longing, could excuse ever.  For no fault of her own Mary’s life was a curse to her in the end.  And so it may be with any of us.  I’ll not have the sin of giving life on me.”