“He looks a determined man, I think,” said Nellie.  “Mr. Stratton says he’s the shrewdest capitalist in Australia and that he’ll give the unions a big fight for it one of these days.  He says he has a terrible hatred of unionism and thinks that there’s no half-way between smashing them up and letting them smash the employers up.  His company pays 25 per cent. regularly every year on its shares and will pay 50 before he gets through with it.”

“How?”

“How!  Out of fellows like you, Ned, who think themselves so mighty independent and can’t see that they’re being shorn like sheep, in the same way, though not as much yet, as Mrs. Somerville is by old Church and the fat brute, as you call him.  But then you rather like it I should think.  Anyway, you told me you didn’t want to do anything ‘wild,’ only to keep up wages.  You’ll have to do something ‘wild’ to keep up wages before he finishes.”

“That’s all right to talk, Nellie, but what can we do?” asked Ned, pulling his moustache. .

“Hire him instead of letting him hire you,” answered Nellie, oracularly.  “Those fat men are only good to put in museums, but these lean men are all right so long as you keep them in their place.  They are our worst enemies when they’re against us but our best friends when they’re for us.  They say Mr. Strong isn’t like most of the swell set.  He is straight to his wife and good to his children and generous to his friends and when he says a thing he sticks to it.  Only he sees everything from the other side and doesn’t understand that all men have got the same coloured blood.”

“How can we hire him?” said Ned, after a pause.  “They own everything.”

Nellie shrugged her shoulders.

“You think we might take it,” said Ned.

Nellie shrugged her shoulders again.

“I don’t see how it can be done,” he concluded.

“That’s just it.  You can’t see how it can be done, and so nothing’s done.  Some men get drunk, and some men get religious, and others get enthusiastic for a pound a hundred.  You haven’t got votes up in Queensland, and if you had you’d probably give them to a lot of ignorant politicians.  Men don’t know, and they don’t seem to want to know much, and they’ve got to be squeezed by men like him”—­she nodded at Strong—­“before they take any interest in themselves or in those who belong to them.  For those who have an ounce of heart, though, I should think there’d been squeezing enough already.”

She looked at Ned angrily.  The scenes of the morning rose before him and tied his tongue.

“How do you know all these jokers, Nellie?” he asked.  He had been going to put the question a dozen times before but it had slipped him in the interest of conversation.

“I only know them by sight.  Mrs. Stratton takes me to the theatre with her sometimes and tells me who people are and all about them.”

“Who’s Mrs. Stratton?  You were talking of Mr. Stratton, too, just now, weren’t you?”