“I went to work in a hotel as chamber maid, once.  I worked from about six in the morning till after ten at night.  Then four of us girls slept in two beds in a kind of box under the verandah stairs in the back yard.  We had to leave the window open to get air, and in the middle of the first night a light woke me up and a man was staring through the window at us with a match in his hand.  I wanted the twelve shillings so I stood it for a week and, then got another place.”

“What sort was that?”

“Oh!  A respectable place, you know.  Kept up appearances and locked up the butter.  The woman said to me, when I’d brought my box, ’I’m going to call you Mary, I always call my girls Mary.’  I slept in a dark close den off the kitchen, full of cockroaches that frightened the wits out of me.  I was afraid to eat as much as I wanted because she looked at me so.  I couldn’t rest a minute but she was hunting me up to see what I was doing.  I hadn’t anybody to talk with or eat with and my one night out I had to be in by ten.  I was so miserable that I went back to slop-work.  That’s what Mrs. Somerville is doing.”

“It isn’t all honey, then.  I thought town servant girls had a fair time of it.”

“An occasional one does, though they all earn their money, but most have a hard time of it.  I don’t mean all places are like mine were, but there’s no liberty.  A working girl’s liberty is scanty enough, goodness knows”—­she spoke scornfully—­“but at least she mixes with her own kind and is on an equality with most she meets.  When her work is over, however long it is, she can do just exactly as she likes until it starts again.  A servant girl hasn’t society or that liberty.  For my part I’d rather live on bread again than be at the orders of any woman who despised me and not be able to call a single minute of time my own.  They’re so ignorant, most of these women who have servants, they don’t know how to treat a girl any more than most of their husbands know how to treat a horse.”

The naive bush simile pleased Ned a little and he laughed, but soon relapsed again into silence.  Then Nellie spoke of “Paddy’s Market,” one of the sights of Sydney, which she would like him to see.  Accordingly they strolled to his hotel, where he put on a clean shirt and a collar and a waistcoat, while she waited, looking into the shops near by; then they strolled slowly Haymarketwards, amid the thronging Saturday night crowds that overflowed the George-street pavement into the roadway.

CHAPTER IV.

SATURDAY NIGHT IN PADDY’S MARKET.