I want to see one or two chaps and find out whether my drays are down as far as Fig Tree for stores and what's going on up along the Leura.' Bridget noticed that the change in McKeith seemed yet more accentuated.
His manner was more curt and decided--rougher than before.

He appeared to have taken on the tone of the Back-Blocks.

Yet she admired him.

She did not dislike the roughness.
But she felt a womanish aggrievement at his having left her to undo her own things.

And the rooms were horrible--the meagre appliances--the course cotton sheets, the awful Reckitt's-blue colouring of the painted walls.