Don't you know, Joan'-- and his voice got suddenly grave and deep-toned--'you ought to, for you were a bush girl and you've had men-kind out in the Back Blocks--Don't you know that when a man has got to go on day after day, week after week, year after year, fighting devils of loneliness and worse--with nothing to look at except miles and miles of stark staring gum trees and black, smelling GIDGEE* and dead-finish scrub--and never the glimpse of a woman--not counting black gins--to remind him he once had a mother and might have a wife.

Well, can't you see that his only chance of not growing into a rotten HATTER* is to start picturing in his imagination all the beautiful things he's ever seen or read about--the sort of lady-wife he hopes to have some day and in making such a companion of her that she seems to him as real as the stars and far more real than the gum trees.

So as he'll keep saying to her always in his thoughts: "I'll keep myself sound and wholesome for your sake.

I'll never forget that I'm a gentleman, so as YOU won't shrink away from me in horror if ever I've the luck to come across YOU down here on this Earth."' [*Gidgee--Colloquial pronunciation of gidia, an Australian tree.] [*Hatter--A white man who prefers the society of blacks.] He stopped, fitted another cigarette from the copper case into the holder and, before beginning upon it, said without looking at Mrs Gildea: 'I wouldn't spout like that to anybody but you, Joan.

My word! Though I see by your writing that you've a fair notion of how this cursed, grim, glorious old Bush can play the deuce with a chap--body and brain and soul--if he doesn't wear the right kind of talisman to safeguard himself.' 'Yes--I understand.