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“Do you want to give me something?”

He admitted:

“I did feel an urge that way.” And she said deliberately, still intent on her reflection:

“An interesting psychological manifestation of your remorse at feeling yourself unable to reciprocate my affections. Poor Bret! You could buy me some chocolates in Mudgee when we go through to-morrow! That would make you feel better, wouldn't it?”

He said, smiling at her:

“Stop daubing that stuff on your face, and stop talking rot and come out on the veranda. This room's as hot as hell.”

She threw her
powder-puff down and gave his arm a squeeze as she went past him to the door. She said:

“You'd have been quite fond of me if I'd been your sister, wouldn't you?”

She was gone along the veranda like a moth in the darkness, without waiting for the answer he didn't attempt to give.

M
ARGERY
was putting
Richard to bed. He was telling her, while he struggled with his braces, a long rambling tale about a mythical country of his own invention, and she was saying absently, “Yes, darling,” and “Was it?” and “Did it really?” And thinking sadly as she watched him how vulnerable he was in spite of his sturdy body and his rosy brown face. Always in this world of crude violences and brutalities he would remain vulnerable, and yet she could not bring herself to believe that it was other than desirable that a child should grow with a horror of bloodshed, of killing so deeply rooted in him. Some day, she thought, all children will feel like that and it'll be a better world – perhaps – than it is now. But in the meantime, poor Richard!

She winced, remembering a day when he'd rushed into the kitchen where she was preparing breakfast, his face greenish-white, his eyes mad with some violent and inescapable horror. He'd clutched her round the knees, his hard little head boring against her as a panic-stricken animal beats and plunges against a wall in futile attempts at escape. She'd gone down on her knees to hold him, her own distracted brain alert, her eyes busy, her ears listening to try to find what had so shocked him. There was no sound from outside but the clatter of the mowing-machine where Bill was mowing the square of grass beneath the clothes-lines. Holding Richard in her arms she'd moved towards the door, and felt instantly his whole body contract, resist, strain away from it. She went back into the cool dimness of the kitchen, sat down with him, soothed and stroked him, murmured reassurances. And after some minutes he'd stared up at her with a strange look of incredulity on his face, as though he felt, as a last hope, that she might be able utterly to deny the reality of what he'd seen.

“Mummy – there was a snail – in the grass – and Bill
mowed it – he mowed it all in pieces—
!”

He'd been violently ill then, and when she had changed and bathed and put him down in his cot he'd slept long but restlessly, his hot hand twitching in her own.

She put out an arm for him to steady himself by as he stepped out of his small blue trousers. She thought with a wave of pity and tenderness
that he was really very tiny to be made to look after himself so much. But she knew that when the other baby came she'd have less time for him – he must learn to manage some at least of his daily needs for himself—

He was explaining earnestly:

“In Riverburra there's snakes and they live in the ground and they poisonous the ground—”

“Do they, darling?”

“Yes, and they poisonous the water too, but the people in Riverburra only drink milk so they don't get dead from the snakes.”

“I see. Those buttons don't do up, Richard – don't you remember mother put press-fasteners so they'd be easier for you?”

“I forgot – I only have to go
woosh!
and they all undo theirselves—”

“Yes,
only don't woosh too hard.”

She thought wearily that right or wrong Richard would have lived a far happier life if he had been like that small hearty Goth his cousin, her brother's son, who went about the lawns of their Sydney home trampling on snails with a rich and expansive gusto; who upon one occasion she remembered, had opened a sardine sandwich to inspect it and, remarking cheerfully, “H'm! Dead fish!” consumed it with Gargantuan relish. Well, she thought bitterly, how far had the world gone on? Would he some day be glorified as a fine soldier, while Richard was being scorned and pilloried for a conscientious objector?

He was standing still looking down at himself consideringly, trying to remember how she had told him to go about the removal of this tiresome shirt. She clutched him to her as though the menacing years had taken shape before her very eyes and were reaching out hungry hands for him.

He said wheedlingly:

“You
take off my shirt, Mummy.”

She answered, with wet eyes, “Yes, darling.”

“And
put on my pajompers?”

“Yes.”

“And
read me?”

“Yes, one story, sweetheart.”

“Two?”

She laughed, carrying him to his cot.

“One
. Mother must go back to the Grans, and Aunt Susan and Uncle Bert.”

He was silent while she put on his pyjamas and tucked him into his cot. She asked:

“Did you bring in all the friends-and-relations?”

“Yes – want them to sleep with me.”

“Where
are they?”

“They're looking out the window; they're watching for Daddy.”

They were arranged along the window-sill, a teddy-bear and a golliwog, a wooden camel called Tripps, and Wingo the china frog. She brought them to him and watched his careful disposal of them beneath his sheet and blanket. He asked:

“Is Daddy coming home soon?”

“Yes, soon.”

“Is he better now?”

“Yes, darling, quite better.”

“In Riverburra when people get sick the doctor makes them come well again.”

“That's very nice of him, isn't it? What shall I read, darling?”

While she went to fetch the book she began to wonder whether a world of peace-loving men would really be the Utopia of the future. Often when she was worried, hemmed in by the difficulties of daily life, her mind escaped in this way to some restful tangle of impersonal problems. She unravelled them as many people work out crossword puzzles, for a mental relaxation, separating thread from thread till she had achieved in her own mind some kind of neatness, some approximate conclusion.

She came now from her original doubt to a feeling that the differences between the sexes had been enormously and unjustifiably exaggerated. What were they, after all, beyond a few physical variations biologically necessary? And as those differences were complementary so, she realised, feeling a knot in the tangle give, and a long thread come cleanly away from it, the one fundamental psychological difference between them was complementary too, rather than, as she had always thought it, antagonistic.

She stood in front of the small bookshelf in her bedroom running a finger absently along the top row. If then, you took away from him man's primeval urge to kill, to destroy, you might possibly be doing just as harmful a thing as if you took away from him his power to propagate? For as woman's creative urge implies peace, toil, construction, stability, surely man's destructive instinct must imply strife and friction; change – mobility—

You could argue then, that a civilisation reared on the feminine ideal would remain entirely static, while one reared on the masculine ideal could not endure at all?

Where
was
the thing? Orange, with gold lettering.

In that case the old Adam must
remain? They must continue to have, from time to time, these increasingly frightful orgies of killing? But why should they, after all? Men still like to smash and women still like to create, but surely, surely, it was no longer necessary that man should expend his destructive force, every year more diabolically ingenious, on the life which woman was still faithfully renewing after the fashion of uncountable ages ago? If they must do that, she thought, there could not come too soon the brave new world peopled by artificially produced babies, food for their vile and artificial slaughters!

She sighed, abandoning her search of the bookshelf and looking wearily round the room. Centuries ago, her brain went on arguing, there hadn't really been anything for man to smash except his neighbour's head, so of course he had smashed that. But now—! She saw the whole world suddenly as a gigantic
nursery full of delights for the half of humanity which has never grown up. Not only the weapons that his own ingenuity had conceived, but there to his hand an inexhaustible supply of enemies and victims to annihilate! What was the matter with him? Did he really think it more interesting to pick a quarrel with his fellow man than to pursue his quite reasonable argument with, say, a typhus germ to its victorious conclusion? Did he really prefer sinking under the ocean for the purpose of ambushing and drowning some hundreds of human beings, to cruising about in a new world of smothered light and sound, still virtually unexplored – the last remaining mystery – land of his globe? Did he really need to make enemies of his own kind? Why not war on sharks and rats and blowflies?

Hasn't he, her heart cried despairingly, enough to do? The most magnificent collection of toys, the most lavish supply of playgrounds – the air to turn somersaults in, the bed of the ocean to explore, the vast unknown forces of electricity, atomic energy to harness, the whole universe of suns to conquer—

She lamented over him as any mother laments over the besmudged copybook of her schoolboy son.

“He's so clever! It isn't that he can't do well! If only he'd apply himself!”

There it was, on the bed half hidden by the eiderdown! She remembered now through the veil of her other continuing thoughts that Richard had been “reading” it to Wingo—

Richard. The memory of him stirred the impersonal grief of her thoughts to a sudden savage personal resentment. Let them take care, these irresponsible child-mates of womankind! Let them not hold too
cheaply the life which she is growing tired of producing for such a senseless purpose! Let them not forget that of the fundamental differences between the sexes a difference of mentality is not one – that the feminine brain starved and hampered through the ages is fighting at last into its own. So that a day may come when she will say, “No. I bear no more children into a world not fit to receive them—” And then what? Not safe for very many centuries longer to talk too confidently of the unfailing maternal instinct, when even now, she herself and how many thousands of others like her felt revolt flame in them, cried, as she was crying now, “After this one – no more!”

She picked up the book and went back to Richard's room. He was half asleep, his heavy eyes opening with an effort to watch the door. She sat down beside his cot and began to read softly the first story she came to:

“One day Rabbit and Piglet were sitting outside Pooh's front door listening to Rabbit and Pooh was sitting with them
—”

If Colin didn't get home to-night she'd have to think up some new excuses. But he would – he'd come back as he'd come so often before, silent and vanquished to the comfort she had always been able to give him—

“
Piglet said that Tigger was very bouncy, and that if they could think of a way of unbouncing him it would be a Very Good Idea
—”

Richard was nearly asleep already. He must have been very tired. All the same she'd been glad she had let him stay up to dinner for a treat – his questions and breathless infectious laughter had helped her through what might have been many conversational difficulties.

“
There's a thing called Twy-stymes” he said –” Christopher Robin tried to teach it to me once, but it didn't
—”

How soundly children slept! Soundly and suddenly. The book lay open on her lap; she watched Richard's face, closed, still, the tides of his life welling in a warm flood of colour beneath his petal-soft skin. She saw abruptly with a shock between fear and joy, that it was his father's face.

She went out slowly on the veranda where she had left them to put Richard to bed. Susan was lying back in a deck chair, half in shadow, puffing cigarette
smoke about her to discourage the mosquitoes. Drew, on his knees, had a huge map of Colin's spread out on the floor with the lamp beside it, and Bret, squatting on his heels as bushmen do, was pointing out something to him with the stem of his pipe. Millicent, dim and still, outside the circle of lamplight, said:

“Here's a chair, Margery. You must be tired.”

Margery, sinking back against its comfortably yielding canvas back, realised anew that she was. Drew was saying:

“Now where are we? Here, put this cigarette-case on that corner. This is how we came – Sydney, Parramatta, over the mountains – this would be about where we were stuck, because here's that place Kerrajellanbong. Now there was a turn-off somewhere— Hallo, Marge, young man in bed?— Yes, here it is – now
where does that go? Bathurst, eh?”

“That's right.” Bret's hand dived down into the lamplight, his forefinger sketching a route roughly on the map. Drew went on:

“Lithgow – now where are we? We went through there, didn't we?”

“Not exactly through. We skirted it – here.”

“By jove, we're going more north than I thought. Capertee, Tabrabucca, Cudgegong – you know, those names don't sound so bad when you say them in a string like that! Now where's Kalangadoo. And here we are!”

He stared at the map. He said slowly:

“You know – I'd had a sort of feeling that we'd come a goodish way!”

Bret, puffing at his pipe, remarked that there was still a good deal ahead of them, and Drew, absorbed, began to trace slowly with the point of a pencil the continuation of the road they had travelled. There stirred in him a sudden faint excitement such as one feels, before one's mind has begun to work, on the moment of awakening to some long hoped-for day. He glanced for a half-startled second in the direction of his wife as if he thought that she might have seen in his face some hint of the ridiculous sense of revelation which had so disconcertingly assailed him. She had not, but in that abrupt lifting of his face, its lower half lit brightly by the upward glow of the lamp, and its eyes looking for her, strangely disturbed, out of a half-shadow, she did become aware of a change in him, and because of it, a change in herself—