red. No matter what
the bushmen do up there in Queensland, my heart is with them, so long as
they shake this hateful state of things. I can't remember when everybody
round weren't slaving away and no good coming of it. My father has only a
mortgaged farm to show for a life of toil. My sister, my own sister, who
grew up like a flower in the Queensland bush and worked her fingers to
the bone and should have been to-day a happy woman with happy children on
her knee, they picked her up when she lay dying in the gutter like a dog
and in their charity gave her a bed to die on when they wouldn't give her
decent wages to live on. Everywhere I've been it's the same story, men
out of work, women out of work, children who should be at school the only
ones who can always get work. Everywhere men crawling for a job, sinking
their manhood for the chance of work, cringing and sneaking and
throat-cutting, even in their unionism. In every town an army of women
like my Mary, women like ourselves, going down, down, down. Honesty and
virtue and courage getting uncommon. We're all getting to steal and
plunder when we get a chance, the work people do it, the employers do it,
the politicians do it. I know. We all do it. Women actually don't
understand that they're selling themselves often even when a priest does
patter a few clap-trap phrases over them. Oppression on every hand and we
dare not destroy it. We haven't courage enough. And things will never be
any better while Society is as it is. So I hate what Society is. Oh! I
hate it so. If word or will of mind could sweep it away to leave us free
to do what our inner hearts, crushed by this industrialism that we have,
tell us to do it should go. For we've good in our hearts, most of us. We
like to do what's kind, when we've a chance. I've found it so, anyway.
Only we're caught in this whirl that crushes us all, the poor in body and
the rich in soul. But till it goes, if it ever goes, I'll not be guilty
of bringing a child into such a hell as this is now. That to me would be
a cruelty that no weakness of mine, no human longing, could excuse ever.
For no fault of her own Mary's life was a curse to her in the end. And so
it may be with any of us. I'll not have the sin of giving life on me."

They stood face to face looking into each other's eyes. Unflinchingly she
offered up her own heart and his on the altar of her ideal.

He read on her set lips the unalterability of her determination. It was