Mr. Endicott chuckled.
"I'll tell you something about my daughter," he replied. "She may look like china, but she is pretty solid earthenware really. And if there are any others as anxious about her as you are you might spread the good news."
The train moved off. "So you are in the House of Commons," said the Australian, and he began to talk. "Our great trouble--yours and mine--is----"
"I know it," Mr. Endicott interrupted with a smile of confidence.
"Of course you do," replied the Australian. "It's the overcrowding of the East under the protective rule of the British."
"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Endicott blankly.
"We could help a good deal," the Australian continued, "if only our Government had got a ha'porth of common sense. North of the Tropic of Capricorn, there's land and to spare which coloured labour could cultivate and white labour can't."
This was strange talk to Mr. Endicott. He was aware, but not conscious of great dominions and possessions outside the British Islands. He had indeed avoided the whole subject. He was shy of the phrase which described them, as a horse is shy of a newspaper blown about the street. The British Empire! The very words had a post-prandial sound. Instead of suggesting to him vast territories with myriads of men and women groping amongst enormous problems, they evoked a picture of a flamboyant gentleman in evening dress standing at the head of a table, his face congested with too much dinner, a glass of wine in his one hand, a fat cigar in the other, and talking vauntingly. This particular sentence of the Australian stuck inconveniently in his mind and smouldered there.
For instance. On the afternoon of their arrival Elsie was arranging his developing dishes and his chemicals on a small rough table in a corner of their one living-room. She put an old basket-chair by the table and set around it a screen which she had discovered in one of the bedrooms upstairs.
"There!" she said. "You can make all your messes here, father, and we can keep the room looking habitable, and I shan't get all my frocks stained."