Merely a city stretched athwart the sky. Ordinary men and women, just such as had been left behind in [136] ]London, walked and stood and bustled about the Quay. Every-day warehouses, dull and dingy, crowded to left and right; above them, where the hills rose, thousands upon thousands of shops and houses—alas! for the cherished wigwams—were massed together, with church-spires and town-hall towers breaking up their regular level just as they did in London and other English towns. Afterwards, when the first keen edge of the disappointment had worn off, they tried to excuse the harbour city for its manifold shortcomings.
“Of course,” Phyl said, “since there are such a dreadful lot of people here already they must have houses to live in; we ought to have thought of that, Dolly.”
“And as such lots of ships come in, I s’pose they can’t help having wharves and things,” Dolly said.
The presence of the Quay, with its bustling reminiscences of the London docks in place of the yellow and white beaches thick with shells, she was finding hardest of all to forgive.
“And I s’pose they had to have trams and trains,” sighed Phyl.
“But wouldn’t you think there’d be just one or two aboriginals left?” said Dolly with saddened eyes.
Disillusion
was Mrs. Conway’s portion also.
She also had had her secret imaginings. She had been certain that everywhere there were places where a school had merely to be started to prove at once a [137] ]success. She felt sure that wealthy squatters were in continual need of governesses for their children, and only too willing and anxious to pay them a hundred or a hundred and fifty pounds a year for their services. She imagined her business training of the last two years would easily fit her for one of the secretaryships that are such rare and precious orchids in England, but as every new arrival knows—or at all events imagines—grow on every bush in Australia. The awakening was very rough and sharp.
A month slipped past; another one trod on its heels and tripped away mockingly. The tiny account in the bank grew less and less, for small girls must have enough to eat and a comfortable shelter for their heads. No one took the faintest notice of the repeatedly advertised statement that a well-educated lady offered her services as governess, or amanuensis; unless, indeed, it was some one who smiled a little at the faith and ignorance displayed by the well-educated lady in daring to value her services at £120 a year.