“Why the Golden Bar might take care of itself. I would travel to Europe and see London and Paris—above all, Paris! It’s all very well for you, a man who has seen all you care to see, to not mind being poor, but with a woman it is different. A new suit does not trouble you. If you look an old fright nobody notices it; and even if you live in a pokey little house you do not have to clean it, cook the meals in it, and do your own washing in the dirty little back yard. The world is full of beautiful things, nice things, and I want to have my share. What is the good of being so virtuous in a hurry? Why be too good, and better than other people? It makes you look peculiar and odd, and they don’t like it. If the world’s all wrong, then I will be wrong too; at any rate, I shall have plenty of company. Of course there’s a medium in all things. I don’t say it’s right to do what is wicked to get money. Still money will do so much, smooth so much, that it seems to me just foolishness to say I don’t want it.”
The boat glided on over the rippling water, past the low shores of Drummoyne, past the terraced hills of Hunter’s Hill, with its houses half hidden by creepers, its lawns overshadowed by the green foliaged garden trees, on, till the wide stretch of water came that led to The Brothers.
An Italian sky overhead, a warm lusciousness in the air, and with it all only the splash of the green water against the rocky banks, and the measured beat of the sculls in the rowlocks, as they kept a gentle time.
The Professor spoke again—
“I know I cannot make you see as I see, my dear. Perhaps it is best. We have all to learn the use of our own eyes, and no strange spectacles will help us. Yet there are things which I think you can see, and one is the degradation of a great number of the frequenters of the Golden Bar. I have not been often, or stopped long, for the sight and sound of most of these men was repulsive to me. Hear what they say, what they talk about, think about. Is it not betting? or perhaps sharping, for what other name will describe the effort to obtain what you have not earned? And their faces, in spite of their fine clothes, show their lives—the puffy cheek of wrong living, the thick, drooping eyelids of sensuality and cunning, the projecting faces that look out from their shirt collars like an animal waiting to spring on its prey.
“All these and fifty other signs are stamped on the crowd. And it is not as if they were always so. They were, no doubt, as other men till they associated themselves together to hunt with the devil. I noticed particularly that young fellow, Gosper, we first saw in Windsor, and I had a talk with him yesterday. A few months only have changed the man. There is a talent fit for the highest work cast in the mud. With no aim now but self-interest, self-gratification, to get money, to circumvent fools—that is, his fellow-creatures-to outsharp the sharper. He could not understand, as I wish you to do, that Innocence itself cannot mix with muck and remain unspotted.
“We are, and more particularly a woman, largely formed by those about us. Every low word and brutal jest in that place makes its record on you, even though it only dulls your sense of decency. You learn to respect yourself less. Is it not so, Bertha?”
Bertha had tears in her eyes.
“You are right, Pro, you are always right. I will leave the horrid place at once, or at least very shortly, for I have to give three months’ notice. I have felt what you said lots of times, though I never thought out just what it was. They are a low lot, and that’s the truth—the men that come to the bar. They say things there before me they would not dare to say to their sisters, and that shows what they really think of me in spite of all their compliments. Yes, Pro, I’ll give notice to-night, and if the worst comes to the worst we can go on the road again.”