‘How do you feel now, Jack?’
‘Oh, I’M all right,’ I said.
‘For God’s sake!’ said Andy, ‘don’t put your foot in it and make a mess of it.’
‘I won’t, if you don’t.’
Mrs Baker’s cottage was a little weather-board box affair back in a garden. When we went in through the gate Andy gripped my arm again and whispered—
‘For God’s sake stick to me now, Jack!’
‘I’ll stick all right,’ I said—‘you’ve been having too much beer, Andy.’
I had seen Mrs Baker before, and remembered her as a cheerful, contented sort of woman, bustling about the house and getting the Boss’s shirts and things ready when we started North. Just the sort of woman that is contented with housework and the children, and with nothing particular about her in the way of brains. But now she sat by the fire looking like the ghost of herself. I wouldn’t have recognised her at first. I never saw such a change in a woman, and it came like a shock to me.
Her sister let us in, and after a first glance at Mrs Baker I had eyes for the sister and no one else. She was a Sydney girl, about twenty-four or twenty-five, and fresh and fair—not like the sun-browned women we were used to see. She was a pretty, bright-eyed girl, and seemed quick to understand, and very sympathetic. She had been educated, Andy had told me, and wrote stories for the Sydney ‘Bulletin’ and other Sydney papers. She had her hair done and was dressed in the city style, and that took us back a bit at first.
‘It’s very good of you to come,’ said Mrs Baker in a weak, weary voice, when we first went in. ‘I heard you were in town.’