“And how’s your mother now?”
“Oh, she’s all right, thank you. She’s got a hard time of it, but she’s pretty well used to it.”
“And are you still working at Grinder Brothers’?”
“No. I got tired of slavin’ there for next to nothing. I got sick of my step-father waitin’ outside for me on pay-day, with a dirty, drunken, spieler pal of his waitin’ round the corner for him. There wasn’t nothin’ in it. It got to be too rough altogether.... Blast Grinders!”
“And what are you doing now?”
“Sellin’ papers. I’m always tryin’ to get a start in somethin’ else, but I ain’t got no luck. I always come back to, sellin’ papers.”
Then, after a thought, he added reflectively: “Blast papers!”
His present ambition was to drive a cart.
“I drove a cart twice, and once I rode a butcher’s horse. A bloke worked me out of one billet, and I worked myself out of the other. I didn’t know when I was well off. Then the banks went bust, and my last boss went insolvent, and one of his partners went into Darlinghurst for suicide, and the other went into Gladesville for being mad; and one day the bailiff seized the cart and horse with me in it and a load of timber. So I went home and helped mother and the kids to live on one meal a day for six months, and keep the bum-bailiff out. Another cove had my news-stand.”
Then, after a thought “Blast reconstriction!”