"Dear me, and I an old married woman," she gasped, fanning herself and looking far more like a flushed child. "Whatever would father say? I must think more of my dignity."
"He'd say you were just a kid, like he always does," said Dick, who had collapsed upon the hearth-rug. "It would be an awful shock to father if he found that you'd got prim and grown up."
"I misdoubt he'll never find that, the poor man," said his mother tragically. "Dickie, I'll never forget how terrible it was when I first found myself married and settled down at Kurrajong, with a house and several servants. You see, I was only seventeen when I married, and though seventeen may seem a lot to you, it isn't so much of an age when you come to it. And I had always been at boarding school and I didn't know a thing about keeping house. I used to like stock very much as a child, but I remember that for a while after I was married I used to look at a bullock or a sheep with horror, as unpleasant beasts that got cut up into a number of joints, of which I never could remember the names."
"Poor old mummie!" said Dick, laughing. "How did you manage to learn things?"
"Cook pulled me through; I found her six months after my marriage. Before that there was a terrible cook who scorned me and my ignorance, and gave me a very bad time, and father very bad meals. Of course, he never grumbled."
"No, he never would," said Dick.
"It was only one day when he found me crying in my room that he discovered that I was really unhappy—and you should have seen how angry he was. He sent away the terrible cook, and we went to Melbourne and hunted for a really nice one—and got her. And dear old cookie taught me all the things I ought to have learned before I got married. But I made up my mind that if ever any daughters came to me I would have them taught very thoroughly at school how to run their houses. But they never did come—only one little ragamuffin of a son!"
She rumpled his hair, and leaning forward, dropped a butterfly kiss on his nose.
"Now you look like a golliwog," she said, "and we have no time to spare, because we must go and buy deck shoes, and cures for sea sickness, and other interesting things. We have got to look our very smartest when we board that big mail-boat to get father. Tidy yourself, beloved, and we'll go out."
Dick brushed his hair with her long-tailed hairbrush, which he despised very much; and after his mother had pulled his coat here and there and settled his tie with deft fingers, she pronounced him fit to accompany her, and they fared forth into the busy streets. Shopping with his mother generally resolved itself, for Dick, into waiting at the doors of big drapery houses, where she was swallowed up into mysterious regions that had no charms for her son. He preferred to stand in the doorway, tucked into a corner out of the way of the hurrying throng of eager women passing in and out—there was fun in watching the crowd, the clanging tram-cars, the beautiful horses—it was before the days of many motors, and good carriage horses were still to be seen in the city streets. Like most bush-bred boys—and girls, for that matter—Dick thought there was no sight to equal that of a good horse. He was staring at a big, taking chestnut, driven by a man in a light buggy, when a voice said, "Hullo, young Lester!" and he turned to greet Master Glass, resplendent in a new collar, and no longer melancholy in appearance.