They wouldn’t let me do anything but lie on the sofa. Madge cooked the chops in a determined fashion that made the whole flat smell of burned fat; and Colin did everything else. After dinner was over—it was a gruesome meal, at which Colin was laboriously funny all the time—I was graciously allowed to sit in the kitchenette while they washed up, and we held a council of war.
All the talking in the world could not alter the main fact. There were no funds to pay for country holidays. Our friends—they were not so many as in the old days—were all in Melbourne: our only relations were distant ones, distant in every sense of the word, for they lived in Queensland, and might as well have been in Timbuctoo, Madge sourly remarked, for all the practical use they were. Discuss it as we might, there was no earthly chance of following my prescription.
Poor old Colin looked more like thirty-three than twenty-three as he scrubbed the gridiron with sand-soap.
“You needn’t worry yourselves a bit,” I told them. “All I need is to be away from that horrid old school and Madame Carr, and I’ve got two whole beautiful months. Doctors don’t know everything. I’ll go and sit in Fawkner Park every day and look at the cows, and imagine I’m in Gippsland!”
Colin groaned.
“I don’t see why we haven’t a country uncle or something,” said Madge vaguely: “a red-faced old darling with a loving heart, and a red-roofed farm, and a beautiful herd of cows—Wyandottes, don’t you call them? If we were girls in books we’d have one, and we’d go and stay with him and get hideously fat, and Doris would marry the nearest squatter!” She heaved a sigh.
“Hang the squatter!” Colin remarked; “but I’d give something to see either of you fat. I’m afraid you’re a vain dreamer, Madge. Put down that dish-cloth and let me finish: I’m not going to have you showing up at a music-lesson with hands like a charlady’s.”
Madge gave up the dish-cloth with reluctance. She was silent for quite three minutes—an unusual thing for Madge.
“Look here,” she said at length, with a funny little air of determination. “There’s one thing a whole lot more important than music, and that’s Doris’s health. I wonder we didn’t think of it before!”
“Well, I’d hate to contradict you,” Colin answered, slightly puzzled. “But I don’t see that this highly-original discovery of yours makes it any the more necessary for you to scour saucepans while I’m about.”