“I believe you will make the best bush-woman possible,” said the Colonel, with an admiring glance. “Only we both have so much to unlearn. I didn’t expect to see a room like this, for instance, or such appointments,” he continued, raising a glass of claret pensively to his lips.
“It’s rather a bad thing for us, pappy, as we have to live in the real bush, don’t you think? We must forget it all as soon as possible.”
“It won’t make the least difference to you, my dear,” said Mrs. Grandison. “If you had seen Hubert’s sisters here you would have been—well—astonished to see such girls come out of the bush. For some reasons I begin really to think it would be better for all of us to live there.” Here she glanced reflectively at Josie, who looked scarcely as self-possessed as usual.
“I shall not say another word about bush matters,” said Hubert. “They will keep. When Miss Dacre comes up she will judge for herself. If my opinion is requested, I shall be happy to give it, but shall not volunteer advice. Will your brother travel up with you, Miss Dacre?”
“Willoughby went to stay a few days with a ship friend, who lives near Penrith, I think it is, but he is quite as enthusiastic as I am about beginning life in earnest. He will be in town again on Friday.”
“Come and dine with us on Saturday, then, Hubert,” said Mrs. Grandison, and I’ll ask Mr. Hope and one or two of your rude bush pioneers. Josie, can’t you get a couple of young ladies for Hubert’s benefit and to show Mr. Dacre?”
“I don’t think Hubert wants any more young ladies,” said Josie mischievously; “but I’ll ask the Flemington girls to come in—one of them plays marvellously and the other sings. Her voice is very like Parepa’s.”
CHAPTER XIII
The dinner was a success, the party to the opera having gone off without a drawback to the unbroken joyousness of the affair. The Misses Flemington came and performed such musical feats as were expected of them, and Miss Dacre admitted that she had not heard a voice unprofessional for years to equal May Flemington’s. She wondered, indeed, what she could have been thinking of to imagine that when she came to Australia all artistic luxuries were to be banished from her thoughts.
“The fact is,” she said, “we are frightfully narrow and prejudiced in England. We know a great deal about France, Germany and the Continent generally, because we are always running backwards and forwards. But of our own countrymen in Australia and New Zealand we know next to nothing. I was going to say as little as about Timbuctoo, but we do really know something about Africa, because the missionaries tell us, and we have returned evangelists from Borioboolah Gha, even from Fiji and New Zealand. But of Australia we know nothing.”