"My name's Nellie Lawton and some of us are trying to start a women's
union. You'll be sure to be there?"

"All right," answered the waitress, a little dubiously. Then she added
more cordially, as she wrote out the pay ticket:

"My name's Susan Finch. I'll see what I can do."

So Ned and Nellie got up and, the former having paid at the counter,
walked out into the street together. It was nearly three. The rain had
stopped, though the sky was still cloudy and threatening. The damp
afternoon was chilly after the sultry broiling morning. Neither of them
felt in the mood for walking so at Nellie's suggestion they put in the
afternoon in riding, on trams and 'busses, hither and thither through the
mazy wilderness of the streets that make up Sydney.

Intuitively, both avoided talking of the topics that before had engaged
them and that still engrossed their thoughts. For a while they chatted on
indifferent matters, but gradually relapsed into silence, rarely broken.
The impression of the morning walk, of Mrs. Somerville's poor room, of
Nellie's stuffy street, came with full force to Ned's mind. What he saw
only stamped it deeper and deeper.

When, in a bus, they rode through the suburbs of the wealthy, past
shrubberied mansions and showy villas, along roads where liveried
carriages, drawn by high-stepping horses, dashed by them, he felt himself
in the presence of the fat man who jingled sovereigns, of the lean man
whose slender fingers reached north to the Peak Downs and south to the
Murray, filching everywhere from the worker's hard-earned wage. When in
the tram they were carried with clanging and jangling through endless