man who thinks he's been twisted round a woman's little finger for the
benefit of somebody else. Billy said that he couldn't help being
reminded by the shy, sweet smile and the shy, sweet "thank you" of
the Pretty Girl in the Army, of the shy, sweet smile and the shy,
sweet gratitude of a Sydney private barmaid, who had once roped him
in, in the days before he was married. Then he'd reckon that the Army
lassie had been sent out back to Bourke as a business speculation.

Tom Hall was inclined to reckon so too--but that was after he'd been
chaffed for a month about the three _War Crys_.

The Pretty Girl was discussed from psychological points of view; not
forgetting the sex problem. Donald Macdonald--shearer, union leader
and labour delegate to other colonies on occasion--Donald Macdonald
said that whenever he saw a circle of plain or ugly, dried-up women or
girls round a shepherd, evangelist or a Salvation Army drum, he'd say
"sexually starved!" They were hungry for love. Religious mania was
sexual passion dammed out of its course. Therefore he held that
morbidly religious girls were the most easily seduced.

But this couldn't apply to Pretty Girl in the Army. Mitchell reckoned
that she'd either had a great sorrow--a lot of trouble, or a
disappointment in love (the "or" is Mitchell's); but they couldn't
see how a girl like her could possibly be disappointed in love--unless
the chap died or got into jail for life. Donald decided that her soul
had been starved somehow.

Mitchell suggested that it might be only a craving for notoriety, the
same thing that makes women and girls go amongst lepers, and out to
the battlefield, and nurse ugly pieces of men back to life again; the