only a poor domestic female, I really don't feel safe with fires anywhere except in fire-places and in grates with hearths. But I do want you to know you have my sympathy—and my Lovat." She then signed herself Harriet Somers, and felt even more fluttered than when she had signed the marriage register.
She received for answer:
"Dear Mrs Somers: I am much honoured and very grateful for the assurance of your sympathy. I have put a one-and-sixpenny government stamp under your signature, to make your letter a legal document, and have further forged the signatures of two witnesses to your deed of gift of Lovat, so I am afraid there is no court of law in New South Wales in which you could now substantiate a further claim over him. I am sorry to take this mean advantage over you, but we lawyers know no scruples.
"I should be more than delighted if I could have the honour of entertaining once more in Sydney—say next Thursday—a beautiful person and remarkable woman (one and the same individual) who tells me to my nose that I am a Jew and that my name, instead of Benjamin, should be Abraham. Do please come again and call me Abraham's Bosom, but don't fail to bring your husband, for the simple look of the thing."
"The Kangaroo is a fighting beast, I believe," said Somers, looking at Harriet and laughing. He was not sorry when for once some other person gave her a dig.
"I think he's rather foolish," she said briefly.
These days Somers, too, was filled with fury. As for loving mankind, or having a fire of love in his heart, it was all rot. He felt almost fierily cold. He liked the sea, the pale sea of green glass that fell in such cold foam. Ice-fiery, fish-burning. He went out on to the low flat rocks at low tide, skirting the deep pock-holes that were full of brilliantly clear water and delicately-coloured shells and tiny, crimson anemones. Strangely sea-scooped sharp sea-bitter rock-floor, all wet and sea-savage. And standing at the edge looking at the waves rather terrifying rolling at him, where he stood low and exposed, far out from the sand-banks, and as he watched the gannets gleaming white, then falling with a splash like white sky-arrows into the
