And book us rooms at
the Hotel Australia. They do you very well there."
It was her first love letter. She felt, vaguely, that it lacked
something though she did not quite know what. She hated the talk about
money and about her uncle. She hated that he could borrow money so
casually from a nurse who had been good to him. She wished that terrible
hunger he had predicted had not happened to her. She knew, with absolute
certainty, that Dr. Angus had gauged her fatal habit of conceited
anxiety to help other people when he cabled to her not to marry a
drunkard whom she had merely put to him as a hypothetical case. And she
knew the doctor was inevitably right about the folly of marrying a man
like Louis.
"But he's wrong about there being no cure. When he is with me every
minute and I can look after him as if he is my little baby, he won't be
able to do it. I'll be a gaoler to him--I'll be his providence, his
mother, his nurse, his doctor. Oh everything--I'll be what God was to
father."
Down on Circular Quay she felt she could not go aboard the Oriana yet.
In spite of the unsteadiness of her feet it was very pleasant to be
walking about in a new land, so, taking out Louis's letter again she
went on rather blindly through the wharves, reading it. A Japanese boat
was loading; smells of garlic and of spice and sandalwood were wafted to
her from the holds and weaved into her thoughts of Louis; a little
further along there was a crowd of stevedores clustered in the roadway
round a violent smell of whisky.
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