She knew nothing
about men; what she had seen on the ship made her class them as
nuisances to be put in the sea out of hand. Her father was the only man
she had known intimately before. Her father had been a weak man, and yet
a tyrant and an autocrat. Logically, then, all men were tyrants and
autocrats. The women in Sydney whom she saw in Mrs. King's kitchen,
where she went to learn how to cook, talked much of their husbands,
calling them "boss." Hence she meekly accepted Louis's autocratic
orderings of her coming and going. Again, her father had been gripped,
in the tentacles first of the whisky-cult, and later of the God-cult.
Therefore, she reasoned, all men were so gripped by something. It was a
pity that they were so gripped. It seemed to her that women must have
been created to be soft cushions for men to fall upon, props to keep
them up, nurses to minister to their weakness. She slowly came to
realize that the age of heroes was dead--if it had ever been, outside
the covers of story-books. It seemed that Siegfried no longer lived to
slay dragons, that Andromeda would have to buckle on armour, slip her
bonds and save her Perseus when he got into no end of entanglements on
his way to rescue her. By degrees she came to think that men were
children, to be humoured by being called "boss" or "hero" as the case
may be.
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