a fencing contract west of Bourke. We had a book which
we'd borrowed from a library at Bourke for a year or two--never mind the
name of it--it was in ninety-one or ninety-two, and the sex problem was
booming then. I had been surreptitiously tearing some carefully-written
slips of manuscript--leaves taken from an old pocket-book--into small
pieces; I dropped them, with apparent carelessness, into the fire and
stood with my back to it.

"I'll bet five pounds," said Mitchell, suddenly, "that you've been
trying your hand on a sex-problem story."

I shifted uneasily and brought my hands from behind me into my pockets.
"Well, to tell you the truth," I admitted, "I have."

"I thought so," exclaimed Mitchell. "We'll be put to the expense of
sending you to Sydney for medical treatment yet. You've been having too
easy times lately, plenty of hard graft and no anxiety about tucker or
the future. What are the symptoms?"

"Well," I said, taking a hand out to scratch the back of my head, "the
plot looked all right--at first sight."

"So there's a plot, is there? Well, in the first place, a plot is a
problem. Well, what's the plot?... Come on, you needn't be frightened to
tell an old mate like me."

"Well," I said, "the yarn looked all right at first sight; that article
of `T's' in the _Bulletin_ turned me off it; listen and see what you
think of it: There was a young fellow, a bit of a genius----"

"Just so, it's the geniuses that build the sex problems. It's an
autobiography. Go on."

"Well, he married a girl."

Mitchell (sotto voce): "God help her."

"He loved her, and she loved him: but after they'd been married a while
he found out that, although he understood her, she didn't and couldn't
possibly ever understand him."

"Yes," commented Mitchell, "and if he hadn't caught the sex problem, nor
been reading about it, he would never have found that out."

"It was a terrible disappointment," I continued--I had got into the
habit of taking Mitchell's interruptions and comments as matters of
course--"He saw that his life would be a hell with her----"

Mitchell: "Didn't strike him that her life would be a hell with him?"

"They had no thought in common."

Mitchell: "She was in her right mind then."

"But he couldn't leave her because he loved her, and because he knew
that she loved him and would break her heart if he left her."

"Must have been a pretty cocksure sort of a fellow," remarked Mitchell,
"but all geniuses