e articles intensely realistic, and many of the
statements were very interesting. He said he read one or two things in
the _Cry_ that he didn't know before. Tom Hall, taken unawares, bought
three _Crys_ from the Pretty Girl, and blushed to find it fame.

Little Billy Woods, the Labourers' Union secretary--who had a poetic
temperament and more than the average bushman's reverence for higher
things--Little Billy Woods told me in a burst of confidence that he
generally had two feelings, one after the other, after encountering
that girl. One was that unfathomable far-away feeling of loneliness and
longing, that comes at odd times to the best of married men, with the
best of wives and children--as Billy had. The other feeling, which
came later on, and was a reaction in fact, was the feeling of a 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