five shillings a week for,
furnished, with the use of the kitchen. It cost us about ten shillings a
week between us for food, and I got raised to twelve-and-six a week
because they wanted me back where I'd worked before. So we weren't so
badly off, and we kept a week ahead. Of course we lived anyhow, on dry
bread and tea very often, with cakes now and then as a treat, boiled eggs
sometimes and a chop. There was this about it, we felt free. Sometimes we
got sewing to do at night from people we got to hear of. So we managed to
get stuff for our dresses and we kept altering our hats and we used to
fix our boots up with waxed threads. And all the time I kept looking for
Mary and couldn't see her or hear of her.

"I had got to understand how Mary might live for years in a place like
Brisbane without being known by more than a very few, but I puzzled more
and more as to how she'd got the money she'd sent home. The places where
she might have earned enough seemed so few that everybody knew of them.
In all dressmaking places the general run of girls didn't earn enough to
keep themselves decently unless they lived at home as most did. Even then
they had a struggle to dress neatly and looked ill-fed, for, you see, it
isn't only not getting enough it's not getting enough of the right food
and getting it regularly. Most of the girls brought their lunch with them
in a little paper parcel, bread and butter, and in some places they made
tea. Some had lots of things to eat and lots to wear and plenty of pocket
money and didn't seem to have to work but they weren't my sort or Mary's.

"What made me think first how things might be was seeing a girl in the
second place I worked at. She looked so like Mary, young and fresh and
pretty and lively, always joking and laughing. She was very shabby and
made-over when I saw her first, with darned gloves and stitched-up boots
down at heel and bits of ribbon that she kept changing to bring the best
side up. Then she got a new dress all at once and new boots and gloves
and hat and seemed to have money to spend and the girls began to pass
remarks about her when she wasn't bearing and sometimes to her face when
they had words with her. I didn't believe anything bad at first but I
knew she wasn't getting any more pay and then, all at once, I recollected
being behind her one night when we came out of the shop and seeing a
young fellow waiting in a door-way near. He was a good-looking young
fellow, well