o it. As many as can are renting rooms, letting
part of their house and so struggling along. As many more are giving up
and renting these rooms or smaller houses. And apparently well-to-do
people are often in as bad a fix. It's against my interest to have things
this way, but it's so, and there's no getting over it. If it keeps on,
pretty well every workingman's house about Sydney will be a rented house
soon. The building societies can't stop that unless men have regular work
and fair wages."

"It's the unions that upset trade," asserted the propertied-looking man.

"It's the land law that's wrong," contended the spruce man. "If all taxes
were put on unimproved land values it would be cheaper to live and there
would be more work because it wouldn't pay to keep land out of use. With
cheap living and plenty of work the workingman would have money and
business would be brisk all round."

"Nonsense!" exclaimed the propertied man, brusquely.

"It's so," answered the spruce little man, getting down as the tram
stopped, "There's no getting away from facts and that's fact."

So even out here, Ned thought, looking at the rows of cottages with
little gardens in front which they were passing, the squeeze was coming.
Then, watching the passengers, he thought how worried they all seemed,
how rarely a pleasant face was to be met with in the dress of the people.
And then, suddenly a shining, swaying, coachman-driven brougham whirled
by. Ned, with his keen bushman's eyes, saw in it a stout heavy-jawed
dame, large of arm and huge of bust, decked out in all the fashion, and
insolent of face as one replete with that which others craved. And by her
side, reclining at ease, was a later edition of the same volume, a girl
of 17 or so, already fleshed and heavy-jawed, in her mimic pride looking
for all the world like a well-fed human animal, careless and soulless.

Opposite Nellie a thin-faced woman, of whose front teeth had gone,
patiently dandled a peevish baby, while by her side another child
clutched her dingy dust-cloak. This woman's nose was peaked and her chin
receded. In her bonnet some gaudy imitation flowers nodded a vigorous
accompaniment. She did not seem ever to have had pleasure or to have been
young, and yet in the child by her side her patient joyless sordid life
had produced its kind.

They had some tea and buttered scones in a cheaper cafe, where Nellie
tried to "organise" another waitress. They lingered over the meal,