Oscar and Lucinda

Hugh Stratton wrote this on the betting ticket: "Can I assure your father that this is not yours? Or can you, instead, assure me that such a game can indeed be played for profit?" It was signed H.S. It did not occur to Oscar to label Hugh Stratton mad; that his mentor should attempt to blackmail him surprised but did not shock him. His pity for the clergyman enabled him to forgive this and all the other peevish and petty acts he continually committed against all those who came into his orbit. It was Hugh Stratton's nature that, as he became more seemingly unlovable, he was loved the more.

But what did shock Oscar was that this very private piece of paper should be spirited from his room to be used as ammunition against him. Who was the thief? Had Hugh Stratton himself paid one of his "flying visits" while Oscar was safely in tutorial? He did not know. He also saw it did not matter.

Oscar fetched his pen and ink and-without thinking that Hugh Stratton was, once more, responsible for making his porridge cold wrote:

My dear Mr Stratton, how excited I was to receive today one of your rare (and therefore much looked forward to) epistles, and how disappointed I was therefore to discover that it was not what it appeared to be, that you had sealed the envelope, and thereby excluded what we had both wished you to include. I am sure the good Mrs Millar has, by now, discovered the letter amongst the di

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Une Petite Amie

I have forgot the message and, if this makes no sense to you, I will go and ask him again in order that I may deliver it more faithfully. My fondest remarks to Mrs Stratton. Your, etc., O. Hopkins. From that date Oscar left his betting tickets at the course and all the while he was at Oxford, wrote his form records in a code decipherable to no one but himself. As for Mr Stratton, he believed every word of Oscar's letter. It was neither right nor fair that a gambling student should make him feel so soiled.

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Une Petite Amie

Lucinda did not really want a factory. She was frightened of it. She walked down to Sussex Street and watched working men emerging from the mills and wharves there. She was repulsed by them just as she was moved by them-the condition of their trouser turn-ups, the weariness of their jackets. They were alien creatures. She watched them as through a sheet of glass, as we, a century later, might look down on the slums of Delhi as a jumbo jet comes in to land. She could not know that she would, within two years, beyond the boundaries of this history, be brought so low that she would think herself lucky to work at Edward Jason's Druitt Street pickle factory, that she would plunge her hands into that foul swill and, with her hands boiled red and her eyes stinging, stand on the brink of the great satisfaction of her life. But at this time (1859) her hands were white and dry. She pitied the workers their poverty and weariness. And yet there was a way they looked at her that made her fear and hate them. It was her age, her sex, her class. She knew it. She knew it as well as you do, but the knowledge did not make it any easier for she was, so to speak, contracted to proceed. It was the factory, she felt, that gave her the entrée

Oscar and Lucinda

to the vicar of Woollahra's home. It was glass that gave her this cornfort. And as a result of her meeting with De

Years later when she remembered how she and the vicar had looked at bottles, with what abstracted superior curiosity they had examined them, so removed from the loud and sweaty business of sauces and pickles and jams, she judged her young self harshly and forgot how much of what she would become was already there. She was neither as ignorant nor as i

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one could be judged "improper" for staying up late at night to do so. She was not ashamed, not of this, not of, sometimes (usually, often) falling asleep in the leather armchair beside the fire where she would, some time later, be woken with a mug of cream-rich cocoa. She clasped her hands around the mug and looked into the fire, wishing only that she did not have to travel the moonpale clay tracks to her hotel.

The girl did not know enough to care about the opinion of bourgeois society, but De

Lucinda had the habit of arriving at any time that suited her. She always apologized. She always hoped she did not inconvenience or interrupt, but such was the way she tilted her chin that she did not appear apologetic at all. He would come back from giving a lecture on "Common Salt," say, at a Mutual Improvement Association, and find her sitting by his fire in his study, or reading a book at his desk. It was true, as he often said from the speaker's lectern, that he saw education as a ladder standing on earth and reaching up to heaven and that to every high and glorious position there was a way from every condition of life, but he would not, just the same, have suffered anyone else reading his books as Lucinda did. She removed his crenulated leather bookmarks and put them back too early in the story. He would ring for a sandwich and only after he had waited too long for it would he discover that Cook was busy making apple pancakes for the girl who was now ensconced, reading, in the dining room.

And yet he thought her, against all this evidence, to be quite independent. On the nights she was absent he imagined her reading at Petty's Hotel; he had no suspicion that she had-as a lonely cat will always present itself at more than one back door-also found a place in Mr d'Abbs menagerie. Mr d'Abbs, as you will recall, was the principal of an accountancy firm, and supposed to be an associate of Mr Chas Ahearn. Lucinda had consulted Mr d'Abbs in secret because she was unsure of De