up to it. I’ve always wanted to get away from home, be independent. I want to write. Don’t smile. I never expect to write half as well as you do.”
“I’m not smiling. And why should you not write as well as I do?”
“Well, I never expect to, but I want to write. I won a prize story in the Weekly News a few years ago and that set me going. But I don’t expect to do it yet, nothing much before I am thirty. And dad said I’d better get a practical education as well. And so I took a commercial course. And then I thought I’d better get on a paper. I was on the Star for a while—society, rotten job. I couldn’t stick it. And then dad got in with the News committee here and sent Bob up. He was on the Herald. And Bob saw it would take two of us. And he offered it to me and here I am. Of course that’s not quite the whole of it.”
“Nothing ever is the whole of it. But why should you want to write when you can play the piano as you do?”
“Why, I want to earn my own living, be independent.”
“But you could do that with your music.” He turned and looked at her.
“What! I care too much for music to play it in public! To a pack of unsympathetic boobs who rustle programmes and wriggle in squeaky chairs! Not I! I never played in public. I couldn’t even play to my relatives. If there was one person around who did not like music I should get up and smash something.”
He was astonished at the intensity that had welled up in her. She threw her cigarette away and sat up very straight glaring at him.
“But you play at Mac’s?” he said.
“Oh there, yes, places like that, yes, but not on the stage.”
