Читать книгу The Boy in the Bush онлайн

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"Can she drive?"

"You back your life she can. Bred and born to it. Drive an' swear at the 'osses like a trooper, when she's a mind. Swear! I'd never ha' thought it of 'er, when I rode behind 'er as a groom."

"How?"

"Oh, she took me in, she did, pretty. But after all, what's a lady but a woman! Though far be it from me to say: 'What's a woman but a lady!' If I'd gone down on my hands an' knees to her, in them days, I should have expected her to kick me. And what does she do? Rode out of the park gates and stopped. So she did. Turns to me. 'Grey,' she says, 'here's money. You go to London and buy yourself clothes like what a grocer would buy. Avoid looking like a butler or a groom. And when you've got an outfit, dress and make yourself look like a grocer,' she said, though I never had any connections with grocery in my life—'and go to the office in Victoria Street and take two passages to Australia.' That was what she said. Just Australia. When the man in the office asked me, where to in Australia, I didn't know what to say. 'Oh, we'll go in at the first gate,' I said. And so it was Fremantle. 'Yes,' she said, 'we're going to elope.' 'Nice thing for me,' thinks I. But I says, 'All right, Miss.' She was a pearl beyond price, was Miss Ethel. So she seemed to me then. Now she's a termagant as ever was: in double 'arness, collar-proud."