A Town like Alice

locomotion in that country.
    They rode for an hour and a half that evening, coming back to Midhurst in the early dusk. He would not let her stay out longer than that, though she wanted to. "I'm not a bit tired now," she said. "I believe I'm getting the hang of this, Joe. It's much easier on Sally than it was on Auntie."
    "Aye," he said. "The better the horse the less tiring for the rider, long as you can manage him."
    "I'd like to come with you one day up to the top end," she said. "I suppose it'll have to be after we're married."
    He grinned. "Plenty of wowsers back in Willstown to talk about it, if you came before."
    "Do I ride well enough for that?"
    "Oh, aye," he said. "Take it easy and you'll get along all right on Sally. I never travel more than twenty miles in the day, not unless there's some special reason."
    He drove her into Willstown in the utility, and as they kissed goodnight he said he would be in during the following week. She went to bed that night rested and content, refreshed by her quiet day.
    She went to the bank on Friday and cashed the wages cheque as usual; she found that the walls were in the process of being distempered and there was not a fly in the place. Mr Watkins was distant in his manner and ignored her; Len James, the young bank clerk, gave her her money with a broad grin and a wink. She saw Len again on Saturday afternoon, when he brought in Doris Nash for an ice-cream soda. He grinned at her, and said, "You wouldn't know the bank, Miss Paget."
    "I was in there yesterday," she said. "You're having it all distempered."
    "That's right," he said. "You started something."
    "Is he very sore? " she asked.
    "Not really," the boy said. "He's been wanting to decorate for a long tune, but he's been scared of what the head office would say. There's not a lot of turnover in a place like this, you know. Well, now he's doing it."
    "I'm sorry I was rude," she said. "If you get a chance, tell him I said that."
    "I will," he promised her. "I'm glad you were. Haven't had such a laugh for years. I don't like flies, either."
    On the first Sunday she worked steadily in the ice-cream parlour with Rose Sawyer from nine in the morning till ten o'clock at night. They sold a hundred and eighty-two icecreams at a shilling each and three hundred and forty-one soft drinks at sixpence. Dead tired, Jean counted the money in the till at the end of the day. "Seventeen pounds thirteen shillings," she said. She stared at Rose in wonder. "That doesn't seem so bad for a town with a hundred and forty-six people, all told. How much is that a head?"
    "About two and six, isn't it?"
    "Do you think it's going to go on like this?"
    "I don't see why not. Lots of people didn't come in today. Most of them come in two or three times. Judy must have had about ten bob's worth."
    "She can't keep that up," Jean said. "She'll be sick, and we'll get a recession. Come on and lets go to bed."
    She opened the ice-cream parlour after lunch on Christmas Day and took twenty pounds in the afternoon and evening. She had the gramophone from the workshop in the parlour that evening playing dance music so that the little wooden shack that was her ice-cream parlour streamed out music and light into the dark wastes of the main street, and seemed to the inhabitants just like a bit of Manly Beach dropped down in Willstown. Old, withered women that Jean had never seen before came in that night with equally old men to have an ice-cream soda, drawn by the lights and by the music. Although the parlour was still full of people she closed punctually at ten o'clock, thinking it better as a start to stick to the bar closing time and not introduce the complication of late hours and night life into a rural community.
    The workshop went fairly steadily under Aggie Topp and they despatched two packing-cases of shoes to Forsayth just after Christmas to be sent by rail to Brisbane and by ship to England. She had already sent a few early samples of their work to Pack arid Levy by air mail.
    On Boxing Day the rain came. They had had one or two short showers before, but that day the clouds massed high in great peaks of cumulonimbus that spread and covered the whole sky so that it grew dark. Then down it came, a steady, vertical torrent of rain that went on and on, unending. At first the conditions became worse, with no less heat and very high humidity; in the workshops the girls sweated freely even at seventy degrees, and Aggie Topp had to postpone the finishing