“Of course you can’t go on with a soft, oh-so-friendly life like this here. You’ve got to have an awakening of the old recognition of the aristocratic principle, the innate difference between people.”
“Aristocratic principle!” she shrieked on the wind. “You should have seen yourself, flying like a feather into the sea after your hat. Aristocratic principle!” She shrieked again with laughter.
“There you are, you see,” he said to himself. “I’m at it again.” And he laughed too.
The wind blew them home. He made a big fire, and changed, and they drank coffee made with milk, and ate buns.
“Thank heaven for a home,” he said, as they sat in the dark, big rooms at Coo-ee, and ate their buns, and looked out of the windows and saw here as well a whirl of gannets like a snowstorm, and a dark sea littered with white fluffs. The wind roared in the chimney, and for the first time the sea was inaudible.
“You see,” she said, “how thankful you are for a home.”
“Chilled to the bone!” she said. “I’m chilled to the bone with my day’s pleasure-outing.”
So they drew up the couch before the fire, and he piled rugs on her and jarrah chunks on the fire, and at last it was toastingly warm. He sat on a little barrel which he had discovered in the shed, and in which he kept the coal for the fire. He had been at a loss for a lid to this barrel, till he had found a big tin-lid thrown out on the waste lot. And now the wee barrel with the slightly rusty tin lid was his perch when he wanted to get quite near the fire. Harriet hated it, and had moments when she even carried the lid to the cliff to throw it in the sea. But she brought it back, because she knew he would be so indignant. She reviled him however.
“Shameful! Hideous! Old tin lids! How you can sit on it. How you can bring yourself to sit on such a thing, and not feel humiliated. Is that your aristocratic principle?”
“I put a cushion on it,” he said.