Norman Lindsay

Do they [parents] not sneakingly bestow on me their crass inability to do anything with their own misbegotten progeny, a subterfuge which I scornfully fub off on text-books?

He went on kissing her with unflagging industry, while she remained limply in his arms, in a species of satisfied trance.

Seated in a kitchen chair, and rasping at his scorched shoulders, he said peevishly, "By ginger, it gives a man the willies, left alone in a place like this all day."

It spread slowly up from the sea-rim, a welling upwards of pure white light, ghosting the beach with silver and drawing the grey bastions of sandstone out of formless space.

To be sure, he expected eggs as well, and looked from his plate to Bradly's to assure himself that it was not by an oversight that Bradly had omitted to serve him eggs. Still, he tucked in handsomely to bacon and tomato on fried bread, felicitating himself on the considered wisdom of his arrival in the character of guest to Bradly.

Such diversion as Podson could extort from his isolation was soon vitiated by repetition. He surfed. He sun-baked - with discretion till his skin had peeled and given him a harder cuticle.

He went over his canvases with disgust and anger, unable to see virtue in any one of them. Even his sacred Oyster Girl went back on him. The creature of a vitiated æstheticism, he could only suppose that conceit had played an abominable trick on his eyesight.

She had a special seat there, a little embrasure between two upright slabs of sandstone, which was sheltered and private.

"Good God! I don't want another accident here. I should go dotty if I had to face all that again."