It was hard work to talk for two, and keep the ball of courtship rolling after the approved fashion of Kentish Town, when the slouching young Boer would only grunt in reply, or twinkle at her out of his piggish eyes. But Emigration Jane had come out to South Africa, hearing that places at five shillings a day were offered you by employers, literally upon their knees, and that husbands were thick as orange-peel and programmes on the pit-floor of the Britanniar Theayter, 'Oxton, or the Camden Varieties on the morning after a Bank Holiday. She had left her first situation at Cape Town, being a girl of spirit, because her mistress had neglected to introduce her to eligible gentlemen acquaintances, as the pleasant-spoken agent at the Emigrants' Information Office in Cheapside, the young gentleman of Hebrew strain, whose dark eyes, waxed moustache, and diamond tie-pin had made a deep impression upon the susceptible heart of his client, had assured Jane the South African employer would take an early opportunity of doing. The reality had not corresponded with the glowing picture. The employer had failed in duty, the husbands-aspirant had not appeared. Ephemeral flirtations there had been, with a postman, with a trooper of the Cape Mounted Police, with an American bar-tender. But not one of these had breathed of indissoluble union, though each had wanted to borrow her savings. And Emigration Jane had "bin 'ad" in that way before, and gone with her bleeding heart and depleted Post Office Savings-book before the fat, sallow magistrate at the Regent's Road County Court, and winced and smarted under his brutal waggeries, only to learn that the appropriator of her womanly affections and her fifteen sovereigns had already three wives.
The brute, the 'artless beast! Emigration Jane wondered at herself, she did, as 'ad bin such a reg'ler soft as to be took in by one to whom she never referred in speech except as "That There Green." That she softened to him in her weaker moments, in spite of his remembered appetite for savings and his regrettable multiplicity of wives, gave her the fair hump. That something in the expression of this new one's muddy eyes recalled the loving leer of "That There Green," she admitted to herself. Womanly anxiety throbbed in the bosom, not too coyly hidden by the pneumonia blouse, as the couple passed the gilded portals of a public bar, and the Slabberts' elbow was thrust painfully into her side, as its owner said heavily: