Richard was thankful to get out of Canberra Hall. It was like escaping from one of the medical-examination rooms in the war. He and Jaz went in silence down the crowded, narrow pavement of George Street, towards the Circular Quay. Richard called at the General Post-office in Martin Place. As he came out again, and stood on the steps folding the stamps he had bought, seeing the sun down Pitt Street, the people hurrying, the flowers at the corner, the pink spread of _Bulletins_ for sale at the corner of George Street, the hansom-cabs and taxis standing peacefully in the morning shadow of the post-office, suddenly the whole thing switched right away from him. He hailed a hansom. “Jaz,” he said, “I want to drive round the Botanical Gardens and round the spit there--and I want to look at the peacocks and cockatoos.” Jaz climbed in with him. “Right O!” said the cabby, hearing the order, and they clock-clocked away up the hill to Macquarie Street. “You know, Jaz,” said Richard, looking with joy at the blue harbour inlet, where the Australian “fleet” lay rusting to bits, with a few gay flags; “you know, Jaz, I shan’t do it. I shan’t do anything. I just don’t care about it.” “You don’t?” said Jaz, with a sudden winsome smile. “I try to kid myself that I care about mankind and its destiny. And I have fits of wistful love for the working men. But at the bottom I’m as hard as a mango nut. I don’t care about them all. I don’t really care about anything, no I don’t. I just don’t care, so what’s the good of fussing.” “Why no,” said Jaz, again with a quick smile. “I feel neither good nor bad. I feel like a fox that has gnawed his tail off and so escaped out of a trap. It seems like a trap to me, all this social business and this saving mankind. Why can’t mankind save itself? It can if it wants to. I’m a fool. I neither want love nor power. I like the world. And I like to be alone in it, by myself. What do you want, Jaz?” Richard was like a child escaped from school, escaped from his necessity to _be_ something and to _do_ something. They had jogged past the palm trees and the grass of the gardens, and the blue wrens had cocked their preposterous tails. They jogged to the end of the promontory, under wild trees, and Richard looked at the two lobes of the harbour, blue water on either side, and another part of the town beyond. “Now take us back to the cockatoos,” he said to the cabby. Richard loved the look of Australia, that marvellous soft flower-blue of the air, and the sombre grey of the earth, the foliage, the brown of the low rocks: like the dull pelts of kangaroos. It had a wonder and a far-awayness, even here in the heart of Sydney. All the shibboleths of mankind are so trumpery. Australia is outside everything. “I couldn’t exactly say,” Jaz answered. “You’ve got a bit of an Australian look this morning about you,” he added with a smile. “I feel Australian. I feel a new creature. But what’s the outcome?”