“Before he had struck out into the fatal west for himself, he had stopped with a planter. The planter’s name, of course, was Whitaker. There was a man who had isolated himself, and worked like a navvy, and made good. His history, I suppose, was much like all other local histories. His place, on one of the rivers that flow into Lake Eyre, was a kind of outpost. He was very glad to let Paramore sit on his verandah and talk to him in the evenings. Paramore must have been there six weeks before he finally started on his expedition--if you can call an unsuccessful, hand-made thing that leaked at every pore an expedition. The daughter, Joan Whitaker, was back from school in Melbourne. There was a fiancé of sorts about the place. I don’t remember much about him, least of all his name. He was approved by Whitaker. Paramore seems not to have noticed the girl--rather deliberately not to have noticed her, she being another man’s property. So Whitaker had no objection to prolonging Paramore’s stay. Paramore talked, I feel convinced, as well as he wrote. I saw of him only dregs and delirium, but I made that out. The love affair went on all over the plantation, while Whitaker and Paramore sat on the verandah and constituted society. They got on well enough, apparently. Paramore certainly liked Joan Whitaker, but he kept out of the way of the fortunate affair. Remember that; there’s no reason to doubt his word. It all came out, bit by bit, in troubled references--mixed up with his symptoms and medicines, and the ebb and flow of the fever. “But out in the bush, later, the memory of her had grown upon him; I suppose, simply because, though so far away, she was the nearest feminine thing. At the heart of all that despair over the frustrated research, was an irrelevant sentimental regret that he shouldn’t be able to make love to her if he ever saw her again. In her flittings about, she had pricked his imagination once or twice--this bright creature that flitted at another man’s behest. You can see how it might be; and Paramore up to that time had been heart-whole. Moreover, his exploration was shocking and disgusting to him, as I’ve said--it was aimless nastiness without even the grace of bolstering up a theory. He didn’t love the work for itself, remember; only for its results and what he believed its sacred importance. He hated the technique of it. And Joan Whitaker was as different as a Melbourne schooling, and a fair complexion, and the awkwardness of innocence, could make her. She was all the things those unsatisfactory aborigines weren’t. I don’t think it went deeper than that. She merely served the moment. Any other girl would have done as well. Or, at least, that’s my notion.