Explore "Plain Living" by Rolf Boldrewood on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The dinner was a success, the party to the opera having gone off without a drawback to the unbroken joyousness of the affair. The Misses Flemington came and performed such musical feats as were expected of them, and Miss Dacre admitted that she had not heard a voice unprofessional for years to equal May Flemington's. She wondered, indeed, what she could have been thinking of to imagine that when she came to Australia all artistic luxuries were to be banished from her thoughts.
"The fact is," she said, "we are frightfully narrow and prejudiced in England. We know a great deal about France, Germany and the Continent generally, because we are always running backwards and forwards. But of our own countrymen in Australia and New Zealand we know next to nothing. I was going to say as little as about Timbuctoo, but we do really know something about Africa, because the missionaries tell us, and we have returned evangelists from Borioboolah Gha, even from Fiji and New Zealand. But of Australia we know nothing."