In House of All Nations, Jules and his wife, the elegant and perpetually youthful Claire-Josèphe, attend the wedding of new multimillionaire Toots Legris and the son of ‘old’ money, Duc-Adam Lhermite. Stead’s wedding guest list runs for a page of the novel, including:

The most revealing commentary on the marriage takes place, appropriately, in the bank’s plush offices after the ceremony. Toot’s father says that he told his future son-in-law, ‘Take her, my boy, you been sleeping with her two years anyhow. The sooner she marries you the sooner she’ll get tired of you…she’s not my daughter: what rot you talking Jules? She’s the daughter of seventy million guilders.’^[35]

Jules refuses to condemn the amorality of his friends, telling Alphendéry, ‘I sleep with my own wife, true; but I sleep with other people’s money. And raped money gets people much wilder than raped wives.’^[36] The triangulation of money, sex and marriage (the ‘recurrent cash–flesh nexus’ described by Don Anderson)^[37] is made clear by Jules when he tells Raccamond that ‘every woman is a whore, but the whores are the ones who never learned the game…What is a whore? A poor girl who never had a chance to go into business with a man and set up a little house of her own.’^[38] For Jules, women must use sex as a pathway to financial power both inside and outside of marriage, as do many of the notable women characters in the novel: Claire-Josèphe, Marianne Raccamond and Margaret Weyman are interested primarily in manipulating relationships with men because their feminine status denies them an alternative. The situation is little better for the novel’s female intellectuals, who attend Communist Party meetings that are racked by internal dissension and who seem, as much as their wealthy counterparts, to be subject to masculine control. As Rooney notes, the masculinity of the novel is disrupted momentarily in a scene in which three women, Judith (Jean Frère’s wife), Henrietta Achitophelos and Suzanne Constant (Adam’s wife), arrive at Adam’s workshop-flat^[39]; but none of these women, despite their powerful disruption of the brotherly proceedings, can ultimately challenge the institutional order.

Waterway’s society wedding of Veronica Stewart and George Hegarty will, like its Paris counterpart, make news. The melee of newspapermen and bystanders gathers to watch guests arrive at the city church that has been the site, also, of a demonstration by the unemployed. As the guests arrive, they comment on the ‘proletariat’ outside the church, while inside Sim Hegarty speculates on the marriage of money and privilege that will secure Veronica and George’s future. The institutional and stifling power of the accumulated wealth in the Sydney church is the driving force of a ceremony that is described by way of the heady mix of flowers and summer heat:

Lorna Sellman, conscious that her beauty is her stock-in-trade, manipulates her attendance to her advantage and by the time the ceremony is over she has been able to secure a future with Sim Hegarty. Lorna’s credo—‘Blessed are they that have anything over five thousand a year…And thrice blessed are they that have titles, no matter how they got them’^[41] —preserves her position as one of the rich and beautiful in this ‘familiar, material, recognisable city’.^[42] Although she has not preserved her virginity, she has been smart enough to be selective in her affairs so that her name has market value. Both writers are keen to promote a view of marriage as a financial transaction, unless, as in Dark’s case, politics can smooth the way. For these Australian writers, marriage provokes questions about sexual and class relationships that cross international boundaries.

Dark is, of course, aware that events in Europe will displace the familiar and the recognisable and the novel develops an elegiac tone for a city that will shortly change either by virtue of war or class revolution. Likewise, Stead’s bankers have underestimated the rise of fascism in Europe, but the political disruption provides an excellent cover for Jules’ disappearance at the end of House of all Nations. Stead’s narrator speculates on the new rhetorical territory this spectator–traveller will inhabit: ‘Adventurers are flying every day and rising again under new governments and speaking new languages.’^[43] The dance that Jules led the financiers will be replicated in another time and another place in Stead’s transnational world.