it and
being checked suddenly, stood on tip-toes, so to speak, and fell
into each other's arms with a vehemence that completely overset
them; one rolled right down the bank, head first, and the others
tumbled upon its kicking wheels. It was all over in a moment; and
the dazed passengers, realising in a second moment that the end of
the world was still an event in the future, picked themselves up as
best they could. No one was killed, but some were badly shaken, and
most of them screamed horribly. The sound of those screams, mingled
with the clanking and crashing of riven wood and metal, and the
hissing of escaping steam, conveyed the idea of such an appalling
catastrophe as would make history for the world.

Though not a satirist--she does not hate well enough to be that--Ada
Cambridge has occasionally a neat and forcible way of describing
character. Richard Delavel's first wife was 'a gentle and complaisant
being, soft and smooth, apparently yielding to the touch, but dense,
square, and solid as a well-dumped wool-bale.' When opposed in will or
contradicted in her opinion, she smiled resignedly, and, if it appeared
due to her dignity, sulked for a period. Yet generally she was 'the
evenest-tempered woman that ever a well-meaning husband found it
difficult to get on with.' A pattern of order and conscientiousness,
'governed by principles that were as correct as her manners and costume,
and as firmly established as the everlasting hills,' she might have made
an admirable wife for a clergyman, but was totally unsuited to Delavel,
as he to her.

Still, she was very proud of the look of 'blood' in her Richard, and
when he became wealthy, and she a fashionable hostess in Sydney
society, nothing delighted her more than her opportunities of making the
aristocratic connection known. Her own origin as the daughter of a
farmer was quite forgotten. 'Annie might have been a Delavel from the
beginning, in her own right, for all the recollection that remained to
her of the real character of her bringing up.... Years and certain
circumstances will often affect a woman's memory that way--a man somehow
manages to keep a better grasp of facts.'

Yelverton, the lover of Elizabeth King, an English aristocrat spending
some of his wealth in lessening the misery and vice of London, was 'not
the orthodox philanthropist, the half-feminine, half-neuter specialist
with a hobby, the foot-rule reformer