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"With time and patience," he said, as he sat down, "anybody can get a grip on a personality, but a mighty impersonality is like the Deluge or or a steam-roller. Do I look flattened out?" "You do, rather, for you," said Hélène. "Tell me about it from the beginning." And Leighton did. It took him half an hour. When he got through, she said, still smiling, "I'd like to meet this Folly person."
There was a welcome diversion afforded for her, when Aunt Julia came, by the prompt hostility that declared itself between her and Miss Buckston. Aunt Julia was not a person to allow a steam-roller to pass over her without protest, and Althea felt that she herself had been cowardly when she saw how Aunt Julia resented, for them both, Miss Buckston's methods.
Within five minutes a hundred men were at work with pick and shovel filling up the hole with material piled at frequent intervals along the road for just that purpose. Within twenty minutes a steam-roller had arrived goodness knows where it had materialized from! and was at work rolling the road into hardness.
"No use at all. You couldn't outrun a steam-roller, but if you won't duck out, I've got to do my best. I'd as lief die of a gunshot-wound as starve to death in the desert." "Do you suppose we could run away?" "Could we!" Glass propped himself eagerly upon one elbow. "Leave it to me." "No!" Wally resumed rubbing himself down. "I can't leave without looking like a quitter.
Pound it into them that the Enemy Allies will give them a square deal as a Republic and put them under the steam-roller with the Hohenzollerns if they stand pat, and you'll get them. No more hungry and tubercular babies, no more babies born with a cuticle short in theirs. They'd rise as one man I mean damn the men! as one woman."
The crowd, treacle-slow, and swinging its children shoulder-high, would shuffle on, pause next at the falsetto exhortations of the Baron, then on to the collapsibilities of the Boneless Wonder, the flexuosities of the Snake-charmer, the goose-fleshing, the terrible crunching of Jastrow the Granite Jaw. A commotion, this last, not unlike the steam-roller leveling of a rock road.
And for half an hour, side by side, on their backs, they floated in the fairly placid Kanaka Surf. Ida Barton was the first to announce recovery by speaking first. "And how do you feel now, man of mine?" she asked. "I feel as if I'd been run over by a steam-roller," he replied. "And you, poor darling?" "I feel I'm the happiest woman in the world.
Later, when folk foretold Japan's certain defeat if she tackled the monster, and in 1914 talked crazily of "the Russian steam-roller" I saw only that crumpled rag of paper flying into the basket. By that time I had seen too much of the Slav to trust him in any capacity. But this is anticipating.
Russia, in spite of all that had been said about her power as a great steam-roller, could make no real headway; while France and England combined could not drive the Huns from the line they occupied. People tried to explain the situation, but the dreadful logic still remained: the country we had sworn to protect and save was in the hands of the enemy.
He has been told what to say yesterday, for instance, it was some lurid balderdash about a steam-roller and how the Kaiser is to be fed on dog biscuits at Saint Helena he has been "doped" by the editor, who gets the tip and out he goes! unless he take it from the owner, who is waiting for a certain emolument from this or that caucus, and trims his convictions to their taste.
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